One of the great lies of the charter-choice movement is that you can run multiple school districts for the price of one.
A school district of, say, 2,000 students can lose 75 students and with them about $750,000 dollars of revenue, and somehow that district of 1,925 students can operate for three quarter of a million dollars less. And how does the district deal with that loss of revenue? By closing a building-- because the more school buildings you operate, the more it costs.
The other common response of a school district to the loss of revenue to charters is to raise local taxes. If charters want to look at where some of their bad press is coming from, they might consider school boards like mine that regularly explain to the public, "Your local elementary is closing and your taxes are going up because we have to give money to the cyber charters."
We can run examples a dozen different ways. What is cheaper in the aggregate-- to house your ten person family in one house, or to house each family member is a separate building? Is it cheaper and more efficient to educate 2,000 students in one district with one set of administrators and special areas teachers, or in five school districts with five sets of administrators and special area teachers?
The inefficient, multiple provider model of charter schools creates greater expense, and the difference can only be made up one of two ways-- either taxpayers must fork over more money for education, or schools must cut services. If you are going to add charter-choice schools to a system, those are the only two options.
States have tried to fudge their way around with various systems of reimbursements to school districts for the students they lose to choice-charter. IOW, when that district loses the $750K, some states help make up the shortfall, either partially or completely. This is solidly in the Taxpayers Must Pay More category, but by funneling the money through the state, taxpayers might be kept unaware that they are paying more tax dollars so that a handful of students can go to a private school at public expense.
Which brings us to the morning news from Wisconsin.
Wisconsin is a happy land for school choice fans, with vouchers in play through three separate programs, robust choice advocacy groups, and a governor who tries to expand school choice every time the sun shines. So they have had plenty of opportunity to feel the effects of voucher prorgams sucking the life blood from public schools. Choice advocates have tried combating the bad PR with bad arguments ("it all just kind of evens out over time, somehow"). But now the legislature is trying to patch, or at least hide, the bleeding.
The 2015-2017 let local school districts draw on additional tax dollars, through state aid and through property taxes, to cover the money lost to vouchers, but Assembly Speaker Robin Vos didn't like that plan, feeling that local school districts could "pocket" the difference (schools would probably have squandered those tax dollars on books and programs and education stuff, and we can't have that). Vos's proposal would have dramatically reduced the amount of revenue that districts could call on to plug the gap, actually leaving districts in the hole.
Thursday the legislature passed a break-even compromise. If a school loses $750K in voucher money, they are authorized to gather some combination of additional state aid and local tax increases to raise exactly that $750K.
Which means that having vouchers in a Wisconsin school district raises the cost of educating students in that district by exactly the cost of the vouchers. The vouchers represent not a backpack of student money following students from school to school, but additional taxpayer dollars injected into the education system. The taxpayers will pay extra so that some students can go to a private school.
This is not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. If you want to stand up in front of the taxpayers and sell the idea that they should pay higher taxes so that some students can go to a private school at public expense, go ahead and try to sell that idea. But if you are going to insist on lying about it and insist, for instance, that people's taxes are NOT going up to finance vouchers-- well, that sort of dishonesty doesn't benefit anybody.
Wisconsin is a fine example of a state that has successfully avoided having an honest discussion about what they are actually doing, which is increasing taxes in order to fund a new entitlement-- the entitlement of a handful of students to attend a private school at pubic expense. Such an entitlement may or may not be a good idea-- that's a separate discussion, but step one in having that discussion is to be honest about what you want to do.
Showing posts with label Wisconsin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wisconsin. Show all posts
Friday, February 19, 2016
Wednesday, June 10, 2015
Walker's Education Fairy Tale
Yesterday, Presidential Candidate and Occasional Governor Scott Walker took to the pages of the Des Moines Register to pat himself on the back. His arm was not the only thing getting twisted.
Walker opens with one of the standards of the anti-teacher movement-- the story of a fine young teacher who won a first-year-teacher-of-the-year award and was then furloughed at the end of the year.
Why would they get rid of a new teacher like Sampson — especially in Milwaukee, which was one of the most troubled urban school districts in the nation? Well, under the old union contracts, the last hired was first fired.
In 2011, we changed that broken system in Wisconsin. Today, the requirements for seniority and tenure are gone. Schools can hire based on merit and pay based on performance. That means they can keep the best and the brightest in the classroom
Sigh. First of all, as the husband of an excellent teacher who has just been furloughed because she's the one of the least senior teachers at her district, I think I have a good grasp of just how much that royally sucks. (A lot, is the answer. It sucks with the suckage of a thousand black holes.) But there are three things wrong with Walker's "solution."
First, Sampson (and my wife) didn't lose her job because she was last hired. She lost her job because the state failed to adequately fund her school district, so they decided they'd solve the problem by cutting teaching staff.
Second, the whole empty two-part premise of Walker's solution is the existence of an instrument for measuring which teachers are best and brightest-- and that administrators will use it. But we have no such instrument. VAM and its various forms have been debunked long after the cows came home, ate supper, and turned in for the night. Walker's tiny stack of lost-their-job youngsters is a molehill next to the mountain of tales about excellent teachers whose ratings were crappy.
But of course the efficacy of the measuring stick only matters if someone picks it up. In Walker's universe, teachers can be fired for any reason and paid whatever you feel like paying them. Which means even the best and the brightest can be fired at any time. Which means that--
Third, what good does it tell a young teacher, "Don't worry. You won't be fired just for being the newest," when the next part of that conversation is, "But you could be fired at any time during the entire rest of your career, for any reason. In fact, every raise you get will draw a slightly bigger target on your back. And if you cross the wrong administrator, you'll learn what a (career) killer schedule looks like."
But Walker wants you to know that crushing the unions and destroying teaching as a lifetime profession is totally working. "Scores are going up," he says. "At pretty much the same rate they're going up everywhere else, which is about the same rate they were going up before the current round of reformy foolishness," says anybody who can read the data.
Walker winds up with a plug for choice and local control. As always this is an interesting one-two punch since more choice always seems to equal less local control, because choice is composed of charters that are not controlled by or accountable to the local community. Newark and New Orleans are loaded with choice-ish programs, and yet there is also zero local control.
But mostly Walker wants you to know that he's agin Common Core. This, too, makes an interesting combo with the whole "best and brightest" teacher rating business, since every big teacher-sorting system we have at the moment rests on a big Common Core test. Perhaps Walker is following Chris Christie in demanding that all students be tested on the standards that they are forbidden to be taught.
Walker also supports "moving the money out of Washington," whatever that means. And more vouchers.
It's easy to dismiss Walker as a Koch tool, a bland slice of public-education hating white bread. It's easy to dismiss him until you look around and what he's up against in the GOP. And when we stack him up against the dems-- well, he's more overtly anti-teacher than Hillary, but on choice and charters, I'm not sure I see a heck of a lot of difference between them. This fall's Presidential election is looking worse and worse for public education every day. (Oops-- correction: I mean NEXT fall. It's just that the campaign feels like it's already really in gear.)
Walker opens with one of the standards of the anti-teacher movement-- the story of a fine young teacher who won a first-year-teacher-of-the-year award and was then furloughed at the end of the year.
Why would they get rid of a new teacher like Sampson — especially in Milwaukee, which was one of the most troubled urban school districts in the nation? Well, under the old union contracts, the last hired was first fired.
In 2011, we changed that broken system in Wisconsin. Today, the requirements for seniority and tenure are gone. Schools can hire based on merit and pay based on performance. That means they can keep the best and the brightest in the classroom
Sigh. First of all, as the husband of an excellent teacher who has just been furloughed because she's the one of the least senior teachers at her district, I think I have a good grasp of just how much that royally sucks. (A lot, is the answer. It sucks with the suckage of a thousand black holes.) But there are three things wrong with Walker's "solution."
First, Sampson (and my wife) didn't lose her job because she was last hired. She lost her job because the state failed to adequately fund her school district, so they decided they'd solve the problem by cutting teaching staff.
Second, the whole empty two-part premise of Walker's solution is the existence of an instrument for measuring which teachers are best and brightest-- and that administrators will use it. But we have no such instrument. VAM and its various forms have been debunked long after the cows came home, ate supper, and turned in for the night. Walker's tiny stack of lost-their-job youngsters is a molehill next to the mountain of tales about excellent teachers whose ratings were crappy.
But of course the efficacy of the measuring stick only matters if someone picks it up. In Walker's universe, teachers can be fired for any reason and paid whatever you feel like paying them. Which means even the best and the brightest can be fired at any time. Which means that--
Third, what good does it tell a young teacher, "Don't worry. You won't be fired just for being the newest," when the next part of that conversation is, "But you could be fired at any time during the entire rest of your career, for any reason. In fact, every raise you get will draw a slightly bigger target on your back. And if you cross the wrong administrator, you'll learn what a (career) killer schedule looks like."
But Walker wants you to know that crushing the unions and destroying teaching as a lifetime profession is totally working. "Scores are going up," he says. "At pretty much the same rate they're going up everywhere else, which is about the same rate they were going up before the current round of reformy foolishness," says anybody who can read the data.
Walker winds up with a plug for choice and local control. As always this is an interesting one-two punch since more choice always seems to equal less local control, because choice is composed of charters that are not controlled by or accountable to the local community. Newark and New Orleans are loaded with choice-ish programs, and yet there is also zero local control.
But mostly Walker wants you to know that he's agin Common Core. This, too, makes an interesting combo with the whole "best and brightest" teacher rating business, since every big teacher-sorting system we have at the moment rests on a big Common Core test. Perhaps Walker is following Chris Christie in demanding that all students be tested on the standards that they are forbidden to be taught.
Walker also supports "moving the money out of Washington," whatever that means. And more vouchers.
It's easy to dismiss Walker as a Koch tool, a bland slice of public-education hating white bread. It's easy to dismiss him until you look around and what he's up against in the GOP. And when we stack him up against the dems-- well, he's more overtly anti-teacher than Hillary, but on choice and charters, I'm not sure I see a heck of a lot of difference between them. This fall's Presidential election is looking worse and worse for public education every day. (Oops-- correction: I mean NEXT fall. It's just that the campaign feels like it's already really in gear.)
Thursday, January 29, 2015
Milwaukee's New War on the Poor
On Wednesday, Senator Alberta Darling and Representative Dale Kooyenga released "New Opportunities for Milwaukee." It'stunning. It's a blueprint, a plan, a carefully-crafted rhetorical stance that turns the war on poverty into a war on the poor. Does it present new opportunities? It surely does-- but they are opportunities for more privateers to use the language of civil rights to mask the same old profiteering game.
Make sure your seat belts and safety harnesses are locked in place, because we are about to travel to a place where up is down and forward is backward. The first chunk is directly related to education; the rest is not, but I'm going to go the distance anyway because it helps lay out a particular point of view that is driving some reformsters. The full report is twenty-five pages; I've read them so that you don't have to, but you may still want to. Forewarned is forearmed.
Introduction
2014 marked the 50-year anniversary of the war on poverty. Since 1964, taxpayers spent over $22 trillion to combat poverty. Little, if any, progress has been achieved.
Those are the opening lines, and our basic premise. The writers declare the war on poverty a failure, and the draw a line between Eisenhower's military-industrial complex and a new poverty industrial complex. "There is a presumption in this nation that all we have to do is appropriate more money to address a problem, but over time we see no correlation between government spending and the alleviation of poverty." In fact, the writer's suggest, poverty has gotten worse in the areas that get the most government attention.
"Two-thirds of the incarcerated African-American men come from six zip codes in Milwaukee and it is no coincidence that those zip codes are also home to the greatest density of failing schools and the highest unemployment in the state." Boy, and that's true. It's also no coincidence that every time I see a building on fire, there's a fire truck right nearby, or that every time find water dripping off my car, there's rain. Say it with me, boys and girls-- correlation is not causation.
The writers acknowledge that the poverty of these areas is "a reality no one should accept" and they talk about "the real pain there." They also assert that "no one wants to be in poverty"and they recognize that "Milwaukee is increasingly becoming a tale of two cities."
They also want you to know that the ideas in this plan won't "cost any taxpayer, at any level of government, a single cent." Because compassion is nice and all, but compassion that doesn't actually cost you anything is best. Their plan is about "unleashing individuals, not unleashing government spending," which rather begs the question of what, exactly, has individuals leashed in the first place. They think their ideas are good for the whole state, but for now, they'll just focus on zip codes with unemployment over 10%.
Chapter 1: Empowerment Through Education
This chapter kicks off with great news! While we lost the war on poverty, we apparently totally won the battle for civil rights and equity. No kidding.
In the past, being a minority in America inhibited an individual from pursuing a promising career and well-paying job. This reality is an embarrassing one for our great country, fortunately tremendous progress has been made on this injustice since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Today, a greater discriminator to escaping poverty is not race, but instead revolves around the ability to obtain a high school diploma.
The emphasis is mine (the comma splice and fractured syntax are theirs).
Just soak that in. Just absorb for a minute the implications. The civil rights movement is over; everybody can just go home now. Race is no longer a factor in poverty, and poverty is no longer a factor in its own perpetuation, and class background has nothing to do with upward mobility. It's all education.I told you you were going to need a seatbelt.
The writers want you to know that "fortunately" Milwaukee is a veritable experimentation laboratory for swell things like open enrollment, choice and charter programs. How's that been working out for them? Well...
There have been successes and failures, but overall the competition between schools and school systems is a positive for the community.
Mind you, just a paragraph earlier the writers had graphs and facts and figures about graduation rates. I guess we're just going to have to take their word for it that competition has been positive. And just to be clear-- no, I don't necessarily think that they are trying to hide the truth here. Choice and free market advocates often believe that choice and competition are virtuous in and of themselves. Educational results are beside the point-- choice is how proper systems are supposed to work, and if the results don't back that up, well, something else is messing the system up.
Now on to their proposed fixes.
Charter School Replication
Expanding proven charter schools is essential to improving more quality education, say the writers, and once again, this is more an affirmation of faith than an evidence-based conclusion. A short history of charters in Milwaukee follows, featuring a lovely pro-charter quote from President Obama and some examples of swell charter ideas like Rocketship Charters.
Charter schools are a positive for any community. Similar to the voucher program, their existence applies pressure to traditional public schools to increase their educational delivery system in order to compete.
Their proposal? Allow high-performing charters to replicate without the approval of a charter school authorizer. In this case, "high-performing" will be defined as "beating local mat and reading scores by ten percent for two straight years." So charterpreneurs just need to scoop up some select educational cream, hit the test prep hard, and in two years they can earn carte blanche to create as a big a charter chain as they wish, answerable to nobody at all!
Turnaround schools
Entrenched interests are standing in the way of large scale reform. Thousands of children are "victims of low academic achievement and therefore, dependence on government."
The writers will now use New Orleans and Tennessee's ASD as examples of sweeping reforms. For NOLA, they'll cite success that has been repeatedly debunked. For Tennessee, it's just "early reports" are "encouraging."
Their proposal? A turnaround board that operates outside traditional bureaucracy. The board will entertain proposals from charter operators and will award a five-year charter school contract to the best plan. So, one more public school system turned into a non-public school system to be run as a business. Because it has worked so well in-- oh, wait. It hasn't worked anywhere. Because democracy is stupid and gets in the way of a good business plan? Maybe that's the justification here.
Dual Enrollment Program
"The notion that every student's best interest is served by pursuing a bachelor's degree is without merit."
I have no disagreement with this portion of the proposal at all. Apparently Wisconsin runs a program that helps prep students to be machinists, welders or tech workers in a work-based learning opportunity. In Pennsylvania we have vocational-technical schools, and I will go to bat for these programs any day of the week. The world needs more welders and what's more, the world pays welders good money. There's no reason not to make it easier for students to choose that career path (which is one more reason that the Common Core are a waste of our time).
Proposal? More of that. I'm not going to disagree.
Chapter 220 Intradistrict Aid Flexibility
Back in the seventies, Milwaukee decided (with the help of some federal pressure) to get to integrating its schools.This falls under the heading of Chapter 220 intradistrict stuff.
If I understand correctly, schools basically get paid to accept students who help them meet the mandated mix of integration. The writers want you to know that the statute has a large helping of stupid in that it only recognizes two types of students-- white, and not white. As far as the statute is concerned, Asian, African-American and Latino students are interchangeable.
Proposed solution? If you said "Fix the definition of diversity," you lose. The correct answer is Give out all the money as block grants and don't require any school to do anything in particular with it. So, call a halt to desegregation in Milwaukee? Maybe that's larger than our goal. Perhaps they just want to make sure that charters can choose exactly whatever students they want, no matter what.
DPI Waiver of Mandates
"One size does not fit all." By which the writers mean, schools should be able to get permission to ignore whatever mandates they would like. Because what fun is a charter if you have to follow a bunch of government rules?
Computer Programming Academy
The market wants more technology workers. Let's make it some, because programmers make a lot of money. Perhaps Milwaukee can also start programs for super-models and professional athletes, who also make big money. Or politicians.
And that's the end of the education-specific material. If that's all you came for, you can bail now.
Chapter 2: Free Market Zones-- Targeted Practices for Challenging Neighborhoods
So, these target areas we're talking about are former industrial areas that have seen a "steady decline in manufacturing and the economic activity related to its supply chain," which was a surprise to me because, you know, the key to fixing all economic problems is education, so wouldn't that mean that back in the days of fuller employment we were going great guns in schools? Anyway, these high-unemployment areas carry a lot of extra costs connected with poverty. But have no fear--
Our proposals are not centered on removing safety nets, but providing trampolines.
I love a good metaphor, but I'll be damned if I can figure out what a trampoline would be, but here some the specific of their plan, so let's see.
Not all is baloney. There's a proposal for zero-percent corporate taxes for new businesses (as long they aren't competing with old one). Wisconsin also has a 1939 law that you can't sell products at a loss, so that the big guy won't squeeze out the little guy. The writers say that since the big guys are now on line, this is a lost cause (and keeps consumers from getting hot deals). I think I may side with them on this. On the other hand, there's this:
Right-to-Work Zone
Peacekeeper missile. Freedom is slavery. Right to work.
The proposal here is simple. A five-person governor-appointed board should be able to okay keeping any unions away from a new business. The writers say this is necessary to keep Wisconsin "competitive" by which we must mean competitive from an employer's viewpoint, because this is certainly not how you compete for workers.
Oddly enough, Wisconsin is not the only place to recently float this idea. The governor of Illinois has also floated a similar inspiration. It's almost as if somebody, somewhere has suggested this cool idea-- "If you can't get your whole state to go anti-union, maybe you can just set up a few select union-free zones here and there." ALEC? He Man Union Busters Club Monthly?
I have actually seen a business keep the union out. The owner did it by treating their employees so well that they consistently rejected union overtures. I have also seen managers work with unions as effective partners in keeping a company efficient and profitable. I am not a knee-jerk union supporter at all, but the idea that you have to keep the union out to run a company well is narrow, short-sighted, and often more about somebody's personal power trip than effective corporate management.
Right-to-Work states, zones, neighborhoods and companies are baloney.
Chapter 3: Removing Barriers to Work
Apparently there are Puritans in Wisconsin, because this chapter kicks off wit the idea that work is a moral imperative and it's immoral for the government to put obstacles in the way of anybody interested in working.
The writers would like to remove licensure requirements for floor sanders, interior designers, photographers, and African hair braiding. They would like businesses with low traffic and few employees to be operated out of homes. And they'd like to stop the city from creating more license-necessary professions.
Chapter 4: Social Impact Bonds
Lordy, there's a lot of language here, but it appears that this just all fancy talk for "Sub-contract various government functions and initiatives to third parties." So, for example, if you have identified a problem with recidivism, hire an organization to work on that.
If you'll remember way back to the intro, you'll recall that the writers were very concerned that poverty programs were leading to a poverty industrial complex, but it looks to me like this sort of third party contracting is exactly how you create a poverty industrial complex, or social services industrial complex.
It's a version of what we're seeing in reformster thought- throwing money at government programs is bad, but throwing money at private contractors to run government programs is just super.
Chapter 5: Benefit Corporation and L3C
I'm curious about this, but I don't have time to research further. Apparently a benefit corporation is basically a corporation that can't be sued by its shareholders for making too little profit. Benefit corporations are supposed to be all about producing some sort of social good. It's a new legal toy; the first state to approve it was Maryland and that was just back in 2010. Only twenty-eight states have them right now; Wisconsin is not one of them. Low-profit Limited Liability Companies seem to be legal constructions for the same sort of general purposes. I'm not certain, but it seems like just the thing for anybody who wanted to cash in on the social services industrial complex, or run a charter school company.
There are, of course, gaping holes in this proposal. The jobs went away because industry went away, but if we get everyone a diploma, they will be able to get jobs.... where? Spending money on social service programs is stupid unless you're spending it on private companies that implement those programs, in which case it's great. Unions and government assistance are holding people back, but race and class have nothing to do with it.
There's remarkably little in these twenty-five pages about how to actually solve some of the problems of poverty, particularly poverty in a place where the industrialized bottom has fallen out. It may well be that the writers truly believe that an onslaught of business folks will actually lead to some sort of Milwaukee renaissance, or it may be that they are cynically exploiting the issues of poverty, civil rights and equity to help some buddies make bank.
Either way, this proposal is not about how to help people in the Danger Zones. It's about how to open up the Zones so that private interests can get in there to make a buck. It's opening up the gates to the game lands and telling the pack, "Go ahead. It's open season."
Make sure your seat belts and safety harnesses are locked in place, because we are about to travel to a place where up is down and forward is backward. The first chunk is directly related to education; the rest is not, but I'm going to go the distance anyway because it helps lay out a particular point of view that is driving some reformsters. The full report is twenty-five pages; I've read them so that you don't have to, but you may still want to. Forewarned is forearmed.
Introduction
2014 marked the 50-year anniversary of the war on poverty. Since 1964, taxpayers spent over $22 trillion to combat poverty. Little, if any, progress has been achieved.
Those are the opening lines, and our basic premise. The writers declare the war on poverty a failure, and the draw a line between Eisenhower's military-industrial complex and a new poverty industrial complex. "There is a presumption in this nation that all we have to do is appropriate more money to address a problem, but over time we see no correlation between government spending and the alleviation of poverty." In fact, the writer's suggest, poverty has gotten worse in the areas that get the most government attention.
"Two-thirds of the incarcerated African-American men come from six zip codes in Milwaukee and it is no coincidence that those zip codes are also home to the greatest density of failing schools and the highest unemployment in the state." Boy, and that's true. It's also no coincidence that every time I see a building on fire, there's a fire truck right nearby, or that every time find water dripping off my car, there's rain. Say it with me, boys and girls-- correlation is not causation.
The writers acknowledge that the poverty of these areas is "a reality no one should accept" and they talk about "the real pain there." They also assert that "no one wants to be in poverty"and they recognize that "Milwaukee is increasingly becoming a tale of two cities."
They also want you to know that the ideas in this plan won't "cost any taxpayer, at any level of government, a single cent." Because compassion is nice and all, but compassion that doesn't actually cost you anything is best. Their plan is about "unleashing individuals, not unleashing government spending," which rather begs the question of what, exactly, has individuals leashed in the first place. They think their ideas are good for the whole state, but for now, they'll just focus on zip codes with unemployment over 10%.
Chapter 1: Empowerment Through Education
This chapter kicks off with great news! While we lost the war on poverty, we apparently totally won the battle for civil rights and equity. No kidding.
In the past, being a minority in America inhibited an individual from pursuing a promising career and well-paying job. This reality is an embarrassing one for our great country, fortunately tremendous progress has been made on this injustice since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Today, a greater discriminator to escaping poverty is not race, but instead revolves around the ability to obtain a high school diploma.
The emphasis is mine (the comma splice and fractured syntax are theirs).
Just soak that in. Just absorb for a minute the implications. The civil rights movement is over; everybody can just go home now. Race is no longer a factor in poverty, and poverty is no longer a factor in its own perpetuation, and class background has nothing to do with upward mobility. It's all education.I told you you were going to need a seatbelt.
The writers want you to know that "fortunately" Milwaukee is a veritable experimentation laboratory for swell things like open enrollment, choice and charter programs. How's that been working out for them? Well...
There have been successes and failures, but overall the competition between schools and school systems is a positive for the community.
Mind you, just a paragraph earlier the writers had graphs and facts and figures about graduation rates. I guess we're just going to have to take their word for it that competition has been positive. And just to be clear-- no, I don't necessarily think that they are trying to hide the truth here. Choice and free market advocates often believe that choice and competition are virtuous in and of themselves. Educational results are beside the point-- choice is how proper systems are supposed to work, and if the results don't back that up, well, something else is messing the system up.
Now on to their proposed fixes.
Charter School Replication
Expanding proven charter schools is essential to improving more quality education, say the writers, and once again, this is more an affirmation of faith than an evidence-based conclusion. A short history of charters in Milwaukee follows, featuring a lovely pro-charter quote from President Obama and some examples of swell charter ideas like Rocketship Charters.
Charter schools are a positive for any community. Similar to the voucher program, their existence applies pressure to traditional public schools to increase their educational delivery system in order to compete.
Their proposal? Allow high-performing charters to replicate without the approval of a charter school authorizer. In this case, "high-performing" will be defined as "beating local mat and reading scores by ten percent for two straight years." So charterpreneurs just need to scoop up some select educational cream, hit the test prep hard, and in two years they can earn carte blanche to create as a big a charter chain as they wish, answerable to nobody at all!
Turnaround schools
Entrenched interests are standing in the way of large scale reform. Thousands of children are "victims of low academic achievement and therefore, dependence on government."
The writers will now use New Orleans and Tennessee's ASD as examples of sweeping reforms. For NOLA, they'll cite success that has been repeatedly debunked. For Tennessee, it's just "early reports" are "encouraging."
Their proposal? A turnaround board that operates outside traditional bureaucracy. The board will entertain proposals from charter operators and will award a five-year charter school contract to the best plan. So, one more public school system turned into a non-public school system to be run as a business. Because it has worked so well in-- oh, wait. It hasn't worked anywhere. Because democracy is stupid and gets in the way of a good business plan? Maybe that's the justification here.
Dual Enrollment Program
"The notion that every student's best interest is served by pursuing a bachelor's degree is without merit."
I have no disagreement with this portion of the proposal at all. Apparently Wisconsin runs a program that helps prep students to be machinists, welders or tech workers in a work-based learning opportunity. In Pennsylvania we have vocational-technical schools, and I will go to bat for these programs any day of the week. The world needs more welders and what's more, the world pays welders good money. There's no reason not to make it easier for students to choose that career path (which is one more reason that the Common Core are a waste of our time).
Proposal? More of that. I'm not going to disagree.
Chapter 220 Intradistrict Aid Flexibility
Back in the seventies, Milwaukee decided (with the help of some federal pressure) to get to integrating its schools.This falls under the heading of Chapter 220 intradistrict stuff.
If I understand correctly, schools basically get paid to accept students who help them meet the mandated mix of integration. The writers want you to know that the statute has a large helping of stupid in that it only recognizes two types of students-- white, and not white. As far as the statute is concerned, Asian, African-American and Latino students are interchangeable.
Proposed solution? If you said "Fix the definition of diversity," you lose. The correct answer is Give out all the money as block grants and don't require any school to do anything in particular with it. So, call a halt to desegregation in Milwaukee? Maybe that's larger than our goal. Perhaps they just want to make sure that charters can choose exactly whatever students they want, no matter what.
DPI Waiver of Mandates
"One size does not fit all." By which the writers mean, schools should be able to get permission to ignore whatever mandates they would like. Because what fun is a charter if you have to follow a bunch of government rules?
Computer Programming Academy
The market wants more technology workers. Let's make it some, because programmers make a lot of money. Perhaps Milwaukee can also start programs for super-models and professional athletes, who also make big money. Or politicians.
And that's the end of the education-specific material. If that's all you came for, you can bail now.
Chapter 2: Free Market Zones-- Targeted Practices for Challenging Neighborhoods
So, these target areas we're talking about are former industrial areas that have seen a "steady decline in manufacturing and the economic activity related to its supply chain," which was a surprise to me because, you know, the key to fixing all economic problems is education, so wouldn't that mean that back in the days of fuller employment we were going great guns in schools? Anyway, these high-unemployment areas carry a lot of extra costs connected with poverty. But have no fear--
Our proposals are not centered on removing safety nets, but providing trampolines.
I love a good metaphor, but I'll be damned if I can figure out what a trampoline would be, but here some the specific of their plan, so let's see.
Not all is baloney. There's a proposal for zero-percent corporate taxes for new businesses (as long they aren't competing with old one). Wisconsin also has a 1939 law that you can't sell products at a loss, so that the big guy won't squeeze out the little guy. The writers say that since the big guys are now on line, this is a lost cause (and keeps consumers from getting hot deals). I think I may side with them on this. On the other hand, there's this:
Right-to-Work Zone
Peacekeeper missile. Freedom is slavery. Right to work.
The proposal here is simple. A five-person governor-appointed board should be able to okay keeping any unions away from a new business. The writers say this is necessary to keep Wisconsin "competitive" by which we must mean competitive from an employer's viewpoint, because this is certainly not how you compete for workers.
Oddly enough, Wisconsin is not the only place to recently float this idea. The governor of Illinois has also floated a similar inspiration. It's almost as if somebody, somewhere has suggested this cool idea-- "If you can't get your whole state to go anti-union, maybe you can just set up a few select union-free zones here and there." ALEC? He Man Union Busters Club Monthly?
I have actually seen a business keep the union out. The owner did it by treating their employees so well that they consistently rejected union overtures. I have also seen managers work with unions as effective partners in keeping a company efficient and profitable. I am not a knee-jerk union supporter at all, but the idea that you have to keep the union out to run a company well is narrow, short-sighted, and often more about somebody's personal power trip than effective corporate management.
Right-to-Work states, zones, neighborhoods and companies are baloney.
Chapter 3: Removing Barriers to Work
Apparently there are Puritans in Wisconsin, because this chapter kicks off wit the idea that work is a moral imperative and it's immoral for the government to put obstacles in the way of anybody interested in working.
The writers would like to remove licensure requirements for floor sanders, interior designers, photographers, and African hair braiding. They would like businesses with low traffic and few employees to be operated out of homes. And they'd like to stop the city from creating more license-necessary professions.
Chapter 4: Social Impact Bonds
Lordy, there's a lot of language here, but it appears that this just all fancy talk for "Sub-contract various government functions and initiatives to third parties." So, for example, if you have identified a problem with recidivism, hire an organization to work on that.
If you'll remember way back to the intro, you'll recall that the writers were very concerned that poverty programs were leading to a poverty industrial complex, but it looks to me like this sort of third party contracting is exactly how you create a poverty industrial complex, or social services industrial complex.
It's a version of what we're seeing in reformster thought- throwing money at government programs is bad, but throwing money at private contractors to run government programs is just super.
Chapter 5: Benefit Corporation and L3C
I'm curious about this, but I don't have time to research further. Apparently a benefit corporation is basically a corporation that can't be sued by its shareholders for making too little profit. Benefit corporations are supposed to be all about producing some sort of social good. It's a new legal toy; the first state to approve it was Maryland and that was just back in 2010. Only twenty-eight states have them right now; Wisconsin is not one of them. Low-profit Limited Liability Companies seem to be legal constructions for the same sort of general purposes. I'm not certain, but it seems like just the thing for anybody who wanted to cash in on the social services industrial complex, or run a charter school company.
There are, of course, gaping holes in this proposal. The jobs went away because industry went away, but if we get everyone a diploma, they will be able to get jobs.... where? Spending money on social service programs is stupid unless you're spending it on private companies that implement those programs, in which case it's great. Unions and government assistance are holding people back, but race and class have nothing to do with it.
There's remarkably little in these twenty-five pages about how to actually solve some of the problems of poverty, particularly poverty in a place where the industrialized bottom has fallen out. It may well be that the writers truly believe that an onslaught of business folks will actually lead to some sort of Milwaukee renaissance, or it may be that they are cynically exploiting the issues of poverty, civil rights and equity to help some buddies make bank.
Either way, this proposal is not about how to help people in the Danger Zones. It's about how to open up the Zones so that private interests can get in there to make a buck. It's opening up the gates to the game lands and telling the pack, "Go ahead. It's open season."
Monday, October 20, 2014
Weary in Wisconsin
I received the following message from one of my readers. I'm telling her story here with her permission:
I am writing to you because I don't know where else to turn. I am a veteran elementary teacher of 25 years. I am emotionally spent. Yes, it is the second month of a new school year, and I am completely burned out. To be fair, it hasn't all happened in the last month and a half. It all started about 5 years ago, and things have been rolling downhill since then. You see, because I am an elementary teacher, my life today is completely out of balance. My colleagues and I easily work 60 hours a week, and when we are not at work, are usually worrying about work--about how we are going to get everything done that needs to be done and and how we are going to get our students to the end goal that our administration expects of us, er, I mean, them.
Many of us arrive at school each day at or before 7 am, and and often do not make it home in time for supper with our families. Our lunch break is spent inhaling yogurt as we work with children, score papers, record grades or make copies. We come home exhausted to our own children who need our help with homework, piles of laundry that need to be washed or folded, and to lunches that need to be packed for the next day when this whole crazy cycle begins again. But by the time we get home, we have nothing left to give. And when the weekend finally does roll around, activities have to be scheduled around time we know that we have to spend doing yet more schoolwork. Elderly parents to visit? No time. Sick child? Hubby can you take this? This is just no way to live!
When I was in college, I studied hard and planned for my future in which I expected to one day be a successful, experienced, respected professional. Over the years as a teacher, I have continued to push myself toward greater understanding of child development, academic achievement and my role in helping children reach their potential. Yet where I am today could hardly be farther from the vision I once had for myself. Instead, I find myself in a workplace where I have had instilled in me the notion that I am not doing enough, don't know enough and am not making progress fast enough. I often look back on my college days with regret and even resentment.. I could have done anything. I could have been anything. Why did I make this stupid choice to be a teacher?
My husband tells me that my colleagues and I just need to band together to talk with our administrators, sharing our struggles with them. Surely, he says, our collective voices would be enough to make a case that the administration can't ignore. After all, any good employer cares about the physical and emotional well-being of its employees, right? And surely they would be interested in the morale in the building, right? Well, we have tried. They aren't
If I found a job in a field outside of education this afternoon that fit me, I would take it by tonight. I want out. And I want the world to know it. (Well, kind of. Not my immediate world, perhaps--after all, I do have to keep my job until I can find something else!) But until then, I want some relief. And I simply don't know where to find it.
This teacher works in Wisconsin, and feels that following the "walk out the door at 5:00" approach would result in her being out of a job in a few months.
I don't know how people who create this kind of work environment live with themselves. I don't know what story they tell themselves at the end of the day that makes them feel as if they have done heroic, important things.
And I know that some of you will think, "Well, they just need to stand tall, stand together, and fight back hard." I don't know enough of the specifics of her situation to know if that's a real option or not. But I have to wonder what has happened-- how did we get to the place where it's usual to expect that a teacher needs to be a hard-as-nails street fighter.
How many great people are we losing because all they have to offer is that they are gentle and kind, love children, and want to help students learn and understand--- and they know (or they learn) that that is not enough.
Do feel free to offer support to this reader in the comments. I expect she'll see your comments. As will the other readers who are in a similar place.
I am writing to you because I don't know where else to turn. I am a veteran elementary teacher of 25 years. I am emotionally spent. Yes, it is the second month of a new school year, and I am completely burned out. To be fair, it hasn't all happened in the last month and a half. It all started about 5 years ago, and things have been rolling downhill since then. You see, because I am an elementary teacher, my life today is completely out of balance. My colleagues and I easily work 60 hours a week, and when we are not at work, are usually worrying about work--about how we are going to get everything done that needs to be done and and how we are going to get our students to the end goal that our administration expects of us, er, I mean, them.
Many of us arrive at school each day at or before 7 am, and and often do not make it home in time for supper with our families. Our lunch break is spent inhaling yogurt as we work with children, score papers, record grades or make copies. We come home exhausted to our own children who need our help with homework, piles of laundry that need to be washed or folded, and to lunches that need to be packed for the next day when this whole crazy cycle begins again. But by the time we get home, we have nothing left to give. And when the weekend finally does roll around, activities have to be scheduled around time we know that we have to spend doing yet more schoolwork. Elderly parents to visit? No time. Sick child? Hubby can you take this? This is just no way to live!
When I was in college, I studied hard and planned for my future in which I expected to one day be a successful, experienced, respected professional. Over the years as a teacher, I have continued to push myself toward greater understanding of child development, academic achievement and my role in helping children reach their potential. Yet where I am today could hardly be farther from the vision I once had for myself. Instead, I find myself in a workplace where I have had instilled in me the notion that I am not doing enough, don't know enough and am not making progress fast enough. I often look back on my college days with regret and even resentment.. I could have done anything. I could have been anything. Why did I make this stupid choice to be a teacher?
My husband tells me that my colleagues and I just need to band together to talk with our administrators, sharing our struggles with them. Surely, he says, our collective voices would be enough to make a case that the administration can't ignore. After all, any good employer cares about the physical and emotional well-being of its employees, right? And surely they would be interested in the morale in the building, right? Well, we have tried. They aren't
If I found a job in a field outside of education this afternoon that fit me, I would take it by tonight. I want out. And I want the world to know it. (Well, kind of. Not my immediate world, perhaps--after all, I do have to keep my job until I can find something else!) But until then, I want some relief. And I simply don't know where to find it.
This teacher works in Wisconsin, and feels that following the "walk out the door at 5:00" approach would result in her being out of a job in a few months.
I don't know how people who create this kind of work environment live with themselves. I don't know what story they tell themselves at the end of the day that makes them feel as if they have done heroic, important things.
And I know that some of you will think, "Well, they just need to stand tall, stand together, and fight back hard." I don't know enough of the specifics of her situation to know if that's a real option or not. But I have to wonder what has happened-- how did we get to the place where it's usual to expect that a teacher needs to be a hard-as-nails street fighter.
How many great people are we losing because all they have to offer is that they are gentle and kind, love children, and want to help students learn and understand--- and they know (or they learn) that that is not enough.
Do feel free to offer support to this reader in the comments. I expect she'll see your comments. As will the other readers who are in a similar place.
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