What's The Matter With Indiana

In the modern era of education reform, each state has tried to create its own special brand of educational dysfunction. If the point of Common Core related reforms was to bring standardization to the country's many and varied state systems, it has failed miserably by failing in fifty different ways.

What Indiana provides is an example of what happens when the political process completely overwhelms educational concerns. If there is anyone in the Indiana state capitol more worried about education students than in political maneuvering and political posturing, it's not immediately evident who that person might be.

The current marquee conflagration of the moment is the announcement of a new Big Standardized Test that will take twelve hours to complete. This announcement has triggered a veritable stampede from responsibility, as every elected official in Indianapolis tries to put some air space between themselves and this testing disaster. And it brings up some of the underlying issues of the moment in Indiana.

Currently, all roads lead to Glenda Ritz.

Back before the fall of 2012, Indiana had become a reformster playground. They'd made early strides solving the puzzle of how to turn an entire urban school district over to privatizers, and they loved them some Common Core, too. Tony Bennett, buddy of Jeb Bush and big-time Chief for Change, was running the state's education department just the way reformsters thought it should be done. And then came the 2012 election.

Bennett was the public face of Indiana education reform. He dumped a ton of money into the race. And he lost. Not just lost, but looooooooosssssssssst!!! As is frequently noted, Glenda Ritz was elected Superintendent for Public Instruction with more votes than Governor Mike Pence. I like this account of the fallout by Joy Resmovits mostly because it includes a quote from Mike Petrilli that I think captures well the reaction of reformsters when Bennett lost.

"Shit shit shit shit shit," he said. "You can quote me on that."

After Ritz became a Democrat education in a GOP administration, Republican politicians decided that given her overwhelming electoral victory, they'd better just suck it up and find a way to honor the will of the people by working productively with her  to fashion bi-partisan educational policies that put the needs of Indiana's students ahead of political gamesmanship. Ha! Just kidding. The GOP started using every trick they could think of to strip Ritz of her power.


As Scott Elliot tells it in this piece at Chalkbeat, things actually started out okay, with Ritz and the Pence administration carving out some useful compromises. Elliot marks the start of open warfare at Bennettgate-- the release of emails showing that Tony Bennett had gamed the less-than-awesome Indiana school grading system to favor certain charter operators.

Certainly Ritz and pence have different ideas about how to operate an education system. Mike Pence particularly loves charters-- so much so that he has taken the unusual move of proposing that charter schools be paid $1,500 more per student than public schools (so forget all about that charters-are-cheaper business).

Indiana has also created a complicated relationship with the Common Core, legislating a withdrawal from the Core, but one that required the state to do it without losing their federal bribes payments. The result was a fat-free Twinkie of education standards-- not enough like the original for some people and too much like it for others.

The Indiana GOP has been trying to separate Ritz from any power. They cite any number of complaints about her work style and competence (the GOP president of the Senate famously commented "In all fairness, Superintendent Ritz was a librarian, okay?") and most of the complaints smell like nothing but political posturing.

It's understandable that the state Board of Education would be a cantankerous group. Consider this op-ed piece from Gordon Hendry, newest member of the board, Democrat, attorney, business exec, and director of economic development under former Indianapolis mayor and current charter profiteer Bart Peterson. Hendry opens with, "To me, education policy is economic policy" (pro tip, Mr. Hendry-- education policy is education policy). After castigating Ritz for not running pleasant, orderly meetings (because her job is, apparently, to make alleged grownups behave like actual grownups), Hendry works up to this:

As a Democrat, I don't know why the superintendent insists on creating conflict where rational debate should instead exist.

That just sets off the bovine fecal detector into loud whoops. First, we've got an accusation buried as an assumption (she's the one creating conflict). Combine that with playing the feigned ignorance card-- I just have no idea why she could be so touchy! Really, dude? I'm all the way over here in Pennsylvania, and I can tell why she might be involved in some crankypants activity. I'm pretty sure winning an election and being forced to work with people who dismiss you and try to cut you out of power-- I'm pretty sure that would put someone in a bad mood. So I can understand finding her ideas obnoxious and disagreeing with how she runs a meeting, but when you claim her point of view is incomprehensible, that tells me way more about you than about her.


Most of the statements I read coming out of Indiana are like that-- they carry a screaming barely-subtext of "I am just stringing words together in a way that I've calculated might bring political advantage, but I am paying no real attention to what they actual mean to real humans."

I have no idea how good at her job Glenda Ritz actually is, but the political statement represented by her landslide election seems clear enough, and it's a little astonishing that Indiana's leaders are so hell bent on thwarting the will of the electorate. But damned if the legislature isn't trying to strip her of chairmanship of the Board of Education.

Meanwhile, the fat-free Twinkie standards have spawned some massive tumor of a test, coming in at an advertised length of twelve hours which breaks down to A) weeks of wasted classroom time and B) at least six hours worth of frustrated and bored students making random marks which of course gets Indiana C) results even more meaningless than the usual standardized test results although D) McGraw-Hill will still make a mountain of money for producing it. Whose fault is that? Tom LoBianco seems close to the answer when he says, basically, everyone. (Although Pence has offered a gubernatorial edict that the test be cut to six hours, so, I don't know- just do every other page, kids? Not sure exactly how one cuts a test in half in about a week, but perhaps Indiana is a land of miracles.*) But it's hard for me not see Ritz and Indiana schools as the victims of a system so clogged and choked with political asshattery that it may well be impossible to get anything done that actually benefits the students of Indiana.

UPDATE: On February 11, the Senate Education Committee gave the okay to a bill that would exempt voucher schools from taking the same assessment as public schools. In fact, the voucher schools can just go ahead and create a test of their own. It is remarkable that the State of Indiana has not just closed all public schools, dumped all the education money in a giant Scrooge McDuck sized vault, and sold tickets to just go in a dive around in it.

There's going to be a rally at the Statehouse on Monday, February 16th. If I were an Indiana taxpayer-- hell if I were a live human who lived considerably closer-- I would be there. This is a state that really hates its public schools.


* Edit-- I somehow lost the sentence about the shortening of the test in posting. I've since put the parenthetical point back.

Charter Conversations

Over at the Fordham Institute blog, Andy Smarick dissects and critiques the current state of dialogue regarding charter schools.

What's the problem?

He starts by observing that there are really two conversations going on.

The first "presupposes (or, at minimum, concedes) the legitimacy of chartering and then explores how to make it better." Smarick believes that these nuts-and-bolts, sizzle-free conversations are worthwhile, but undervalued and insufficiently publicized. That's because of the second conversation.

The second, about philosophy and politics, is essentially about whether chartering is good or bad. Participants are interested in basic questions such as, “Should charters exist?” and “What does chartering mean for public education?” This conversation, which typically emanates from deeply held principles and big ideas, seems to attract the scholarly, the idealistic, and the impassioned—but also the certain and the dismissive.

Smarick's concern is that the impassioned side of the conversation attracts too much name-calling and sensationalism. If you want attention and press, he says, use name calling like "privateers" or “corporate interests, hedge fund managers and billionaires starve public schools and services of resources and suck up as much profit as they can." He's also not fond of long-form pieces like the New Jersey article that focused on the web of corruption and general misbehavior that characterizes the charterward shift of New Jersey schools. He thinks the Detroit Free-Press series on corruption and general misbehavior in the Michigan charter missed a chance to examine charter relations to public school and instead focused on scandal and intrigue.

There's a faint smell of flop-sweat around Smarick's complaints, like a Nixon aide complaining that Watergate coverage is failing to mention all the great things the President did in China. But Smarick is generally a serious guy, so I'm going to address his concern seriously here.

What does he want to see?

Here’s my request. If you think chartering is, at root, a threat to public education and believe that it must be brought to an end, please make that case publicly and straightforwardly, with conviction and tact. You’ll find a more receptive audience than you might suspect. If you aren’t obdurately anti-charter but think there are aspects of chartering that need serious improvement, marshal the data and make your case. 

I think there a couple of problems with this request.

Smarick's two-conversations model misses a third conversation that's going on. That's the conversation not about charters in the abstract large-scale policy sense, but in the specific let's-talk-about-the-charter-in-my-neighborhood sense.

Many of the people who have found themselves embroiled in charter debates are there because, like folks in NOLA or Detroit or Chicago or NYC etc etc etc are there because they are dealing with the very specific behavior surrounding very specific charters. The stories he cites about Camden and Michigan are not policy stories-- they are local news stories.

The charter movement's problem is not a policy-and-philosophy problem. It's a too-many-instances-of-specific-crooked-behavior problem. That problem points to some policy and philosophy issues, but those aren't what are driving press coverage and public crankiness.

What's driving the bad press?

Inside Philanthropy ran a piece Friday looking at how Charles Schwab is heavily into charter school investing.

A $1 million gift to the Charter School Growth Fund in 2011 stands out, not only because of the size of the gift but also because of its destination. Founded in 2005, the Charter School Growth Fund (CSGF) is a bit like the mother ship of the charter school movement, working to grow and professionalize this alternative ed sector. A lot of the major players in the charter school funding world have given to CSGF, including Walton, Gates, Dell, Bradley, and Fisher. 

It is no mystery why so many finance guys are interested in the charter movement. Forbes (not exactly liberal tools of the public school establishment) reported back in September of 2013 that investors were flocking to charters because Clinton-era tax laws made such investments very attractive, possibly allowing investors to double their money in seven years (and that includes plenty of foreign investors, which is its own kind of troubling).

Charter schools are not new at all. But the influx of hedge fund managers and rock stars and all manner of people whose motivation is not quality education but ROI is a recent development that has shaped the charter movement, and not in a good way. In state after state, money has greased the wheels of charter regulation (or lack thereof) and the results are fairly predictable.

But people are not waking up to these issues because of some burning interest in educational philosophy or public-private education policy. They are waking up because their own neighborhood schools are being shuttered and replaced by charters that handle them with the same kindness and consideration as the phone company or the DMV.

In my own small ruralish town, people used to not care about PA's cyber-charter laws. Then our school district shuttered two elementary schools to save around 800K in the same year that they had to pay out about 800K for seventy-some students to attend cyber-charters. That, not some philosophical interest in policy-wonkery, is what had taxpayers saying, "Well, that can't be right" and a school board president saying, "You all need to call your congressman today."

Three days after Smarick posted his piece, the Hartford Courant was reporting on the FBI serving subpoenas to FUSE, a Connecticut charter operator. Reporters who went to FUSE offices found a receptionist shredding papers. This sort of story has reached the level of "dog bites man" for its shock and surprise value, so in that sense, Smarick is correct in saying these stories might get too much attention.

But his straining to suggest that coverage of charter misbehavior is exaggerated is off base. For instance, the coverage of Tony Bennett's misbehavior was consistent with the level of misbehavior he displayed and was, again, a local story, particularly for the schools that might have stayed open had they received the same largesse Bennett extended to others. His "exoneration"is not particularly credible nor convincing.

When all is said and done, I'm not sure exactly what Smarick wants. Facts? The stories that he objects to are all loaded with carefully and responsibly researched facts. Make the anti-charter case with tact? Personally, I've made the case both with tact and without. But there are more gifted writers than I who have made the charts and graphs and fact-based arguments about charters in their neck of the woods (Jersey Jazzman pulls off that trick regularly).

Less inflamatory rhetoric? That's not an unreasonable request, though people who are fighting for the life of a local school district that they value are often rather inflamed. Particularly when it turns out they are being shut out of policy decisions that A) have a huge effect on them and B) turn out to have been made for financial, not educational, reasons. It only gets worse if it turns out that some sort of misbehavior is also involved.

Sometimes you have a PR problem because of perception unrelated to reality. Sometimes you have a PR problem because your client keeps doing bad things. That seems to be the plight of the modern charter. Old-school charters, the kinds started by teachers and local people and persons who were generally on an educational mission-- these charters did not give rise to large conversations about the value of charters. But the modern 500-pound-gorilla mega-chain ROI charters are a different animal.

Remember that old Ann Landers column?

Dear Ann Landers: I`m a 16-year-old girl who is a nervous wreck from getting yelled at. All I hear from morning till night is, ``Stop smoking, get off the phone, hang up your clothes, do your homework, clean up your room.`` How can I get them off my case?
             Sick of Parents

Dear Sick: Stop smoking, get off the phone, hang up your clothes, do your homework and clean up your room.

If charters are tired of press about how they get sweetheart deals with politicians to strip resources from public schools in order to enrich themselves, if they're tired of stories about how some charter operator got caught in crooked deals, if they're tired of being raked over the coals for using politics to grease some moneyed wheels-- well, their best move would be to stop doing those things.

If charters are tired of being attacked, they could stop attacking public education, as in the recent charter gathering in which the recurring theme was "Charters are great because public schools suck." I'm not a fan of "they started it" as an argument, but it's also specious to declare "all I did was keep calling him names and stealing his lunch, and then he just hit me for no reason!"

I'm not a fan of Smarick's first posited conversation (let's just assume charters are great), I think the second one is valuable (let's talk about how and if charters can work), but I think both are being drowned out by the third conversation, which is a mass of local conversations about the damage being done and the attacks on local schools that people feel they are suffering through. That conversation is, I believe, a direct result of the injection of huge amounts of money into the process. It's hard to have the conversation because the stakes on all sides are so high (ROI vs. local concerns for children).

I'm actually a fan of old-school charters, and it makes me sad that their promise has been swept aside by the current wave of money-driven charter chains. But asking people to please be more polite and reasonable and please stop pointing out where we've screwed you over is not likely to get the conversation back on track or reclaim the benefits that charter schools could provide.