WA: Charter Miracle

Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education as Private Business Funded by Public Tax Dollars (okay, I just added that last part for clarity) is over at Campbell Brown's million dollar charter promotion site being Very Alarmed about Washington State.

Unless the legislature acts within the next 10 days, we will be the first state in the union to intentionally shut down a group of high-performing schools that serve mainly disadvantaged students.

The shutdown will come because the charter set-up created in Washington state is illegal, a violation of the state's constitution. The court in Washington observed what we already know-- that a charter is not a public school because it is not answerable to a publicly elected board.

Reformsters have been pushing hard for charter schools in Washington for years, finally getting a law on the books in 2012. One charter opened in the 2014-2015 school year. Eight more opened last fall. These are the schools that Lake is so deeply concerned about.

Of course, the ruling from the court came down before the eight schools ever opened, so from Day One, they knew that the school was violating the law. They were just hoping-- and continue to hope now at the eleventh hour-- that the legislature will somehow pass a new law that makes them legal again. So any sympathy for those schools has to be balanced by the fact that the courts had already told them that the law they were depending on was illegal-- and they opened their doors anyway. It is too bad that about 1,100 students will have their school year disrupted-- but everybody knew this was the probably outcome when they walked in the door on the very first day.

But Lake assures us they are awesome schools-- even though they have been open for about five months!

It's a miracle! In just a few months, we can already tell that these schools are superb. They hold weekly ceremonies to recognize students who advance through reading levels. They have an "intentional learning culture." They have a longer school day! They swear that their students are doing really well!

This, I think, is the real story here. Not that charter schools opened in violation of the law and are now surprised that the law hasn't been changed to suit them in time. No, the real story is that Lake and her buddies know how to identify an outstanding school in just five months! See-- when push comes to shove, even they don't believe in this data-driven Big Standardized Test based evaluation of schools. You just know, because you're there, looking at the kids, and you can see it. And people should just take your word for it.

I look forward to seeing Lake apply this method to public schools, just as I continue to look for Lake and other charteristas expressing similar outrage when another charter closes in the middle of the year, sometimes with no advance notice at all.

But shame on all of us if we let misinformation and interest-group politics shut the door on new hope and opportunity for the kids who need it most.

Presumably she's referring to interest-group politics different from the interest-group politics that funded the passage of the illegal charter law in the first place. Or maybe she means the interest-group politics of the state constitution, or the taxpayers who want a say in how their money is spent. I am sure that Washington charter fans have not given up, and will be back with a new law soon. Maybe next time it will be a law that is actually legal.

Strikes and Democracy

Last night I was asked on twitter if I'm embarrassed by the striking Seattle teachers.

Shouldn't I be? My position on charters has been pretty clear, and recently I've been talking about my support for the Washington court ruling that charters are unconstitutional. I've been exceptionally clear that I believe charters, as currently practiced, are undemocratic in part because they are not run by an elected board and are therefor unaccountable to the voters and taxpayers.

I believe the implication (twitter's 140 characters depend a lot on implication) was that if I believe in the swellness of an elected school board, should I not also believe that teachers are obliged to let that elected school board be their guide and not get all unruly with strikes and stuff?

The answer is no, I don't, but the challenge is to articulate why, because my critic is correct in suggesting there might be an inconsistency there. I don't think so. Let's see if I can explain.

How is a government supposed to work?

We regularly conflate the ideas of how a government is put in place, and how it functions once there.

A monarch could inherit the throne, but once on it, be scrupulous about listening to all voices and supporting the rights of all people. A leader could be put in place by a legitimate election and begin behaving like a tyrant once in office. An elected group could meet in secret and never reveal their processes to the public.

We like democracy because as processes to put officials in place go, it seems the most naturally inclined to be open and inclusive. But the fact that it's democratically put in place doesn't guarantee that a group functions in an open and inclusive way.

Democracy is messy

The openness and inclusiveness are just as important as the electing, because that's part of where accountability comes from. It's not just that you have to stand for election every few years-- it's that every time you sit down to meet about your elected position, any member of the public who wants to can come and tell you what they think.

School boards (and city councils and congress) don't always love this part, and will sometimes try to bend the law to get around it. That's why we have things like sunshine laws-- because a democratic process of election is not enough to insure a democratic process of operation.

Democracy in action bothers lots of folks, specifically the same folks who hate it when the pictures in the living room are hung in a disorganized hodge-podge and one of them is tilted. Democracy in action is messy, noisy and inefficient. It ties our fate to the fates of Those People. And it unleashes a variety of contesting contrasting contentious forces.

In other words, if you think that democracy is when we elect a bunch of people and then just sit back and leave them alone while they decide whatever they decide, you are mistaken. American democracy in particular is designed so that the majority can't just force the minority to shut up.

Democracy is not a boisterous campaign followed by an election followed by blissful, compliant silence.

Democracy and Pressure Points

Once a group (such as a school board) is elected, they have to start functioning at the intersection of many different interests. Taxpayers. Parents. Teachers. Local government. And on any given issue, the clash of interests may become vocal and even harsh. In this way, democracy provides a means test for how much folks care. Are you really concerned about how much kale is served in the cafeteria? Are you willing to give up an evening to go complain to the board? To do it several times? To call and write and walk with a protest sign? Each escalation helps the board answer the question, "Just how much do people really care about this?"

So parents come and stand at line at a board meeting to make their point. Taxpayers write letters to the editors and hold demonstrations. And teachers, occasionally, go on strike. Because that's how they show a board just how important the issue is. The elected officials, because they have to conduct their business in plain sight, have to hear about it.

See, accountability of elected officials doesn't just mean that every so many years they must stand for election. It means that all the time in between they must spend listening to their constituents, reading what they say, and feeling whatever pressure those constituents can bring to bear on them.

Democracy and CEOs

The CEO model of leadership hates all of this. The CEO model says you get one genius visionary leader-guy, and then set things up so that nobody can interfere with him as he implements his vision. Depending on his political leanings, he may be presented as someone who has only the best interests of the poor and the downtrodden at heart-- but the poor and the downtrodden don't get to tell him how they think he should do his job.

There are arguments to be made for this model in certain settings. But it is not democracy.

Democracy and Dollars

Our challenge as a nation has become the free flow of money into the process-- not just the election process, but the operating process. Money gets some people extra attention. Charter fans have been quick to point out that the judge who ruled against charters has taken money from unions (all the law would allow-- about $1,900). But of course the law that he thwarted was passed in Washington with the help of millions and millions of dollars in financing from billionaires (including some from out of state). Money gets in the way of an open and inclusive process.

Democracy and Charters

So my problem with charter governance is that it is democratic in neither election nor operation, and that effectively means that they are accountable to nobody.

Charter fans will argue that they are accountable to authorizers, and in some states must actually hit test result targets to stay in business. I am not impressed. Hitting test scores is a nearly-useless metric for determining whether a school is working or not. Do parents complain because Junior didn't score high enough on the Big Standardized Test? Certainly not as often as the express concern about learning, grades, nurturing environment, positive atmosphere, sports, etc etc etc. Parents have hundreds of concerns, and in most current charter arrangements, they can communicate those concerns to nobody.

They can't start any conversation with, "I voted for you..." and they certainly can't go speak out at a public board meeting. They can't ask questions about finances and where the dollars are going. And the list of things parents can't do is nothing compared to the list of undoable things for taxpayers who fund the school, but don't send students there. The message from charters to taxpayers is, "Give us your money, but don't ever EVER try to talk to us about anything. Ever."

Did I Mention the Mess

Schools are public institutions set up to meet the needs of the community. As such, they are required to respond to a zillion different constituencies with a double-zillion priorities and concerns. That means the operation of school districts will always be a tug of war with a million ropes, a balancing act that never reaches equilibrium. That means that some districts will be, at times, out of balance or the site of fairly brutal "discussions" about how to fix things.


The only alternative is to find ways to shut some voices out of the conversation, and while in the worst of times that can become the public school district path (mayoral control, anyone), that disempowerment is Plan A for charters. "Just sit out in the hall. Shut up. We'll be in this locked room deciding what's best for you."

The problem of democracy is that everybody gets the power to be part of the discussion. That's why we insist on educating everybody-- so that the discussion won't get too clogged with people who don't know what they're talking about.

There have always been people who thought the solution for democracy was to only allow a voice to people who deserve one. That's not democracy. It ignores our foundational documents (governments get their power from the consent of the governed). Yes, if everyone has a voice, then sometimes those voices get angry and raised and all activisty. That's part of democracy. The alternatives that we periodically consider may be neater and quieter and more orderly, but they all involve stripping citizens of their voice and their power, and that is just fundamentally wrong.

WA: I Have the Charter Solution

The Washington State supreme court has spoken, and charter supporters are freaking out.

There's a #saveWAcharterschools tag on twitter (a little lonely, but it's there), along with several feisty charteristas who are finding ways to express their outrage.

And on Huffington Post, the heads both the national and state charter associations (each, of course, is not called "president" or "chairman," but "CEO") wrote an expression of something between panic, outrage and feistiness about the closing of charter schools. Thomas Franta and Nina Rees are concerned for the 1,200 Washington students who are suddenly school-less for next week, and I have to agree that the court's decision to sit on this ruling until the last days of summer vacation was just plain mean. At the same time, I hope that Rees, as CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, displays some of this same outrage the next time some charter school decides to cut its losses and close up shop in the middle of a school year.

Charteristas are calling for some way to Save Charter Schools. Washington state legislator Drew Stokesbary on twitter proposes three possible solutions:

So, find ways to rewrite the law so that charter money can stay in its own little lock box in its own big silo. This seems a bit overthought and overwrought. The court's decision, as I understand it, is based on the idea that charter schools cannot receive "common school" public funds because they are not overseen by an elected school board. And if that's the case, charters can fix this very easily. Are you paying attention, charter operators? I have your solution right here.

Just submit to being overseen by an elected school board.

Act like the public schools you claim to be. Make your finances and operation completely transparent to the public.

And allow yourselves to be overseen by an elected school board instead of a collection of individuals who are not answerable to the voters or the taxpayers.

I mean-- what's more important to you? Providing a strong educational alternative for those 1,200 students, or holding on your ability to do whatever you want without having to answer to the public? Is it so important to you that you not be accountable to the public that you would rather engage in timeconsuming rewrites of state law, or even just close your doors, rather than let yourself submit to transparent and open oversight by a group of citizens elected by the very taxpayers whose money you use to run your school?

Many eyes are on Washington right now. One of the things we'll be watching to see is what charter operators do next, because their next move will be one more sign of what they really care about.

Toxic Expectations

"Expectations" seems to be having a moment, shouldering aside "grit" in the pantheon of reformster Orwellian obfuscatory baloney.

To be clear, I am a big fan of educational expectations. I learned about expectations from my chemistry teacher Joe Stewart. We would whine that he expected too much and he would say, "I know. But if I expect this [hand held above head], I will get this [hand held at eye level]. If I only expect this [hand still at eyes], I will get this [hand at chest]." All of my experience as a teacher suggests that Joe had it right.

I communicate two things to my students with expectations-- 1) I intend to hold them to a certain standard and 2) I believe in their ability to succeed. We talk in my class about the pathway to awesome, not the road to good-enough-to-get-by. Students are fond of asking questions ("How long does this have to be? How much time should I spend on this?") that are basically reworded versions of "What's the bare minimum I can get away with on this?" My response is some version of "You are not trying to do the bare minimum. You are trying to be awesome. Don't settle. Be awesome."

Sometimes they want to offer some version of, "What do you expect from me? I'm dumb." They get in return, "I see no evidence of your alleged dumbosity. I expect you to be your version of awesome."
Okay, actually, I communicate three things. 3) I will be with you every step of the way. My role is support and guidance. On the trek up the educational mountain of excellence, I'm a sherpa. It's my job to egg them on. It's my job to make sure they have the supplies and support they need to get there. It's my job to gauge their strength and ability, to know when to say, "Come on! Let's go!" and when to say, "Let's set up camp and rest." It's my job to select a goal that will stretch them but not break them.


I tell you all this so that you know that I understand the power of expectations in education. But my understanding is apparently very different from that of many reformsters.

Arne Duncan has repeatedly insisted that students with disabilities are the victims of low expectations. The state of Washington, using Duncan's fact-free position paper as backup, insisted that

The evidence is clear that disabilities do not cause disparate outcomes, but that the system itself perpetuates limitations in expectations and false belief systems about who children with disabilities can be and how much they can achieve in their lifetime

Get that? All differences in outcomes are entirely the fault of the school. Students with learning disabilities, cognitive impairments, physical challenges-- they only have problems with school work because of the school. The blind student just has trouble seeing the PARCC questions because his teachers expect him to have trouble seeing. The student with limbs twisted by disease is unable to run a ten-minute mile because his phys ed teacher doesn't think he can do it. And the state of Florida was correct to demand that Ethan Rediske take the Big Test even if he was profoundly disabled and dying. We can expect that all children will be exactly the same, and we are just going to expect them all into magical compliance.

But it's not just that reformsters have imbued expectations with mystical magical qualities. Consider Erika Sanzi over at Education Post, Peter Cunningham's $12 million PR machine. She is ruminating on events and unrest in Ferguson, and about the question of the role of education in making young people feel valued:

When I think of how a school shows that it "values" children, my mind automatically goes to the question of expectations.

Does it? Does it really first go to the question of expectations? Because when I read that sentence, my mind automatically went to the question of baloney.

Do you know how a school shows that it values children? It does it by giving them just as much support as it can muster. It makes sure they have the best physical plant that money can buy, a school with all the amenities, a nice library, a well-equipped gym, classrooms that are clean and well-lit and filled with the best new resources that can be found. It spends top dollar to get the best people in the classroom. It makes sure the school can provide every kind of support, resource and facility possible. That's how a school shows it values children.

I am tired to the bone of reformsters claiming that expectations are all that we need, of the repeated chorus that we can't make schools better by throwing money at them. I have an experiment for testing that. Find the school in your state with the lowest level of spending, and reduce every single school-- including the schools in the wealthy neighborhoods-- to that lowest level of spending. When parents squawk, tell them it's okay because you are just going to load the expectations on. You are going to expectation the living daylights out of those kids and nobody is going to miss a cent of the money that was just cut, because, expectations. Try that, and get back to me.

You cannot truly deliver the expectation of success without becoming a partner in that success. You cannot help people climb the mountain without climbing it with them.

If you stand at the foot of the mountain and tell someone, "Get to the peak. Do it. I'm not going to check you out to see how high you can safely climb in one day. I'm not going to give you supplies or support, and I'm not going to help you, either. I'm just going to stay down here and expect that you'll make it to the peak, or else," that's not high expectations. That's just cruelty.

And to say to our poorest schools and communities, "You don't need to have the same kind of money and support and resources that the rich schools get. You just need expectations" is the lamest, most ethically lazy excuse since Cain said, "Brother? Um, where? Wasn't my day to watch him."

There is a half-truth in the reformster argument-- it is deeply wrong to look at students and say that because they are poor or challenged, there's no point in even trying. But it does not follow that by saying we expect them to succeed exactly like anyone else, we're doing any better. There are two groups that are ignored in this touting of high expectations: the children who have been rescued from low expectations by readily available money and resources, and the children whose high expectations have been crushed by the poverty and societal neglect that surrounds them. Neither group is aided by expectation blather, but only one group needs additional support.

When parents discover their child has a gift, they do everything they can to support it. Lessons, equipment, trainers, teachers-- even if they have to squeeze the family budget. They don't say, "That's nice, child. We expect you to be awesome, but you should not expect us to help you." There isn't an elite private school on the planet that says, "We have classes in a moldy, rat-infested barn. There will never be a nurse here when your child is sick or a counselor here when your child is troubled. We will do nothing special to assist your child whatever her difficulties. We have no books, no computer, and no facilities outside of the crumbling classrooms. But we will have really high expectations of your child, so send him to us!"

Nor does the parable say that the Samaritan found the man beaten and lying at the side of the road and said, "I'm going to do you a huge favor. I'm going to expect you to heal yourself and get yourself out of that ditch. Good luck. I expect I'll see you later."

To say that children who face the obstacles of disability or poverty simply need someone to expect more-- that's wrong in too many ways. First, it assumes that they are incapable of having expectations of their own, that they are simply idling and aimless, waiting for someone to slap them awake with a cold bucket of expectations (provided by people who know better than they what their goals should be). And second, it ignores our obligation to provide support, assistance, guidance, and even company on the climb to the mountaintop.
 
Expectations without investment are just empty promises and deluded dreams. They are excuses, a way to shed responsibility, to say that we have no obligation to help clear a path-- we can just sit back and expect the travelers to break their own trail, without even checking to see if they even have the tools to do it. The best expectations help show the way and light the road, but the worst are toxic, not only failing to push back obstacles, but adding the additional roadblock of Not My Problem indifference. If our students living in poverty don't feel valued, I'm pretty sure that the low expectations of their teachers are not the most likely culprit.

Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats

Washington: Disabilities Aren't Real

Following in the footsteps of one of the dumbest initiatives to come out of the US Department of Education, Washington state has arrived at some destructive fact-free findings regarding the education of students with special needs.

The Governor's Office of the Education Ombuds has created and released a report that...well, I will let the conclusion speak for itself:

The evidence is clear that disabilities do not cause disparate outcomes, but that the system itself perpetuates limitations in expectations and false belief systems about who children with disabilities can be and how much they can achieve in their lifetime.

So there you have it-- as previously suggested by the federal Department of Education, the disabilities that students claim to possess do not actually exist in any meaningful way. Any limitations that they appear to have are simply the result of the system's (i.e. teachers) low expectations:

But the vast majority of children  in special education do not have disabilities that prevent them from tackling the same rigorous academic subjects as general education students if they get the proper support, so those low numbers reflect shortcomings in the system, not the students.

You might think that link takes you to some research that supports this rather startling assertion. It doesn't. It takes you to the US ED statement on the subject, and that is supported by-- nothing. I addressed this before ("Quite Possibly the Stupidest Thing To Come Out of the US DOE"), but it hasn't gotten any less bizarre since last June.

I'm not sure which reading is more bizarre-- do they mean that schools take perfectly normal students and arbitrarily turn them into special needs students, or that schools could completely cure students of their disabilities if we just tried harder and expected more? I'm a big believer in expectations, but no matter how hard I expect my hair to grow back, it doesn't happen. Expecting a student to do the best she can is good teacher behavior; expecting a student to do what she cannot is just mean.

Nancy Bailey has written a fiery and pointed reaction to this "news," and sees it as one step in the abolition of special ed programs entirely. After all, the one size fits all nature of Common Core and the Core testing regimen will work so much more smoothly once we make every student the same, and the easiest and fastest way to do that is to just say it's so. This certainly fits in with the philosophy that the way to get all students to read at grade level is to just, you know, make them do it. Insist real hard. If we believe that we can get a student with a second grade reading skill read at the fifth grade level by just somehow making him do it, why can't we make a dyslexic student or student with other processing difficulties read at level by just expecting her to? "Stop pretending you're blind, Jimmy, and read this book right now!"

The report also concludes that special ed programs are too expensive and don't produce enough magical results, plus they have too much procedure and regulation as well as putting parents in adversarial positions (and, boy, isn't that a whole chapter of a book).

Bailey thinks Seattle is clearing the ground to cut special ed as a budget savings for the state. I can see one other impetus for removing special ed rules-- charters. Charters don't like students with special needs because they bring extra costs, and they bring special costs because of regulations that mandate services for them. But remove the mandated services and replace them with something cheap, like High Expectations, and a whole new market sector opens up.

Washington is concerned about the long term effects of this lack of magical high expectations. The report says that the failure of schools to erase all effects of the disabilities results in lives of "unemployment, poverty and dependence."

Good news!! I totally know how to fix this!

High expectations!!

After all-- these students are probably not getting hired for jobs like store manager or nuclear plant engineer or government ombudsperson because the employers don't expect they'll be able to do the job. Low expectations!

So we just mandate that employers must hire the first people who show up for a job. After all, if education results are just the product of randomly applied low and high expectations of the school system, then employment results are just the product of randomly applied low and high expectations of employers. If I can get all students to be awesome in my classroom just by expecting it, then an employer can get awesome results from any and all employees just by expecting them!

So all Washington (either one) has to say is, "Employers, you must hire blindly. Take whoever you get and make it work with the power of high expectations!" And excellence will rain down like manna from heaven. You're welcome.