Well, at least she just put it right out there.
In a piece at the Daily Beast, Campbell Brown calls for US politicians to follow the example of the UK Prime Minister David Cameron. And what example is that?
Last week, addressing his party for the first time since re-election in May, U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron called for an end to the country’s traditional public school system, endorsing instead a nationwide conversion to academies, which are essentially the British equivalent of charter schools—publicly funded, but with greater freedom over what they teach and how they are run.
And Brown includes this quote from Cameron:
“So my next ambition is this,” Cameron told a nationally televised
audience, “five hundred new free schools. Every school an academy…and
yes—local authorities running schools a thing of the past.”
And just in case you're wondering if I'm using context to make Brown seem more radical than she actually is, here are more of her own words;
In a rational world, hosannas might greet a head of state who used his power to reduce inequality.
There are several astonishing ideas folded into that sentence, but the most astonishing is that a Head of State has the power to reduce inequality. But of course Cameron is not so much interested in reducing inequality as he is interested in reducing democratic control of vital public institutions.
But that, apparently, is what Brown loves about him. She dismissing his opponents (and the similar-sounding opponents of charters and choice in the US) by mocking their talk of privatization and anti-democratic reform.
[Addendum] I realized a bit after posting that some clarification is called for. British public schools both are and are not like US public schools. In their earliest form, they were not unlike the earliest version of US public schools-- local folks band together to set up a school for their kids. Somewhere in the middle of their growth, they came to resemble what we would call private schools, and then in more modern times have become more closely connected to each other and to the state-run school system. If you see US public schools as "government schools," created and operated by the state, then these will look like a different thing. But if like me you see US public schools as created and operated by locally chosen citizens, then British "public schools" look rather similar to the US public school. Either way, Cameron and Brown want to see it all replaced with a charter system.
Brown recognizes, sadly, that an American President doesn't have the power to simply erase democratic process with a wave of his hand (though she should have acknowledged the artful Duncan/Obama circumnavigation of the law with waivers), but she wants to at least get some red meat from the candidates.
Brown spends several paragraphs chicken littling education, throwing around fake statistics like three quarters of American students are unprepared for college in reading, math, and science (though she doesn't cite her source, I'm guessing it's the study that looked for students who scored high in all areas of the subject matter ACT, in which case her stat is twelve kinds of bogus). Seriously-- if three quarters of American students aren't capable of attending college, who are all those students on college campuses? She also throws in the old baloney that Back in the Golden Age, US students were absolutely awesome. That's simply not true. No matter how you slice it.
But she wants Presidential candidates to speak up, and to do it now:
Well, here’s a nudge: There is no need to wait to advocate until you are
elected. And no need to wait until someone asks you. Seriously.
Because she really wanted to ask them. She wanted more than a middling six GOP candidates and way more flat-out zero Dems to show up for her education beauty pageants. Though I'll give her credit- she does get one assessment of the situation on the money:
Every candidate has the stage; the Republicans have used it to fuss
unproductively over the Common Core. The Democrats have all but refused
to speak.
But mostly she wants somebody to step up and show the wisdom and fire and determination of David Cameron and call for an end to this democracy baloney. Our beloved leader (whoever that turns out to be) will decide where schools should be and who should run them, and our beloved leader will decide what students (particular the poor ones who can't just escape to private school) need and what they deserve and what they are going to get.
Give Brown credit-- what other reformsters hint at and dance around and court with dog whistles, Brown just goes ahead and calls for directly and clearly-- an end to public schools controlled locally by citizens elected by the taxpayers. Public schools must be shut down. Democratic local control must be ended. The government, run by a Beloved Leader, will decide all. This is a nice, clear reminder that the attempt to shut down public education goes hand in hand with an assault on democracy itself.
Showing posts with label choice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label choice. Show all posts
Saturday, October 17, 2015
Tuesday, October 13, 2015
Dancing Straw Men Reformster Video Festival
Now and then, amidst the noise and mess of the education debates, you will see a moment where people from several sides are able to find a means of engaging in dialogue based on nuanced looks into the issues and an honest attempt to understand the ideas and positions that motiva-- OH MY DEAR GOD IN HEAVEN!What the hell is that!!??
What the hell that is, is a new music video from Bob Bowden and his crew at Choice Media. It's called "We Don't Want School Choice," and it just totally skewers the living daylights out of a whole bunch of anti-choice positions that nobody on planet earth actually supports. But it has singing and dancing and a monster, so you know this is serious business. I'll embed this special slice of video hell further down the page so you can check my work, but I have watched so you don't have to, and really, that might be best.
It opens with a little text down in the lower left corner, just like a real video on MTV back in 1987. We pan through empty school halls and rooms while the mocking echos of the parent voices at which we're about to shake our satirical scepter. And then the beat kicks in and this jam is off and running.
Cut to five hip hoppy dancers busting moves in front of a plain white background, while the beat drops and the chorus of "We don't want school choice, no, we don't want school choice" pops in.
And now, cut to five pissed off parents. This is a well-selected group, with one Black mom, one Hispanic mom, one Ethnic dad, and a white mom and dad. And we will proceed to meet each of them pretending to present the arguments that the writers will pretend pro public education supporters present. Yes, it's all very meta and satirical.
Black mom is wearing a sweater in a well-appointed kitchen and says, "Though our public schools are losin' we still got no business choosin'" and Hispanic mom, on a comfy high-backed sofa says, "Scholarship to private school? Don't let me pick. I'm just a fool." So right off the bat, the writers will insult parents far more than any public school advocate ever did. Yes, yes-- they are saying that this is exactly what PSA's are saying to parents. But the first statement is a non-sequitor. Do the writers mean that parents should only have business choosin' if public schools are losin'? Because that would support my old point-- families don't want school choice nearly as much as they want a good school. And if a private school wants to give scholarships to families, aka find ways to pay that student's ride themselves instead of sucking public tax dollars out of public schools, I say "Hooray!"
And it just gets weirder.
Ethnic dad says, "Even if our kids got smarter, we don't want the choice of charter," and-- really? Charter schools are now promising to make kids smarter? That's pretty amazing. Those must be different charters from the ones that want to make kids more compliant and obedient, or the ones that want to just raise some test scores. But smartify them-- that would be something.
White mom is-- seriously? White mom is the cartoony one, sitting at a kitchen table with sad looking children, e-devices in hand, while white mom has her hair in curlers in a bandana, just one wardrobe choice short of looking like a Hee Haw sketch. But this is a fun device because the charter-boosting writers can insult parents all they want and just say, "Well, that's what PSA's say about you!" Anyway, white mom says "Public schools are all the same, but it's okay, my kids are lame," and I'm not even sure what the point is here. Public schools are different so we should have choice? Cool, non-lame kids don't want to go to public school? So, go to charter school-- it's what the cool kids are doing? That is some serious marketing mojo there.
And now, as angry parents bust a move, we introduce some new characters.
Did I say white mom was almost a cartoon? Well, meet Scary Schoolmarm-- high-necked blouse, jacket, hair severely pulled back, rising up from behind her wooden beaten-up desk to threaten us with a ruler. Because, I guess, every child should have the choice to not attend the same school that Archie Andrews attended in the fifties. She looks over her glasses at us. And because this character does not exist in real life anywhere on the planet, we appear to have hired an actor-model-dancer to play her, so that she looks vaguely like the too-strict teacher who's going to eventually let down her hair and turn out to be hot later in the video. I will look forward hopefully to that part.
Oh! Here comes the monster!! Descending a computer-inserted tunnel, it's the "Educational Options" monster. I wonder if he is going to eat the Scary Schoolmarm before she can turn hot? I assume he's supposed to represent what PSA's see in the "monster" of school choice, but he looks kind of fun and furry, like a steroid-addled Fraggle. Also, he's an inaccurate representation of the school choice monster; he should be knocking down public school kids and stealing their lunch (or art or phys ed) money.
But back to our points, such as they are. "Families with cash" can make all sorts of choices, "but we shouldn't choose, cause we're too poor" say white mom and dad, who are pretty much Hee Haw characters now (she smacks him in the head). This is a hilarious, nuanced look at the role of poverty in education, particularly appropriate in a video that looks as if it cost enough money to give many poor children scholarships to private schools. But I guess the parents don't want a good school for their child or for the rich folks to bear a fair share of the tax burden so that their local school can be wellfunded and fully supported. They aren't asking for a good school-- they just want to be able to have a choice.
Black mom says that since she's middle class, it's good that "smarter people protect us, so it's for our own good that they dis-respect us." The disrespect is illustrated by an as-yet-not-introduced character who knocks down charter schools, religious schools, other charter schools and chases children, with his bulldozer, into "one-size-fits-all" school. I am not sure who, exactly, is knocking down religious schools, unless it's maybe Mr. Constitution bringing up that damn no public tax dollars for religious institutions business again. This part is confusing because "smarter people than us will tell us what to do without actually involving us" sounds like a pretty common charter-choice policy model to me. I have to assume that black mom is not from, say, Newark or Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood.
Now, as the wacky chorus plays (is this song going to have a bridge soon?), we see an example of why choice is good-- a store's shelves lined with boxes of Burlap Flakes. Then the dancers hold up signs-- "Tell us what to do" (Oh-- here's the bridge). We will hammer this home, because if there's one thing about public schools run by elected school boards that operate under laws requiring transparency, it's that they are far more dictatorial than a charter school run by an unelected board that doesn't answer to anyone (except, sometimes, investors) and doesn't even meet people who attend the school.
And now we have five kids, also dancing.
Now meet Snotty Rich Lady (she is also Unnaturally Large Ears Lady, but I don't think that's part of the point). She says, "We rich should pick our schools, but the poor should clean our pools," and now I'm confused, because maybe she is Eva Moskowitz or a No Excuses school operator who thinks poor kids should be trained to be compliant. It's hard to tell, because this over-the-top cartoon person isn't a good representation of any human living on the planet. But the point is, again, I guess, to say that choice is a privilege that the privileged are trying to deny the poor, except for the privileged few who are responsible for running the charter schools that they would never send their own kids to because they don't care about having choice, they just want their kid in a good school, and you can see how the nuances of this cartoon video get kind of twisted up in the hammerhanded pointmaking.
But if you want to know who the video makers really hate, here comes the guy who was driving the bulldozer. Big, bearded, smoking a cigar, wearing a fancy suit, and talking with a gruff monster accent-- it's Teachers Union! He even has a "World's Okayest Boss" mug on his desk. He hates charters because they would cause a drop in dues. Rich lady throws in "And if their schools are failing, well, then tell them to go sailing," which I have to admit is a nice writing. But I am starting to wonder-- who exactly does Rich Lady represent? Where do we find this enclave of wealthy folks who are so carefully aligned against school choice? It sure as hell isn't me or the other folks who blog about the issue. We are not the ones who spent $12 or $4 million on a website, or whatever large pile of change was dropped on this video. I didn't see any filthy rich people starving themselves for Dyett High or walking out with students in Newark. Exactly who are these rich people bent on killing school choice? Where are the hedge fund managers announcing, "We could make a fast buck by getting into the charter school biz, but that would be wrong." Name some names!
Another example of no choice being bad-- Evil Union Guy opens a menu and sees only Stewed Liver. It's a cute move, but as with the shelves of Burlap Flakes, one has to ask-- how would this play if the choice was awesome? If the one choice on the shelves was "Golden Awesome Flakes" or the menu offering was "Best Meal Ever." Would we say, "Bring me more choices?" Where's the scene where a guy walks into his home, sees that he's only got one wife to choose from and makes a sad frowny face while the wacky chorus goes on? Do you want me to say it again? People don't want choices-- they want what they want. Choices are only appealing because they increase the odds that you'll be able to get what you want. But our focus is never on having choices-- it's on having the what we want. And if one choice is enough to get that, we're happy.
But I digress. Evil Union Guy knocks over a tripod holding a "Choice" sign, by far the least clever moment in the whole video. One of the dancers holds up a sign that says "Oh My God" and another holds up a sign that says "Tell my agent to get me a decent gig soon." Ha. Just kidding about the second sign.
The writers have been pretty canny in not trying to speak for children, but instead tell this little parable. Ed Choice Monster breaks onto the set and scares away all the grownups, and it walks away, head down, in the Charlie Brown Loser walk, but the children run up and give it hugs. Apparently they do not have the scene where the school choice monster pushes some of the kids away and says, "No, sorry. You can't be my friend." and when they cry and complain says, "Look. Choice means that I get to choose, not you." That would have been a fun scene to include.
One final shot-- everyone dances to the beat in a red wash of light (except Evil Union Guy who just stands there, arms folded, because evil) and then hits a pose on the last note.
So what do we have here. Well, on the one hand, this is well-produced. People with skills either donated valuable time or were well-paid to create this thing. Bob Bowden has a real background in television production and writing (on top of his engineering degrees from Purdue and Stanford), and while his qualifications in the education field may be, technically, non-existent, he's been playing at the charter-choice game for a while. So, like much of the charter movement, money is talking loudly here.
On the other hand, what it's saying is ridiculous. Not since the classic (and now unavailable) Cranky Idiot Grampa Complains About Common Core video have we seen such a ham-handed nuance-free straw man attack. Non-existent characters espousing non-existent arguments boil down to "The rich folks and teachers unions don't want you to have choice, so you should get it" and that just omits so many uncomforable facts and inconvenient truths that it hardly seems worth the bother (or the money they dumped on this). I would rather go back and watch the classic Petrilli and the Fordhams dance to their version of What Does the Fox Say, which at least had the home-made look of people enjoying themselves.
Also, Scary Schoolteacher never turned hot.
Here's the linkage. While I don't want to encourage them with actual views, you still might want to stop over and share your views about the video. The comments section is, so far, wide open.
What the hell that is, is a new music video from Bob Bowden and his crew at Choice Media. It's called "We Don't Want School Choice," and it just totally skewers the living daylights out of a whole bunch of anti-choice positions that nobody on planet earth actually supports. But it has singing and dancing and a monster, so you know this is serious business. I'll embed this special slice of video hell further down the page so you can check my work, but I have watched so you don't have to, and really, that might be best.
It opens with a little text down in the lower left corner, just like a real video on MTV back in 1987. We pan through empty school halls and rooms while the mocking echos of the parent voices at which we're about to shake our satirical scepter. And then the beat kicks in and this jam is off and running.
Cut to five hip hoppy dancers busting moves in front of a plain white background, while the beat drops and the chorus of "We don't want school choice, no, we don't want school choice" pops in.
And now, cut to five pissed off parents. This is a well-selected group, with one Black mom, one Hispanic mom, one Ethnic dad, and a white mom and dad. And we will proceed to meet each of them pretending to present the arguments that the writers will pretend pro public education supporters present. Yes, it's all very meta and satirical.
Black mom is wearing a sweater in a well-appointed kitchen and says, "Though our public schools are losin' we still got no business choosin'" and Hispanic mom, on a comfy high-backed sofa says, "Scholarship to private school? Don't let me pick. I'm just a fool." So right off the bat, the writers will insult parents far more than any public school advocate ever did. Yes, yes-- they are saying that this is exactly what PSA's are saying to parents. But the first statement is a non-sequitor. Do the writers mean that parents should only have business choosin' if public schools are losin'? Because that would support my old point-- families don't want school choice nearly as much as they want a good school. And if a private school wants to give scholarships to families, aka find ways to pay that student's ride themselves instead of sucking public tax dollars out of public schools, I say "Hooray!"
And it just gets weirder.
Ethnic dad says, "Even if our kids got smarter, we don't want the choice of charter," and-- really? Charter schools are now promising to make kids smarter? That's pretty amazing. Those must be different charters from the ones that want to make kids more compliant and obedient, or the ones that want to just raise some test scores. But smartify them-- that would be something.
White mom is-- seriously? White mom is the cartoony one, sitting at a kitchen table with sad looking children, e-devices in hand, while white mom has her hair in curlers in a bandana, just one wardrobe choice short of looking like a Hee Haw sketch. But this is a fun device because the charter-boosting writers can insult parents all they want and just say, "Well, that's what PSA's say about you!" Anyway, white mom says "Public schools are all the same, but it's okay, my kids are lame," and I'm not even sure what the point is here. Public schools are different so we should have choice? Cool, non-lame kids don't want to go to public school? So, go to charter school-- it's what the cool kids are doing? That is some serious marketing mojo there.
And now, as angry parents bust a move, we introduce some new characters.
Did I say white mom was almost a cartoon? Well, meet Scary Schoolmarm-- high-necked blouse, jacket, hair severely pulled back, rising up from behind her wooden beaten-up desk to threaten us with a ruler. Because, I guess, every child should have the choice to not attend the same school that Archie Andrews attended in the fifties. She looks over her glasses at us. And because this character does not exist in real life anywhere on the planet, we appear to have hired an actor-model-dancer to play her, so that she looks vaguely like the too-strict teacher who's going to eventually let down her hair and turn out to be hot later in the video. I will look forward hopefully to that part.
Oh! Here comes the monster!! Descending a computer-inserted tunnel, it's the "Educational Options" monster. I wonder if he is going to eat the Scary Schoolmarm before she can turn hot? I assume he's supposed to represent what PSA's see in the "monster" of school choice, but he looks kind of fun and furry, like a steroid-addled Fraggle. Also, he's an inaccurate representation of the school choice monster; he should be knocking down public school kids and stealing their lunch (or art or phys ed) money.
But back to our points, such as they are. "Families with cash" can make all sorts of choices, "but we shouldn't choose, cause we're too poor" say white mom and dad, who are pretty much Hee Haw characters now (she smacks him in the head). This is a hilarious, nuanced look at the role of poverty in education, particularly appropriate in a video that looks as if it cost enough money to give many poor children scholarships to private schools. But I guess the parents don't want a good school for their child or for the rich folks to bear a fair share of the tax burden so that their local school can be wellfunded and fully supported. They aren't asking for a good school-- they just want to be able to have a choice.
Black mom says that since she's middle class, it's good that "smarter people protect us, so it's for our own good that they dis-respect us." The disrespect is illustrated by an as-yet-not-introduced character who knocks down charter schools, religious schools, other charter schools and chases children, with his bulldozer, into "one-size-fits-all" school. I am not sure who, exactly, is knocking down religious schools, unless it's maybe Mr. Constitution bringing up that damn no public tax dollars for religious institutions business again. This part is confusing because "smarter people than us will tell us what to do without actually involving us" sounds like a pretty common charter-choice policy model to me. I have to assume that black mom is not from, say, Newark or Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood.
Now, as the wacky chorus plays (is this song going to have a bridge soon?), we see an example of why choice is good-- a store's shelves lined with boxes of Burlap Flakes. Then the dancers hold up signs-- "Tell us what to do" (Oh-- here's the bridge). We will hammer this home, because if there's one thing about public schools run by elected school boards that operate under laws requiring transparency, it's that they are far more dictatorial than a charter school run by an unelected board that doesn't answer to anyone (except, sometimes, investors) and doesn't even meet people who attend the school.
And now we have five kids, also dancing.
Now meet Snotty Rich Lady (she is also Unnaturally Large Ears Lady, but I don't think that's part of the point). She says, "We rich should pick our schools, but the poor should clean our pools," and now I'm confused, because maybe she is Eva Moskowitz or a No Excuses school operator who thinks poor kids should be trained to be compliant. It's hard to tell, because this over-the-top cartoon person isn't a good representation of any human living on the planet. But the point is, again, I guess, to say that choice is a privilege that the privileged are trying to deny the poor, except for the privileged few who are responsible for running the charter schools that they would never send their own kids to because they don't care about having choice, they just want their kid in a good school, and you can see how the nuances of this cartoon video get kind of twisted up in the hammerhanded pointmaking.
But if you want to know who the video makers really hate, here comes the guy who was driving the bulldozer. Big, bearded, smoking a cigar, wearing a fancy suit, and talking with a gruff monster accent-- it's Teachers Union! He even has a "World's Okayest Boss" mug on his desk. He hates charters because they would cause a drop in dues. Rich lady throws in "And if their schools are failing, well, then tell them to go sailing," which I have to admit is a nice writing. But I am starting to wonder-- who exactly does Rich Lady represent? Where do we find this enclave of wealthy folks who are so carefully aligned against school choice? It sure as hell isn't me or the other folks who blog about the issue. We are not the ones who spent $12 or $4 million on a website, or whatever large pile of change was dropped on this video. I didn't see any filthy rich people starving themselves for Dyett High or walking out with students in Newark. Exactly who are these rich people bent on killing school choice? Where are the hedge fund managers announcing, "We could make a fast buck by getting into the charter school biz, but that would be wrong." Name some names!
Another example of no choice being bad-- Evil Union Guy opens a menu and sees only Stewed Liver. It's a cute move, but as with the shelves of Burlap Flakes, one has to ask-- how would this play if the choice was awesome? If the one choice on the shelves was "Golden Awesome Flakes" or the menu offering was "Best Meal Ever." Would we say, "Bring me more choices?" Where's the scene where a guy walks into his home, sees that he's only got one wife to choose from and makes a sad frowny face while the wacky chorus goes on? Do you want me to say it again? People don't want choices-- they want what they want. Choices are only appealing because they increase the odds that you'll be able to get what you want. But our focus is never on having choices-- it's on having the what we want. And if one choice is enough to get that, we're happy.
But I digress. Evil Union Guy knocks over a tripod holding a "Choice" sign, by far the least clever moment in the whole video. One of the dancers holds up a sign that says "Oh My God" and another holds up a sign that says "Tell my agent to get me a decent gig soon." Ha. Just kidding about the second sign.
The writers have been pretty canny in not trying to speak for children, but instead tell this little parable. Ed Choice Monster breaks onto the set and scares away all the grownups, and it walks away, head down, in the Charlie Brown Loser walk, but the children run up and give it hugs. Apparently they do not have the scene where the school choice monster pushes some of the kids away and says, "No, sorry. You can't be my friend." and when they cry and complain says, "Look. Choice means that I get to choose, not you." That would have been a fun scene to include.
One final shot-- everyone dances to the beat in a red wash of light (except Evil Union Guy who just stands there, arms folded, because evil) and then hits a pose on the last note.
So what do we have here. Well, on the one hand, this is well-produced. People with skills either donated valuable time or were well-paid to create this thing. Bob Bowden has a real background in television production and writing (on top of his engineering degrees from Purdue and Stanford), and while his qualifications in the education field may be, technically, non-existent, he's been playing at the charter-choice game for a while. So, like much of the charter movement, money is talking loudly here.
On the other hand, what it's saying is ridiculous. Not since the classic (and now unavailable) Cranky Idiot Grampa Complains About Common Core video have we seen such a ham-handed nuance-free straw man attack. Non-existent characters espousing non-existent arguments boil down to "The rich folks and teachers unions don't want you to have choice, so you should get it" and that just omits so many uncomforable facts and inconvenient truths that it hardly seems worth the bother (or the money they dumped on this). I would rather go back and watch the classic Petrilli and the Fordhams dance to their version of What Does the Fox Say, which at least had the home-made look of people enjoying themselves.
Also, Scary Schoolteacher never turned hot.
Here's the linkage. While I don't want to encourage them with actual views, you still might want to stop over and share your views about the video. The comments section is, so far, wide open.
Sunday, September 6, 2015
Nobody Really Wants Choice
Families need a choice. Parents want a choice. Poor students deserve a choice. We hear the rhetoric over and over again, but I remain convinced that it's baloney.
People do not want choice.
When I sit down in a restaurant and order my favorite meal, the one I've been craving all day, I don't sit there eating it thinking, "Oh, if only there were more choices. If only, in addition to the meal I'm eating, there was a wider variety of other meals for me to not eat."
When I look across the room at my wife, as my heart fills up with love, I don't think, "If only there were an assortment of women that I could have married, but didn't. That would make my marriage way better."
If I'm watching a movie in a multiplex, my enjoyment is not enhanced by knowledge that there are many swell movies playing on the other screens that I am not watching.
And if my child is in a great school, I don't think, "Oh, if only there were other excellent schools that she wasn't attending."
Furthermore, the corporate guys who tout choice as a value don't believe it, either.
No business says, "It's really important that the consumers have a choice. Let's get one of our competitors into this neighborhood." Ronald McDonald does not give the Burger King a stack of money and say, "Hey, come open a store across the street from me so the consumers can have a choice." No group of suits sits in a boardroom and says, "Boy, if all the consumers became our customers, that would be awful because it would wipe out choice."
When corporate types extol choice, what they always mean is "We want more customers to choose us."
But nobody wants choice.
What do people actually want? They want to have what they want to have.
"I want more choices," never means, "I have chosen what I want, but I want to know that the options I didn't choose are all great."
"I want choice," really means "I do not like the available options. I want to be offered the option of having what I actually want." If my favorite restaurant has my favorite meal, I don't care if the entire rest of the menu is blank. But if I look at a menu and see nothing that interests me, I'd like more choice. Either way, at the end of the day, I am only going to eat one meal. What difference does it make if the meals that I don't eat are appealing or unappealing to me?
Do parents want school choice? I doubt it. Maybe there are some folks who want to know that while their child is in a great school, there are other schools she could be going to instead. But I'm doubtful.
Do parents want school choice? I doubt it. What parents want is for their child to be in a great school, and if their child is in a great school, they aren't going to care if that school is the only school or one school out of a thousand. Some are going to say that choice will drive excellence, but again-- what's the real goal? Would you really be unhappy if your child were in an outstanding school that didn't get that way through competition? I don't think so.
Why do lots of parents in poor, neglected school districts like the idea of choice? It's not because they love the idea of choices. It's because their local menu offers the prospect of a terrible meal. They want more choices because they are hoping that one of those choices, finally, will be an excellent education for their children.
Nobody really wants choice. What people want is to have what they want. What they want from education is for their children to be in good schools.
But focusing on choice instead of school quality leads to focusing on the wrong thing, sometimes to the detriment of the real goal. Providing choice on a thin budget makes excellence that much harder to achieve. And it completely blinds us to the reformy option that charter/choice fans never want to talk about:
What would happen if we took all the time and energy and money poured into pushing charter/choice and focused it on turning the local schools into schools of excellence.
Some reformsters are going to claim we tried that. I don't believe that's true, for a variety of reasons that would stretch this post from Too Long to Way Too Long.
Some folks have decided that our model for school reform should be like a guy who finds his car filled up with fast food wrappers and in need of new tires-- so instead of working on the car, he goes out and buys three new cars. It's a waste of resources-- and he can only drive one car, anyway. School choice and charter systems have turned out to be hella expensive, costing not only money but community ties and stability, and only rarely delivering excellence-- and that only for a small percentage of students.
People want excellence (or at least their idea of excellence). Some people push choice as a way to get there. But what if it isn't? What if there are better ways to get to excellence?
Look, we know why some people love the idea of choice-- because it is a great way for them to get their hands on bundles of that sweet sweet public tax money. But for people who have a sincere interest in school choice, my request is that they step back and ask themselves what their real goal is, and if it's having each child in the nation in an excellent school, let's talk about that. If you think that choice is a path to that goal, well, you and I have some serious disagreements ahead of us. But the discussion will be much more useful and productive if we focus on the real goal and not get distracted by mistaking means for an end.
People do not want choice.
When I sit down in a restaurant and order my favorite meal, the one I've been craving all day, I don't sit there eating it thinking, "Oh, if only there were more choices. If only, in addition to the meal I'm eating, there was a wider variety of other meals for me to not eat."
When I look across the room at my wife, as my heart fills up with love, I don't think, "If only there were an assortment of women that I could have married, but didn't. That would make my marriage way better."
If I'm watching a movie in a multiplex, my enjoyment is not enhanced by knowledge that there are many swell movies playing on the other screens that I am not watching.
And if my child is in a great school, I don't think, "Oh, if only there were other excellent schools that she wasn't attending."
Furthermore, the corporate guys who tout choice as a value don't believe it, either.
No business says, "It's really important that the consumers have a choice. Let's get one of our competitors into this neighborhood." Ronald McDonald does not give the Burger King a stack of money and say, "Hey, come open a store across the street from me so the consumers can have a choice." No group of suits sits in a boardroom and says, "Boy, if all the consumers became our customers, that would be awful because it would wipe out choice."
When corporate types extol choice, what they always mean is "We want more customers to choose us."
But nobody wants choice.
What do people actually want? They want to have what they want to have.
"I want more choices," never means, "I have chosen what I want, but I want to know that the options I didn't choose are all great."
"I want choice," really means "I do not like the available options. I want to be offered the option of having what I actually want." If my favorite restaurant has my favorite meal, I don't care if the entire rest of the menu is blank. But if I look at a menu and see nothing that interests me, I'd like more choice. Either way, at the end of the day, I am only going to eat one meal. What difference does it make if the meals that I don't eat are appealing or unappealing to me?
Do parents want school choice? I doubt it. Maybe there are some folks who want to know that while their child is in a great school, there are other schools she could be going to instead. But I'm doubtful.
Do parents want school choice? I doubt it. What parents want is for their child to be in a great school, and if their child is in a great school, they aren't going to care if that school is the only school or one school out of a thousand. Some are going to say that choice will drive excellence, but again-- what's the real goal? Would you really be unhappy if your child were in an outstanding school that didn't get that way through competition? I don't think so.
Why do lots of parents in poor, neglected school districts like the idea of choice? It's not because they love the idea of choices. It's because their local menu offers the prospect of a terrible meal. They want more choices because they are hoping that one of those choices, finally, will be an excellent education for their children.
Nobody really wants choice. What people want is to have what they want. What they want from education is for their children to be in good schools.
But focusing on choice instead of school quality leads to focusing on the wrong thing, sometimes to the detriment of the real goal. Providing choice on a thin budget makes excellence that much harder to achieve. And it completely blinds us to the reformy option that charter/choice fans never want to talk about:
What would happen if we took all the time and energy and money poured into pushing charter/choice and focused it on turning the local schools into schools of excellence.
Some reformsters are going to claim we tried that. I don't believe that's true, for a variety of reasons that would stretch this post from Too Long to Way Too Long.
Some folks have decided that our model for school reform should be like a guy who finds his car filled up with fast food wrappers and in need of new tires-- so instead of working on the car, he goes out and buys three new cars. It's a waste of resources-- and he can only drive one car, anyway. School choice and charter systems have turned out to be hella expensive, costing not only money but community ties and stability, and only rarely delivering excellence-- and that only for a small percentage of students.
People want excellence (or at least their idea of excellence). Some people push choice as a way to get there. But what if it isn't? What if there are better ways to get to excellence?
Look, we know why some people love the idea of choice-- because it is a great way for them to get their hands on bundles of that sweet sweet public tax money. But for people who have a sincere interest in school choice, my request is that they step back and ask themselves what their real goal is, and if it's having each child in the nation in an excellent school, let's talk about that. If you think that choice is a path to that goal, well, you and I have some serious disagreements ahead of us. But the discussion will be much more useful and productive if we focus on the real goal and not get distracted by mistaking means for an end.
Friday, June 19, 2015
CA: What Else Could We Do...?
I've just returned from a visit to my son and his fiance. They live in the Koreatown neighborhood of Los Angeles, and over the past few years, I've noted some desultory building activity in the lots across the street from their building. But this trip, work was in full bloom.
This is not a small piece of construction, sitting on a big chunk of neighborhood. "What the heck is that?" I asked. My future daughter-in-law told me that it's a charter school. How did she know? The pastor of the church across the street told her (and, apparently, that the church was working with the charter).
Wow.
I'm just looking at the construction, the huge amount of money that must be pouring into that site, and mostly I'm thinking, "What could a public school that is already in place, that already exists, that already has a lot and a building-- what could that school do with the money being poured into that charter construction?"
It's one thing to consider all this in theory, but to actually look at the pile of money that must be going into securing the lot, building the structure, adding the bells and whistles, while meanwhile back at my own school, there's basic maintenance on things like doors that won't be done this year because we're a little stretched on the budget.
What, I wonder, will not get done in a Koreatown school this year because a river of money has been diverted so that this shiny new building can go up.
You figure out opportunity costs by asking questions like, "If you had a couple million dollars to spend on your district, what are the first five things that would go on your list?" I can't imagine that there are leaders in any school district who would say, "Not spend any of it on facilities we already have, but build whole new facilities somewhere else." I mean, look at that pile of bricks. What could we build with that many bricks at a school that already exists? What could we have done with our broken-down walls if we had the money that went into that pretty orange facing?
The school may be shiny and swell. The people behind it may be bighearted and well-intentioned. But that none of that changes the fact that in order to spend the money to create a new charter school, that money had to be taken away from public schools. It seems wasteful and inefficient and just foolish.
Wow.
I'm just looking at the construction, the huge amount of money that must be pouring into that site, and mostly I'm thinking, "What could a public school that is already in place, that already exists, that already has a lot and a building-- what could that school do with the money being poured into that charter construction?"
It's one thing to consider all this in theory, but to actually look at the pile of money that must be going into securing the lot, building the structure, adding the bells and whistles, while meanwhile back at my own school, there's basic maintenance on things like doors that won't be done this year because we're a little stretched on the budget.
What, I wonder, will not get done in a Koreatown school this year because a river of money has been diverted so that this shiny new building can go up.
You figure out opportunity costs by asking questions like, "If you had a couple million dollars to spend on your district, what are the first five things that would go on your list?" I can't imagine that there are leaders in any school district who would say, "Not spend any of it on facilities we already have, but build whole new facilities somewhere else." I mean, look at that pile of bricks. What could we build with that many bricks at a school that already exists? What could we have done with our broken-down walls if we had the money that went into that pretty orange facing?
The school may be shiny and swell. The people behind it may be bighearted and well-intentioned. But that none of that changes the fact that in order to spend the money to create a new charter school, that money had to be taken away from public schools. It seems wasteful and inefficient and just foolish.
Opting Options
.@rweingarten Including the right to opt their kids out of public schools (and take the public dollars with them)?
— Michael Petrilli (@MichaelPetrilli) June 18, 2015
Language is funny-- it sometimes creates the illusion of parallels and conections when none, in fact, exist. I could say, for instance, that the fact that you order Chicken McNuggets is proof that you are lacking in bravery, that you are too chicken to stand up for what you believe in, or maybe that you are showing that you are rushing towards consequences, since you are paying for the chance to have the chickens come home to roost.
More than a few folks have observed that opting children out of the Big Standardized Test and opting children out of public school are two things that can be described by using the phrase"opting out." But there are some fairly important differences between the two options for opting.
First, the BS Test and public school are not equivalent. Public education, provided by and paid for by the community, is one of the greater goods upon which this country is built. The door swings both ways. In order for our democracy to function, our citizens have to possess some level of education. Also, as a democracy, we recognize every citizen's right to a full education-- we do not operate on the assumption that some people deserve a good education and other lesser people do not.
A BS Test, on the other hand, is not one of the greater goods at the foundation of this country. There is not even evidence that it is a lesser good, or even a fair-to-middlin' good. There's no indication that it is good at all. Certainly there is no argument to be made that, in order to participate in democracy, every citizen ought to take a standardized test. Nor is there no case to be made that every citizen needs to be tested in order to receive all their rights. "I could have really gone somewhere in life, if only I'd had the chance to take the PARCC," said nobody ever.
Public education is provided for the benefit of the individuals being educated, and it is provided for the benefit of society as a whole. BS Testing benefits test manufacturers.
Furthermore, opting out of the BS Test does not take anything away from anyone else. As currently structured, choice systems always strip resources from the public school for every student who "opts out." The loss to the public school is always in excess of the actual reduction in the public school's costs; ten students fewer does not equate fewer building expenses, fewer teachers, or less heat and light in the building.
I can actually imagine a system with multiple schools to choose from-- but that system only works if every school is fully funded. As long as we insist that we can fund one public school and three charters for the same total cost as one public school, choice will be a zero sum game, and public schools will be the losers. This means that every child who opts out of public school leaves the students in the public school with fewer resources. If Chris opts out, Pat is left in a worsening public school situation-- and Pat has no say in the matter.
Opting out of the BS Tests, however, affects nobody except the opt-outer. The testing experience of the students who are left behind is not affected. If Chris opts out, it doesn't change Pat's testing adventure in the slightest.
Finally, Petrilli is correct in saying that those are public dollars-- and a choice-charter system denies the public any say in how those dollars are spent. Granted, the democracy of elected school boards is sometimes problematic, and as with all political situations, some voices have to work extra hard to be heard. But that is still better than a choice-charter system where decisions are made by folks who don't answer to anybody.
So, no-- these opt outs are not the same.
Thursday, June 11, 2015
Can't we do better than access?
Here's a piece of rhetoric that charter-choice advocates love to use:
"...to empower school districts to ensure that all kids have access to high-performing schools."
-- PennCAN
"All options need to be on the table to improve schools so every child has access to the best teachers and every family has access to great school choices."
-- Jenny Sedlis, Executive Director of StudentsFirstNY
"Having access to great school facilities will help these young people reach their full potential."
-- Bobby Turner, CEO, Canyon Capital Realty Advisers (praising Rocketship)
"...low-income urban areas facing myriad challenges and whose families don’t have adequate access to great schools."
-- Andy Smarick
The Challenge of Promoting Equal Access to Quality Teachers
-- Headline of article by Mark Dynarski on Brookings website
"...equal access to great teachers is every child’s constitutional right..."
-- TNTP on Vergara verdict
"His vision... includes expanding access to great schools"
-- DFER, just about every time they go to bat for a candidate
I could do this all day, but you get the idea. A recurring theme among charter promoters and choice advocates is to argue for every child to have access to a great school.
So let me ask you a question. You've worked really hard at your job, and you have bills to pay. Would you rather have access to some money, or would you like to have the money. Would you like to work at a place where everybody has access to a nice paycheck, or would you like to have a nice paycheck? When you are hungry, do you want access to food, or do you want food?
In the charter context, "access" is a great little weasel word-- limiting, but not as obvious as "chance."
After all, if I said everybody at my company would have the chance to earn a good paycheck, would you guess what I was up to pretty quickly?
Maybe some charter-choice boosters just aren't choosing their words carefully enough. They need to step up their game.
Because I don't think giving every child "access" to a great school is much of a goal. I can meet that goal by saying, "Hey, I built a great school that can only hold twelve students, but all 2,000 students in the area had access to it." It smacks of exactly the sort of cherry-picking and sorting that charter fans (except Mike Petrilli) don't have the nerve to fess up to. "Access" says "Yes, we gave every kid the chance to prove they deserved to go to Awesome Charter High, but not all were found worthy." "Access" is a word or built-in excuses-- we gave Chris access to a better school, but Chris didn't have what it takes to make use of it. Left some childs behind? Oh well. At least we gave them access.
"Access" is also a word of transport. It implies that every child, to get to a great school, will have to go somewhere else. It says that we can't do anything about the student's present school except provide the means of escape, an open door to Somewhere Else (that she may or may not have the stuff to pass through).
With that one word, charter-choice boosters write off public schools and most of the students in them.
If you still can't see it, just think about how the picture changes if we change the rhetoric to saying, "Our goal is for every single student in the US to be in a great school."
Well, look at that. Suddenly, the option of trying to fix the schools that children are already in-- that option is back on the table. Nor can we make excuses about how a student had "access" to a great school, but just couldn't walk through that door. Maybe we still want to commit to charters and choice (or not), but we have to make an equal-or-greater commitment to bringing existing public schools up to greatness as well.
We don't need to give children access to great schools. We need to give them-- all of them-- great schools.
"...to empower school districts to ensure that all kids have access to high-performing schools."
-- PennCAN
"All options need to be on the table to improve schools so every child has access to the best teachers and every family has access to great school choices."
-- Jenny Sedlis, Executive Director of StudentsFirstNY
"Having access to great school facilities will help these young people reach their full potential."
-- Bobby Turner, CEO, Canyon Capital Realty Advisers (praising Rocketship)
"...low-income urban areas facing myriad challenges and whose families don’t have adequate access to great schools."
-- Andy Smarick
The Challenge of Promoting Equal Access to Quality Teachers
-- Headline of article by Mark Dynarski on Brookings website
"...equal access to great teachers is every child’s constitutional right..."
-- TNTP on Vergara verdict
"His vision... includes expanding access to great schools"
-- DFER, just about every time they go to bat for a candidate
I could do this all day, but you get the idea. A recurring theme among charter promoters and choice advocates is to argue for every child to have access to a great school.
So let me ask you a question. You've worked really hard at your job, and you have bills to pay. Would you rather have access to some money, or would you like to have the money. Would you like to work at a place where everybody has access to a nice paycheck, or would you like to have a nice paycheck? When you are hungry, do you want access to food, or do you want food?
In the charter context, "access" is a great little weasel word-- limiting, but not as obvious as "chance."
After all, if I said everybody at my company would have the chance to earn a good paycheck, would you guess what I was up to pretty quickly?
Maybe some charter-choice boosters just aren't choosing their words carefully enough. They need to step up their game.
Because I don't think giving every child "access" to a great school is much of a goal. I can meet that goal by saying, "Hey, I built a great school that can only hold twelve students, but all 2,000 students in the area had access to it." It smacks of exactly the sort of cherry-picking and sorting that charter fans (except Mike Petrilli) don't have the nerve to fess up to. "Access" says "Yes, we gave every kid the chance to prove they deserved to go to Awesome Charter High, but not all were found worthy." "Access" is a word or built-in excuses-- we gave Chris access to a better school, but Chris didn't have what it takes to make use of it. Left some childs behind? Oh well. At least we gave them access.
"Access" is also a word of transport. It implies that every child, to get to a great school, will have to go somewhere else. It says that we can't do anything about the student's present school except provide the means of escape, an open door to Somewhere Else (that she may or may not have the stuff to pass through).
With that one word, charter-choice boosters write off public schools and most of the students in them.
If you still can't see it, just think about how the picture changes if we change the rhetoric to saying, "Our goal is for every single student in the US to be in a great school."
Well, look at that. Suddenly, the option of trying to fix the schools that children are already in-- that option is back on the table. Nor can we make excuses about how a student had "access" to a great school, but just couldn't walk through that door. Maybe we still want to commit to charters and choice (or not), but we have to make an equal-or-greater commitment to bringing existing public schools up to greatness as well.
We don't need to give children access to great schools. We need to give them-- all of them-- great schools.
empower
school districts to ensure that all kids have access to a
high-performing school! - See more at:
http://penncan.org/research/real-accountability-real-results#sthash.5cJo5cJU.dpufool! - See more at:
http://penncan.org/research/real-accountability-real-results#sthash.5cJo5cJU.dpuf
empower
school districts to ensure that all kids have access to a
high-performing school! - See more at:
http://penncan.org/research/real-accountability-real-results#sthash.5cJo5cJU.dpuf
Which Choosey Choosers Choose the Choices?
I respect reform advocate Andy Smarick for his willingness to consider some of the problems that come with the reformster movement in education. Yes, he steadfastly advocates for choice and charters, and yes, I think he's wrong about many things. But he wrote a long series of posts about the inherent tension between conservative values and conservative support for reformy stuff (here's my response to one of them), and he was a practitioner of respectful and reasonable dialogue before reformsters decided that it would be a good PR move.
So I was all eyes when Smarick connected with Edushyster for an interview. It's right here, and you should read it.
Democracy vs. School Choice
Smarick and 'Shyster (which sounds like an excellent vaudeville act) get directly to one of the great tensions in the choice movement-- the tension between democracy and choice.
The reformster theory is that school choice ought to be democracy on steroids, a free market where every customer gets a direct vote on What School Looks Like and any entrepreneur can enter that race.
In practice, that seems to be very much what does not happen. Every place that people have been given the chance to "vote with their feet," they have lost all other voice in the process. (Not to mention that when a city moves to a "vote with their feet system," non-parent taxpayers end up with no vote at all-- not feet, not ballots, not anything.) This is not playing well. As Edushyster puts it
In recent elections, voters in both Chicago and Philadelphia basically shouted that they want more say over their schools. Is it just me, or does it seem like if you give voters a vote over whether they want an actual vote vs. the vote with their feet kind of vote, they always seem to vote for the *vote vote*?
Edushyster also throws in Camden and Newark as examples of how choice has led to disempowered and denocracy-free cities. And Smarick... agrees.
I totally agree with you. State takeovers of urban districts are sometimes necessary but they absolutely have to be temporary. It has to be a way to decentralize power to give parents more choices. It can’t be something that exists in perpetuity because then what you get are disempowered communities that are even more disempowered. And that’s no way to have these cities thrive in the way we want them to.
Edushyster bores in (well, not really "bores." Edushyster is the smartest, sharpest Manic Pixie Dream Girl of the edublogger world and I'm pretty sure she could get the toughest interview subject to just give her his car). If choice is so great, why don't citizens get to choose their choices? Why don't the citizens and families get to decide what choices they get to choose from? And again... Smarick agrees.
You’re right. I think this is a failure that I and lots of other people who have done this work are guilty of. We’ve had this urgency about changing things and have done too little to go into these places and have long conversations about, say, what does a new school board look like?
The School Governance Question
In the interview, Smarick raises an issue that I've watched him wrestle with a few times, and his wrestling has led me to do some mulling of my own-- how do you manage governance of a schoo;l system?
The school board model has the virtue of being good old direct democracy. But I suspect that it has upper and lower limits. When we get to the huge urban systems, is a board member who is representing a million voters any more responsive to the customers than a guy who's unelected CEO of a unaccountable charter corporation? On the other end of the scale, we have my small district where, in an not-unusual state of affairs, we have three people running for five empty seats this fall. If you imagine that's not going to end well for us, all I can say is that your imagination is on the mark. And all of that is before we get to the issue of a highly technical and complex operation being run by a bunch of elected amateurs. Sadly, that is still better than having a school system run by unelected amateurs, but it's still not optimal.
We just assumed that democratic control meant that a city had a single school board and that that school board owns all public schools in the district, makes decisions about all of the contracts, makes decisions about all of the principals, makes decisions about where kids go to school based on these residential zones. That is one form of democratic control. What I’m saying is that we could have a different set of rules that govern these boards so that you don’t give one board all of that authority. I don’t think you can have the kind of elected school board we’ve had for 100 years and simultaneously have community and parental empowerment.
It's an interesting idea, but almost impossible to conceive of working combined with a non-geographical school system.
Why the free market is always going to break Andy Smarick's heart
If there's one thing I've learned in my years of reading about school reform, it's that free market fans have some romantic and idealistic notions about the free market. In fact, it may be that what defines the different camps of the edu-debates is what part of the picture we are idealistic about (and therefor prone to overlook the problems of).
Smarick doesn't care for the way that Choice Systems seems to descend into Not Much Actual Choice Systems:
...if it’s wrong for the government to tell you where you have to go to school based on where you live, it’s no better if you have a system of choice—and I’m using air quotes here—but there are in fact no choices because all of the schools look the same. Choice is only choice if there are options.
But in a free market, this sort of leveling effect is an absolutely predictable outcome. When your edupreneur and his hedge fund backers set up a charter school, they are not saying, "What quirky specialized school can we create in order to insure a broad range of choices in the total system?" The total system and its range of choices is not their problem. Their problem is drawing in enough customers to make the enterprise worth their wild. And so they, like most of the other edupreneurs in the market, will chase the larger, more financially sustainable, section of the market.
The clearest parallel is the cable tv system. We were going to have thousands of channels, a broad and awesome world of choice. Bravo, Art & Entertainment, Music Television, the History Channel, the Learning Channel, two comedy channels-- we were going to have amazing choices and slowly but surely, as they chased the better parts of the market, they all deserted their original mission and became fun-house mirror versions of each other.
The free market does not love variety. Occasionally an outlier will strike it rich-- and what happens next? Everyone else rushes to imitate.
Smarick is also not a fan of unending government interference with the education market, but this, too, is inevitable. And not (just) because government has trouble keeping its grubby hands off anything.
When you let free market forces loose near society's most vulnerable citizens, bad things inevitably happen. The free market needs the freedom to experiment, but nobody is very enthusiastic about using school children as guinea pigs (and besides, some choice players have not played very nicely) and so there will be calls for government oversight. Plus, because in so many states it was the charter fans who brought the government into the game in order to get political access to the market-- well, you know that once government gets out in the game, it's nearly impossible to get it out. PLUS! When free markets mature, the power players inevitably "team up" with government to make sure the system favors them and not any new interlopers (see examples from Standard Oil to Microsoft).
Short answer-- no free market school system is ever going to be left alone to blossom and bloom on its own.
One last great moment from the interview
Edushyster: This feels to me to be a major contradiction at the heart of the Smarick vision. That on the one hand, parents are going to be empowered to choose their own choices, but on the other hand, all of the choices will be part of an accountability system that rewards a single definition of success. Am I wrong?
Smarick: That’s where you and I will probably agree and I disagree with a lot of reform folks. I think that we have systems that focus on a narrow set of metrics, inevitably we get schools that respond just to those metrics.
So I was all eyes when Smarick connected with Edushyster for an interview. It's right here, and you should read it.
Democracy vs. School Choice
Smarick and 'Shyster (which sounds like an excellent vaudeville act) get directly to one of the great tensions in the choice movement-- the tension between democracy and choice.
The reformster theory is that school choice ought to be democracy on steroids, a free market where every customer gets a direct vote on What School Looks Like and any entrepreneur can enter that race.
In practice, that seems to be very much what does not happen. Every place that people have been given the chance to "vote with their feet," they have lost all other voice in the process. (Not to mention that when a city moves to a "vote with their feet system," non-parent taxpayers end up with no vote at all-- not feet, not ballots, not anything.) This is not playing well. As Edushyster puts it
In recent elections, voters in both Chicago and Philadelphia basically shouted that they want more say over their schools. Is it just me, or does it seem like if you give voters a vote over whether they want an actual vote vs. the vote with their feet kind of vote, they always seem to vote for the *vote vote*?
Edushyster also throws in Camden and Newark as examples of how choice has led to disempowered and denocracy-free cities. And Smarick... agrees.
I totally agree with you. State takeovers of urban districts are sometimes necessary but they absolutely have to be temporary. It has to be a way to decentralize power to give parents more choices. It can’t be something that exists in perpetuity because then what you get are disempowered communities that are even more disempowered. And that’s no way to have these cities thrive in the way we want them to.
Edushyster bores in (well, not really "bores." Edushyster is the smartest, sharpest Manic Pixie Dream Girl of the edublogger world and I'm pretty sure she could get the toughest interview subject to just give her his car). If choice is so great, why don't citizens get to choose their choices? Why don't the citizens and families get to decide what choices they get to choose from? And again... Smarick agrees.
You’re right. I think this is a failure that I and lots of other people who have done this work are guilty of. We’ve had this urgency about changing things and have done too little to go into these places and have long conversations about, say, what does a new school board look like?
The School Governance Question
In the interview, Smarick raises an issue that I've watched him wrestle with a few times, and his wrestling has led me to do some mulling of my own-- how do you manage governance of a schoo;l system?
The school board model has the virtue of being good old direct democracy. But I suspect that it has upper and lower limits. When we get to the huge urban systems, is a board member who is representing a million voters any more responsive to the customers than a guy who's unelected CEO of a unaccountable charter corporation? On the other end of the scale, we have my small district where, in an not-unusual state of affairs, we have three people running for five empty seats this fall. If you imagine that's not going to end well for us, all I can say is that your imagination is on the mark. And all of that is before we get to the issue of a highly technical and complex operation being run by a bunch of elected amateurs. Sadly, that is still better than having a school system run by unelected amateurs, but it's still not optimal.
We just assumed that democratic control meant that a city had a single school board and that that school board owns all public schools in the district, makes decisions about all of the contracts, makes decisions about all of the principals, makes decisions about where kids go to school based on these residential zones. That is one form of democratic control. What I’m saying is that we could have a different set of rules that govern these boards so that you don’t give one board all of that authority. I don’t think you can have the kind of elected school board we’ve had for 100 years and simultaneously have community and parental empowerment.
It's an interesting idea, but almost impossible to conceive of working combined with a non-geographical school system.
Why the free market is always going to break Andy Smarick's heart
If there's one thing I've learned in my years of reading about school reform, it's that free market fans have some romantic and idealistic notions about the free market. In fact, it may be that what defines the different camps of the edu-debates is what part of the picture we are idealistic about (and therefor prone to overlook the problems of).
Smarick doesn't care for the way that Choice Systems seems to descend into Not Much Actual Choice Systems:
...if it’s wrong for the government to tell you where you have to go to school based on where you live, it’s no better if you have a system of choice—and I’m using air quotes here—but there are in fact no choices because all of the schools look the same. Choice is only choice if there are options.
But in a free market, this sort of leveling effect is an absolutely predictable outcome. When your edupreneur and his hedge fund backers set up a charter school, they are not saying, "What quirky specialized school can we create in order to insure a broad range of choices in the total system?" The total system and its range of choices is not their problem. Their problem is drawing in enough customers to make the enterprise worth their wild. And so they, like most of the other edupreneurs in the market, will chase the larger, more financially sustainable, section of the market.
The clearest parallel is the cable tv system. We were going to have thousands of channels, a broad and awesome world of choice. Bravo, Art & Entertainment, Music Television, the History Channel, the Learning Channel, two comedy channels-- we were going to have amazing choices and slowly but surely, as they chased the better parts of the market, they all deserted their original mission and became fun-house mirror versions of each other.
The free market does not love variety. Occasionally an outlier will strike it rich-- and what happens next? Everyone else rushes to imitate.
Smarick is also not a fan of unending government interference with the education market, but this, too, is inevitable. And not (just) because government has trouble keeping its grubby hands off anything.
When you let free market forces loose near society's most vulnerable citizens, bad things inevitably happen. The free market needs the freedom to experiment, but nobody is very enthusiastic about using school children as guinea pigs (and besides, some choice players have not played very nicely) and so there will be calls for government oversight. Plus, because in so many states it was the charter fans who brought the government into the game in order to get political access to the market-- well, you know that once government gets out in the game, it's nearly impossible to get it out. PLUS! When free markets mature, the power players inevitably "team up" with government to make sure the system favors them and not any new interlopers (see examples from Standard Oil to Microsoft).
Short answer-- no free market school system is ever going to be left alone to blossom and bloom on its own.
One last great moment from the interview
Edushyster: This feels to me to be a major contradiction at the heart of the Smarick vision. That on the one hand, parents are going to be empowered to choose their own choices, but on the other hand, all of the choices will be part of an accountability system that rewards a single definition of success. Am I wrong?
Smarick: That’s where you and I will probably agree and I disagree with a lot of reform folks. I think that we have systems that focus on a narrow set of metrics, inevitably we get schools that respond just to those metrics.
Saturday, May 2, 2015
Hidden Costs of Choice
I'm going to set aside my several issues with a charter school system (say, the pitting of student educational interests against the charter operator's business interests) and pretend that I have other beefs with charters so I can focus on just one concern-- the extra costs of a charter-choice system.
If you run a restaurant, offering a buffet can be tricky and costly. You have to be prepared to offer a full range of dishes, so that your Beloved Diner can have a full choice-- even though your beloved diner will leave some of those choices unused. Either you will have to absorb the cost of the extra food, or you will have to offer a buffet that doesn't really offer many choices.
A charter must have extra capacity built in. If I'm going to offer Chris a choice of three schools, each one of those schools must have a seat available for Chris-- and Chris will only occupy one of them. But every empty seat represents a cost to the system.
The plan will be that Happychoice Academy can offer fewer seats than would be needed to accommodate every single student who could conceivably choose to attend. Instead of three schools preparing three seats each for Chris, Pat and Taylor, each school will prepare just one seat and hope that Chris, Pat and Taylor distribute themselves evenly between the schools.
But that ideal is unlikely to happen, so charter-choice schools have to manage their excess capacity, which means taking control of how many of which students come to fill those seats. The only way to guarantee a full open free-choice system would be to have multiple schools which all have the capacity to handle all the students-- and that amount of excess capacity would be hugely expensive. The only way such a system can hope to be remotely economically viable is for choice to actually be limited. So, choice controlled by the schools.
Even if the schools become good at predicting the amount of capacity they need, or they use very tight controls, the no-backfill rule creates more unused capacity which creates more excess cost. Success Academies, the extreme example, jettison more than half of their students between 3rd and 8th grade which means either A) they plan to wash out that many students or B) somebody has to pay the overhead costs of all those empty seats. That sloughing off of students also means that somebody somewhere has to maintain the capacity that allows them to absorb the students who return from Happychoice Academy.
Of course, the part of the system that is obligated to maintain much of this excess capacity is the traditional public system, which must take every student that shows up at its doors.
Bottom line-- if we treat a charter-and-public school combo system as one school system, we arrive at one of two options.
A) A system that, for each 1,000 students, must maintain and finance a total 1,400 (ish-- I'm just spitballing here) seats. That is economic wastage of huge proportions.
B) A system that, for each 1,000 students, maintains say, 1,200 seats, with the full 1,000 in public school and the charter-choice capacity all tightly controlled and not really very choicey at all.
This is one of the mysteries of the conservative support of charter-choice systems for me-- the wastage is huge. A charter-choice-public hybrid system is like trying to operate four homes for the same amount of money you spent on having just one. It's wasteful and excessively costly, requiring you to pay for all sorts of capacity that you don't need. There's a reason that school districts strapped for cash are not saying, "Hey, let's save money by opening three more schools in the district."
If you run a restaurant, offering a buffet can be tricky and costly. You have to be prepared to offer a full range of dishes, so that your Beloved Diner can have a full choice-- even though your beloved diner will leave some of those choices unused. Either you will have to absorb the cost of the extra food, or you will have to offer a buffet that doesn't really offer many choices.
A charter must have extra capacity built in. If I'm going to offer Chris a choice of three schools, each one of those schools must have a seat available for Chris-- and Chris will only occupy one of them. But every empty seat represents a cost to the system.
The plan will be that Happychoice Academy can offer fewer seats than would be needed to accommodate every single student who could conceivably choose to attend. Instead of three schools preparing three seats each for Chris, Pat and Taylor, each school will prepare just one seat and hope that Chris, Pat and Taylor distribute themselves evenly between the schools.
But that ideal is unlikely to happen, so charter-choice schools have to manage their excess capacity, which means taking control of how many of which students come to fill those seats. The only way to guarantee a full open free-choice system would be to have multiple schools which all have the capacity to handle all the students-- and that amount of excess capacity would be hugely expensive. The only way such a system can hope to be remotely economically viable is for choice to actually be limited. So, choice controlled by the schools.
Even if the schools become good at predicting the amount of capacity they need, or they use very tight controls, the no-backfill rule creates more unused capacity which creates more excess cost. Success Academies, the extreme example, jettison more than half of their students between 3rd and 8th grade which means either A) they plan to wash out that many students or B) somebody has to pay the overhead costs of all those empty seats. That sloughing off of students also means that somebody somewhere has to maintain the capacity that allows them to absorb the students who return from Happychoice Academy.
Of course, the part of the system that is obligated to maintain much of this excess capacity is the traditional public system, which must take every student that shows up at its doors.
Bottom line-- if we treat a charter-and-public school combo system as one school system, we arrive at one of two options.
A) A system that, for each 1,000 students, must maintain and finance a total 1,400 (ish-- I'm just spitballing here) seats. That is economic wastage of huge proportions.
B) A system that, for each 1,000 students, maintains say, 1,200 seats, with the full 1,000 in public school and the charter-choice capacity all tightly controlled and not really very choicey at all.
This is one of the mysteries of the conservative support of charter-choice systems for me-- the wastage is huge. A charter-choice-public hybrid system is like trying to operate four homes for the same amount of money you spent on having just one. It's wasteful and excessively costly, requiring you to pay for all sorts of capacity that you don't need. There's a reason that school districts strapped for cash are not saying, "Hey, let's save money by opening three more schools in the district."
Friday, May 1, 2015
Choice: Real Problems, Fake Answers
By following link to link, I ended up at this piece by Derrell Bradford, executive director of NYCAN and experienced in the reform game (if not the school biz), part of the 50CAN network of choice-pushing charter fans. But his essay "I am your black friend who grew up in Sandtown-Winchester" is as raw and powerful an argument as I've ever heard from the Friends of Choice. And it crystallizes once again where the big, fat hole in the choice argument lies.
Bradford, it turns out, grew up in the same area as Freddie Gray. It was an earlier time, but it was still ugly. Bradford's personal story, which has fueled his reformster career, is the story of escaping that neighborhood.
I never thought things were rough in my neighborhood when I was a kid. I thought they just “were.” But the older I got the more my life became a focused square of activity because of those rough streets. School, sports, home at night, dinner, then the blue chair in my grandma’s Baker Street living room where I fought to stay awake and master the quadratic formula. In retrospect, a lifetime of dinner conversations and events make the haze of memories crystal clear. My grandma talked about redlining, a lot. My friend Stuart, a big redhead black kid a few years older than me that lived on Calhoun Street, was shot and killed. Grandma got mugged while walking home from church one morning. I'd been beat up and had my bike taken from me. All the streets around us-- Stricker, Presstman, Gilmore, Gold-- loomed with their own sort of eerie malevolence. In a city of neighborhoods, mine was exactly one square block.
Say what you like about Bradford-- the man can write.
He creates a compelling pictures-- as compelling as any of the many word pictures being crafted in the face of the Baltimore riots-- of a school and neighborhood that is a toxic, terrible trap for the young men and women who live there.
His point is simple. He escaped. He wants others to be able to do the same. And this is where I lose the thread of his argument.
Bradford had the fortune to land at a tony top-notch prep school. The kind of school that gets way more in money and resources than the school to which zip code would have consigned him. That's what got him out of the old neighborhood.
This is what I don't get about reformsters like Bradford. Why are they not saying, "We demand a school for our neighborhood that is every bit as good as that big, shiny prep school."
The problem of underfunded, under-supported, under-resourced schools is real. The choice solution is not real at all. It proposes to rescue some students and make things worse for the rest. It proposes to further cripple the neighborhood school that should be an anchor of the community (look at a twenty-year study of social capital and education done in Baltimore).
You find a group of children trapped on a sinking ship, so you rescue some by tearing boards out of the hull of the sinking ship to reinforce your lifeboat. And then you leave most of the children on the now-sinking-more-rapidly ship.
You find a group of children starving in a home, so you take some of them with you to feed, but on your way out you take all the pots and pans so you can cook for the kids you're taking, leaving the remaining children to starve even faster.
I absolutely get the dire nature of the problem that Bradford and others are describing. But please tell me how school choice helps? It rips resources away from the already-struggling school, making it that much harder to "fix" it. It "rescues" only a small percentage of the students.
Why why why WHY is this a better solution than moving heaven and earth to get that "failing" school the resources it needs? Why is it a better solution to move a handful of students to a bright, shiny school instead of doing everything in your power to turn the community school into a bright, shiny school for every student and family in the community? If you know how to create a magically awesome alternative to the failing public school, why can't the awesome alternative model be applied directly to the public school itself.
Don't tell me the bullshit about how money doesn't matter. Bradford has made the argument that failing public schools spend too much money on bells and whistles, but until you show me a highly respected private school that markets itself by saying, "We promise to spend next to nothing on your kid," or "Never mind the full voucher. Just send us the student with $500 and that's all we need to educate her," I'm not buying the money-doesn't-matter argument. And truly, neither is anybody else. Nobody believes that. Nobody.
This is what I have always found baffling about voucher proponents. It's not that I don't believe in the problems they cite. It's that their solutions strike me just like somebody who says, "I've had a terrible cold lately, so I'm going to jab myself in the gut with a steak knife and soak my head in kerosene." The voucher solution is non-sequitor, a solution that seems to hold no reasonable promise of help (and at this late date, no empirical or anecdotal support, either).
So I'm saying to Derrell Bradford-- I find your writing moving, your story moving, your picture of the problem compelling (and I am not using my trademark irony here-- I mean it). But I can not for the life of me see how school choice brings us the slightest step closer to a solution, nor in all the reading about choice that I've ever done, have I seen a clear and sensible explanation of how this non-solution solution can hope to solve a thing. I'm still listening.
Bradford, it turns out, grew up in the same area as Freddie Gray. It was an earlier time, but it was still ugly. Bradford's personal story, which has fueled his reformster career, is the story of escaping that neighborhood.
I never thought things were rough in my neighborhood when I was a kid. I thought they just “were.” But the older I got the more my life became a focused square of activity because of those rough streets. School, sports, home at night, dinner, then the blue chair in my grandma’s Baker Street living room where I fought to stay awake and master the quadratic formula. In retrospect, a lifetime of dinner conversations and events make the haze of memories crystal clear. My grandma talked about redlining, a lot. My friend Stuart, a big redhead black kid a few years older than me that lived on Calhoun Street, was shot and killed. Grandma got mugged while walking home from church one morning. I'd been beat up and had my bike taken from me. All the streets around us-- Stricker, Presstman, Gilmore, Gold-- loomed with their own sort of eerie malevolence. In a city of neighborhoods, mine was exactly one square block.
Say what you like about Bradford-- the man can write.
He creates a compelling pictures-- as compelling as any of the many word pictures being crafted in the face of the Baltimore riots-- of a school and neighborhood that is a toxic, terrible trap for the young men and women who live there.
His point is simple. He escaped. He wants others to be able to do the same. And this is where I lose the thread of his argument.
Bradford had the fortune to land at a tony top-notch prep school. The kind of school that gets way more in money and resources than the school to which zip code would have consigned him. That's what got him out of the old neighborhood.
This is what I don't get about reformsters like Bradford. Why are they not saying, "We demand a school for our neighborhood that is every bit as good as that big, shiny prep school."
The problem of underfunded, under-supported, under-resourced schools is real. The choice solution is not real at all. It proposes to rescue some students and make things worse for the rest. It proposes to further cripple the neighborhood school that should be an anchor of the community (look at a twenty-year study of social capital and education done in Baltimore).
You find a group of children trapped on a sinking ship, so you rescue some by tearing boards out of the hull of the sinking ship to reinforce your lifeboat. And then you leave most of the children on the now-sinking-more-rapidly ship.
You find a group of children starving in a home, so you take some of them with you to feed, but on your way out you take all the pots and pans so you can cook for the kids you're taking, leaving the remaining children to starve even faster.
I absolutely get the dire nature of the problem that Bradford and others are describing. But please tell me how school choice helps? It rips resources away from the already-struggling school, making it that much harder to "fix" it. It "rescues" only a small percentage of the students.
Why why why WHY is this a better solution than moving heaven and earth to get that "failing" school the resources it needs? Why is it a better solution to move a handful of students to a bright, shiny school instead of doing everything in your power to turn the community school into a bright, shiny school for every student and family in the community? If you know how to create a magically awesome alternative to the failing public school, why can't the awesome alternative model be applied directly to the public school itself.
Don't tell me the bullshit about how money doesn't matter. Bradford has made the argument that failing public schools spend too much money on bells and whistles, but until you show me a highly respected private school that markets itself by saying, "We promise to spend next to nothing on your kid," or "Never mind the full voucher. Just send us the student with $500 and that's all we need to educate her," I'm not buying the money-doesn't-matter argument. And truly, neither is anybody else. Nobody believes that. Nobody.
This is what I have always found baffling about voucher proponents. It's not that I don't believe in the problems they cite. It's that their solutions strike me just like somebody who says, "I've had a terrible cold lately, so I'm going to jab myself in the gut with a steak knife and soak my head in kerosene." The voucher solution is non-sequitor, a solution that seems to hold no reasonable promise of help (and at this late date, no empirical or anecdotal support, either).
So I'm saying to Derrell Bradford-- I find your writing moving, your story moving, your picture of the problem compelling (and I am not using my trademark irony here-- I mean it). But I can not for the life of me see how school choice brings us the slightest step closer to a solution, nor in all the reading about choice that I've ever done, have I seen a clear and sensible explanation of how this non-solution solution can hope to solve a thing. I'm still listening.
Wednesday, February 25, 2015
Coke Provides a Marketing Lesson
Proponents of vouchers and choice systems never tire of touting the benefits of the free market. For them, the free market is like a colosseum in which gladiator products battle to become better, until the crown goes to those who are Most Excellent of All. It's a touchingly childlike belief; the free market will deliver excellence to customers just like Santa will deliver presents to good boys and girls.
But in our American free-ish market capitalism-lite system, the path to victory often has nothing to do with the pursuit of excellence.
Sometimes the market place just doesn't want excellence enough to pay for it; analysts have suggested that's why the airline travel experience is lousy and getting lousier. Or consider cable television, which promised a cornucopia of varied and quality channels and instead delivered 500 versions of the same bland culture-mulch.
Yesterday, Coca-Cola delivered another lesson in how the free market really works. Coke has been having troubles financially, and it's worth noting that many of these troubles have absolutely nothing to do with the product at all, but with the financial machinations of international exchange rates. Apparently when those aren't tilted in the proper direction, you can magically turn your money into less money. Additionally, Coke has suffered some loss of market share because it has occurred to many people that they could put more healthful substances into their bodies.
So how did Coke handle this? Did they find a way to make their product better? Did they pursue excellence so that they could be rewarded by the free market? Of course not. As reported by the AP, they did this:
To make up for weak volume gains at home, the company has been using a variety of tactics including a focus on "mini-cans" and smaller bottles that are positioned as premium offerings and help push up revenue.
That's right. They looked for a better way to trick the customers into giving them more money. Specifically, they put their flavored fizzy water in smaller cans, essentially raising their price-per-unit and then marketing the increased cost as a Good Thing. They put less of the same old product in new cans. That's it.
This is the free market at its worst. The customer is your adversary-- they have your money and somehow, some way, you have to get it away from them. It's not that you need a product that actually has better quality-- you need a product that can more easily be sold.
I've written this many times. If I'm ever important enough to have a law named after me, this might be my best shot:
The free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing.
The notion that unleashing these sorts of market forces in education would somehow lead to better schools would be funny if it weren't so destructive in practice. It is particularly problematic because under school choice, the school can't raise the price because that voucher payment is set by the state (I know we rarely call these vouchers any more, but that's only because the term has become a political liability-- school choice programs are still essentially voucher programs). So the only option for schools in a free market system is to cut services, to put less education in a smaller, shinier can.
When a school's guiding principle, its business plan, is to ask, "How much less can we give these students and still keep market share," that school is broken. A system that rewards better marketing of a poorer product is not a system that creates excellence, and we do not need to put education in smaller cans.
Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats
But in our American free-ish market capitalism-lite system, the path to victory often has nothing to do with the pursuit of excellence.
Sometimes the market place just doesn't want excellence enough to pay for it; analysts have suggested that's why the airline travel experience is lousy and getting lousier. Or consider cable television, which promised a cornucopia of varied and quality channels and instead delivered 500 versions of the same bland culture-mulch.
Yesterday, Coca-Cola delivered another lesson in how the free market really works. Coke has been having troubles financially, and it's worth noting that many of these troubles have absolutely nothing to do with the product at all, but with the financial machinations of international exchange rates. Apparently when those aren't tilted in the proper direction, you can magically turn your money into less money. Additionally, Coke has suffered some loss of market share because it has occurred to many people that they could put more healthful substances into their bodies.
So how did Coke handle this? Did they find a way to make their product better? Did they pursue excellence so that they could be rewarded by the free market? Of course not. As reported by the AP, they did this:
To make up for weak volume gains at home, the company has been using a variety of tactics including a focus on "mini-cans" and smaller bottles that are positioned as premium offerings and help push up revenue.
That's right. They looked for a better way to trick the customers into giving them more money. Specifically, they put their flavored fizzy water in smaller cans, essentially raising their price-per-unit and then marketing the increased cost as a Good Thing. They put less of the same old product in new cans. That's it.
This is the free market at its worst. The customer is your adversary-- they have your money and somehow, some way, you have to get it away from them. It's not that you need a product that actually has better quality-- you need a product that can more easily be sold.
I've written this many times. If I'm ever important enough to have a law named after me, this might be my best shot:
The free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing.
The notion that unleashing these sorts of market forces in education would somehow lead to better schools would be funny if it weren't so destructive in practice. It is particularly problematic because under school choice, the school can't raise the price because that voucher payment is set by the state (I know we rarely call these vouchers any more, but that's only because the term has become a political liability-- school choice programs are still essentially voucher programs). So the only option for schools in a free market system is to cut services, to put less education in a smaller, shinier can.
When a school's guiding principle, its business plan, is to ask, "How much less can we give these students and still keep market share," that school is broken. A system that rewards better marketing of a poorer product is not a system that creates excellence, and we do not need to put education in smaller cans.
Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats
Thursday, January 29, 2015
Choice & Charter Digest
In honor of both Throwback Thursday and a week devoted to school choice PR (thanks for endorsing that, Mr. President), here's an assortment of archive pieces from this blog about choice and charters. Enjoy some old favorites and share them with a friend.
Bullying in New Jersey
In which the New Jersey Charter School Association decides that the best way to deal with a Rutgers professor doing research that makes charters look bad is to use the courts to try to bully her into silence.
My Public School Sales Pitch
If I were telling a parent why to choose public school over charters, this would be my sales pitch.
Indiana: Building a Better Leech
Here's how they go about sucking public schools dry in Indianapolis so that charters can profit.
Choice and Disenfranchising the Public
School choice is all about cutting voters and taxpayers out of their own public school system.
The First All-Charter District
A complete takeover of an entire school district by a charter company has been tried. You just don't hear about it much because it was a total failure.
Why For-Profit = Anti-Student
Whether it's a flat-out for profit school or one of those non-profits used to funnel profits to corporate pockets, a school that needs to make money cannot help being bad for students.
Chicago Schools Caught Cooking the Charter Books
When charters need to look successful, there's always plain old changing the numbers. Here's how Chicago gave some charters a helping hand.
Profiting from Non-Profits
Non-profits are a great way to look noble and still make a bundle of loot.
Charters Break the American Promise
School choice is about reinforcing the social strata
Bush: Nuanced and Wrong
Jeb Bush may be backing away a bit from CCSS, but he is leaning into choice and charters. Here's why he's wrong.
Charter Wolves in Public School Clothing: Buffalo Edition
Buffalo, NY, provides yet another model for using charters to get rich off public tax dollars
Should We Embrace Charter Districts
Responding to a piece that puts all the pro-charter arguments in one spot. They're still wrong.
Forever Schools
Charters aren't in it for the long haul; public schools are.
The Public Charter School Test
If a charter wants to claim it's a public school, it has to meet these four tests.
Charters as Money Funnels
The Gulen chain provides yet another example of how charters can be better at making money than at making education.;
Charters Want More Money
Remember how charters promoted themselves by saying they'd make education less expensive. That was the bait. Now comes the switch.
Fraud and Mismanagement in PA Charters
Here's Pennsylvania's version of how to use charters for shenanigans and profit.
How To Win Hearts and Minds for Charterdom
Did you know there's an actual marketing handbook for the charter movement. I am not making this up.
Cyber-Schools Still Suck, Says NEPC Report
NEPC took a look at 338 cybers. Not very pretty.
When School Choice Works
Under what conditions would voucher systems be okay?
Choice & Cable
Market forces do not foster excellence.
School Choice Does Not Reduce the Cost of Education
School choice does not make education cheaper. It just redistributes the money.
Conservatives Don't Really Like School Choice
Okay, I know some say they do. But if you really follow conservative principles, they do not lead you to school choice.
The Financial Fantasies of Choice
Support of school choice rests on some financial fictions that just won't die. This one caused enough ruckus to rate a sequel.
School Choice is Un-American
Choice violates some basic principles that we hold dear in this country.
Involuntary Free Market
Free market competition for schools doesn't fit, because not everybody really wants the product.
The Free Market Hates Losers
The free market demands winners and losers. It's a philosophy that has no place in public schools.
Schools, Transparency and Free Markets
Remember when even that free market CREDO charter fan said that the free market doesn't work for schools.
Charters: Diminishing Returns and Just Good Enough
The free market is incompatible with education. Here's why.
Bullying in New Jersey
In which the New Jersey Charter School Association decides that the best way to deal with a Rutgers professor doing research that makes charters look bad is to use the courts to try to bully her into silence.
My Public School Sales Pitch
If I were telling a parent why to choose public school over charters, this would be my sales pitch.
Indiana: Building a Better Leech
Here's how they go about sucking public schools dry in Indianapolis so that charters can profit.
Choice and Disenfranchising the Public
School choice is all about cutting voters and taxpayers out of their own public school system.
The First All-Charter District
A complete takeover of an entire school district by a charter company has been tried. You just don't hear about it much because it was a total failure.
Why For-Profit = Anti-Student
Whether it's a flat-out for profit school or one of those non-profits used to funnel profits to corporate pockets, a school that needs to make money cannot help being bad for students.
Chicago Schools Caught Cooking the Charter Books
When charters need to look successful, there's always plain old changing the numbers. Here's how Chicago gave some charters a helping hand.
Profiting from Non-Profits
Non-profits are a great way to look noble and still make a bundle of loot.
Charters Break the American Promise
School choice is about reinforcing the social strata
Bush: Nuanced and Wrong
Jeb Bush may be backing away a bit from CCSS, but he is leaning into choice and charters. Here's why he's wrong.
Charter Wolves in Public School Clothing: Buffalo Edition
Buffalo, NY, provides yet another model for using charters to get rich off public tax dollars
Should We Embrace Charter Districts
Responding to a piece that puts all the pro-charter arguments in one spot. They're still wrong.
Forever Schools
Charters aren't in it for the long haul; public schools are.
The Public Charter School Test
If a charter wants to claim it's a public school, it has to meet these four tests.
Charters as Money Funnels
The Gulen chain provides yet another example of how charters can be better at making money than at making education.;
Charters Want More Money
Remember how charters promoted themselves by saying they'd make education less expensive. That was the bait. Now comes the switch.
Fraud and Mismanagement in PA Charters
Here's Pennsylvania's version of how to use charters for shenanigans and profit.
How To Win Hearts and Minds for Charterdom
Did you know there's an actual marketing handbook for the charter movement. I am not making this up.
Cyber-Schools Still Suck, Says NEPC Report
NEPC took a look at 338 cybers. Not very pretty.
When School Choice Works
Under what conditions would voucher systems be okay?
Choice & Cable
Market forces do not foster excellence.
School Choice Does Not Reduce the Cost of Education
School choice does not make education cheaper. It just redistributes the money.
Conservatives Don't Really Like School Choice
Okay, I know some say they do. But if you really follow conservative principles, they do not lead you to school choice.
The Financial Fantasies of Choice
Support of school choice rests on some financial fictions that just won't die. This one caused enough ruckus to rate a sequel.
School Choice is Un-American
Choice violates some basic principles that we hold dear in this country.
Involuntary Free Market
Free market competition for schools doesn't fit, because not everybody really wants the product.
The Free Market Hates Losers
The free market demands winners and losers. It's a philosophy that has no place in public schools.
Schools, Transparency and Free Markets
Remember when even that free market CREDO charter fan said that the free market doesn't work for schools.
Charters: Diminishing Returns and Just Good Enough
The free market is incompatible with education. Here's why.
Tuesday, January 27, 2015
9 Things to Know About School Choice
To help kick off School Choice PR Week, Forbes ran a puff piece about choice entitled "Kicking Off School Choice Week With 9 Things You Need To Know". The piece comes from contributor Maureen Sullivan who in 2009 was elected to the the Hoboken school board arguing "for lower taxes and higher standards" during her "nearly" four year term (Sullivan was elected as a member of the Kids First team, then defected because she found them insufficiently reformy, leading to a great deal of fiscal grandstanding and wrangling in Hoboken)
Her 9 things make a nice compendium of what choice advocates offer as arguments these days. Let's consider them in the order she presents them.
1) Sullivan cites the American Federation for Children poll as proof that Americans want school choice for realsies. As Diane Ravitch pointed out to me when I wrote about that poll, it's interesting that in all the times choice has been on a ballot in the states, it has never won once (update: my mistake-- with huge backing, a charter bill did finally just pass in Washington) . At any rate, looking to AFC for information about school choice is like looking to R. J. Reynolds for information about the effects of smoking.
2) More than 100K students use vouchers to attend private school (according to Center for Education Reform, another school choice booster group). There are a little under 50 million K-12 students in the US, making voucher students about 0.2% of the student population. It's a good number to remember the next time anybody offers students in a voucher program as proof of anything.
3) There are 6,500 charter schools open now. Well, probably, more or less. Hard to say exactly how many have opened or closed this week. According to the National Alliance for Public School Charters, 2.5 million students are enrolled. Sullivan did include one actually interesting factoid here-- half of all charters are in four states (California, Texas, Florida and Arizona).
4) The Center for Education Reform offers grades each state on its charter school swellness. It's a fifty-five-point scale, and twenty-five of those points are based on independent authorizers and number of schools allowed. Fifteen more points for a combination of state and district autonomy, along with "teacher freedom," whatever that is supposed to be. Final fifteen are for funding. The A states are DC, Minnesota, Indiana, Michigan and Arizona.
5) Eight states don't allow charters (North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Nebraska, Vermont, West Virginia, Alabama and Kentucky, though Nebraska is likely to change under a new pro-charter governor). It's an interesting list. Do you suppose the lack of any juicy urban profit centers is a factor for these states?
6) Charter schools go out of business. Sigh. I wish this weren't news to people, but as we repeatedly see, it is. The NAPSC reported that 200 2012-13 charters didn't open again the following year. The Center for Ed Reform says that of 6,700 that ever were, 1,036 have closed since 1992. I do not know how to make those figures fit with the figures in item 3.
7) Charter schools are getting better results. This is based on the wishful thinking and fluffy unicorns study released bu CATO studying Texas charters. In fact, there are no conclusive studies showing that charters do it better, and where marginally better results occur (and also when they don't, which is sad for the charter) those results are readily explained by how the charter manages its student body with selective intake and pushing out low performers. There are virtually no examples of charters attempting to educate an entire student population in the same way that a public school system must. So far we've had one all-charter district, and it failed to have any positive effect whatsoever.
8) The US Senate passed a resolution recognizing National School Choice Week, sponsored by Tim Scott (Rep-SC) with ten co-sponsors including Ted Cruz , Rand Paul, and Dianne Feinstein.
9) The two biggest teachers' unions got their asses handed to them by pro-school-choice candidates, achieving victory only over Pennsylvania's Tom Corbett, who arguably could have been beaten by my dog. There's a whole host of explanations for those electoral victories, and they do underline how disconnected AFT and NEA leadership are from absolutely anything at all. I suspect the elections mostly show that political fooferawing only moves the needle so far. Scott Walker wasn't going to lose unless someone caught him on video beating a nun to death with a puppy. Tom Corbett wasn't going to win even if someone had a video of Jesus endorsing him.
Sullivan's article is one more example of the long game that charter and choice advocates are playing. Just keep insisting something is true long enough (public schools are failing, vaccines are dangerous, fluoride makes you communist, The Bachelor is a show about finding true love, charter schools are popular and successful) and eventually it enters Conventional Wisdom as, at a minimum, a "valid alternative view." It's not necessary for the things to be true, or even supported by facts-- just keep repeating them uncritically and without argument, and eventually, they stick.
Her 9 things make a nice compendium of what choice advocates offer as arguments these days. Let's consider them in the order she presents them.
1) Sullivan cites the American Federation for Children poll as proof that Americans want school choice for realsies. As Diane Ravitch pointed out to me when I wrote about that poll, it's interesting that in all the times choice has been on a ballot in the states, it has never won once (update: my mistake-- with huge backing, a charter bill did finally just pass in Washington) . At any rate, looking to AFC for information about school choice is like looking to R. J. Reynolds for information about the effects of smoking.
2) More than 100K students use vouchers to attend private school (according to Center for Education Reform, another school choice booster group). There are a little under 50 million K-12 students in the US, making voucher students about 0.2% of the student population. It's a good number to remember the next time anybody offers students in a voucher program as proof of anything.
3) There are 6,500 charter schools open now. Well, probably, more or less. Hard to say exactly how many have opened or closed this week. According to the National Alliance for Public School Charters, 2.5 million students are enrolled. Sullivan did include one actually interesting factoid here-- half of all charters are in four states (California, Texas, Florida and Arizona).
4) The Center for Education Reform offers grades each state on its charter school swellness. It's a fifty-five-point scale, and twenty-five of those points are based on independent authorizers and number of schools allowed. Fifteen more points for a combination of state and district autonomy, along with "teacher freedom," whatever that is supposed to be. Final fifteen are for funding. The A states are DC, Minnesota, Indiana, Michigan and Arizona.
5) Eight states don't allow charters (North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Nebraska, Vermont, West Virginia, Alabama and Kentucky, though Nebraska is likely to change under a new pro-charter governor). It's an interesting list. Do you suppose the lack of any juicy urban profit centers is a factor for these states?
6) Charter schools go out of business. Sigh. I wish this weren't news to people, but as we repeatedly see, it is. The NAPSC reported that 200 2012-13 charters didn't open again the following year. The Center for Ed Reform says that of 6,700 that ever were, 1,036 have closed since 1992. I do not know how to make those figures fit with the figures in item 3.
7) Charter schools are getting better results. This is based on the wishful thinking and fluffy unicorns study released bu CATO studying Texas charters. In fact, there are no conclusive studies showing that charters do it better, and where marginally better results occur (and also when they don't, which is sad for the charter) those results are readily explained by how the charter manages its student body with selective intake and pushing out low performers. There are virtually no examples of charters attempting to educate an entire student population in the same way that a public school system must. So far we've had one all-charter district, and it failed to have any positive effect whatsoever.
8) The US Senate passed a resolution recognizing National School Choice Week, sponsored by Tim Scott (Rep-SC) with ten co-sponsors including Ted Cruz , Rand Paul, and Dianne Feinstein.
9) The two biggest teachers' unions got their asses handed to them by pro-school-choice candidates, achieving victory only over Pennsylvania's Tom Corbett, who arguably could have been beaten by my dog. There's a whole host of explanations for those electoral victories, and they do underline how disconnected AFT and NEA leadership are from absolutely anything at all. I suspect the elections mostly show that political fooferawing only moves the needle so far. Scott Walker wasn't going to lose unless someone caught him on video beating a nun to death with a puppy. Tom Corbett wasn't going to win even if someone had a video of Jesus endorsing him.
Sullivan's article is one more example of the long game that charter and choice advocates are playing. Just keep insisting something is true long enough (public schools are failing, vaccines are dangerous, fluoride makes you communist, The Bachelor is a show about finding true love, charter schools are popular and successful) and eventually it enters Conventional Wisdom as, at a minimum, a "valid alternative view." It's not necessary for the things to be true, or even supported by facts-- just keep repeating them uncritically and without argument, and eventually, they stick.
Thursday, January 22, 2015
Choice Advocates Conduct Poll; Unsurprising Results Ensue
The American Federation for Children is not so much about children as they are "the nation's voice for education choice." So when they called a press conference to announce the results from their recent poll, it is perhaps unsurprising that their pollster found a deep and wide support for school choice far beyond anything I've ever seen in any polls before.
Purpose
The purpose of the poll was telegraphed right up front in the subject line for their email announcing the press event announcing the poll-- "Is school choice a 2016 sleeper issue ?"
Kevin Chavous, executive counsel for the AFC, underlined that point in his opening comments. His reading of the 2014 mid-term elections is that pro-choice candidates (that would be, of course, supporters of school choice, not reproductive choice) swept the election, sent a message to the two largest teacher unions, and put Presidential candidates on notice of which way the wind is blowing. Yes, the AFC would like Presidential hopefuls to set sail for Choiceland, and they are here to try to fill those sails with a little more hot wind.
Chavous introduced the pollster, Debbie Beck of Beck Research, a public opinion research firm. He assures us that she's seasoned with fifteen years of experience and has "represented" major corporations, which strikes me as an extraordinarily odd word to use for a pollster, unless of course you think the business of pollsters is to create "research" to help push particular opinions, and not to be unbiased collectors of facts. But then, she's been a consultant on several political campaigns and has worked for folks like Mayor Michale Bloomberg and StudentsFirst, and introduced herself as a Democratic pollster. Who knew that there was such a thing as a pollster who was partisan on purpose?
So Beck stepped up and announced that their study found that modern charters are not widely supported and lead to segregation and the bleeding off of resources from public schools, so the American Federation for Children would withdraw their support from school choice and instead work to make sure that each child in America gets an iPad and a pony. Ha! Of course not. The report that these choice advocates bought and paid for turns out to prove that they've been right all along!! And People Who Want To Be President should damn well listen to this organization and make school choice part of their platform.
Methodology
I did not study pollology in college, so I have no professional standing to critique some of their methodology. But I can say that I found some parts interesting.
They used a sample of 1800 likely voters. 800 of those were a full-on national sample. 1000 were an over sample from ten states (100 per state). The ten states were Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, Nevada, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Wisconsin. That does not look like an education reform cross-section of America to me, not even if I squint. But this oversample was "case-weighted" into the national samples "so that the number of voters in each state is proportional." "Weighting" in polls is basically about using math to correct bad numbers in your random sample-- say your male/female ration of responders is 70/30 instead of 50/50, so you use math to make the samples "weigh" equally. I'm not sure what that has to do with this study, but I am sure that somehow we've got 1000 respondents from educationally regressive states in the mix somehow. If someone wants to edify me in the comments, I welcome the education.
The breakdown of respondents has some interesting data points. The liberal/moderate/conservative breakdown is tilted away from liberals (22/32/39). Education is pretty evenly distributed, as is gender. Age is distributed pretty evenly by decade until we get to "65 and over," which gives us 29% of the respondents.
Some of the questions on the survey are... well.. not exactly what we'd expect in an unbiased search for The Truth. One portion of the survey tests out both pro- and anti- choice talking points (just in case, you know, anybody who happened to be running for a certain higher office might want to know how to spin). One anti-choice point was "Vouchers allow students to attend private schools that teach creationism, focus on religious studies and oppose homosexuality." Yes, I'm sure the school choice issue is best decided based on how one feels about The Gays.
Perhaps the most egregious fishing expedition in the form of a question was a choose-one-or-the-other question that asked respondents to say whether "we need to make major changes to the ways that public schools are run" or "we only need to make minor changes to the way that public schools are run." I didn't go to pollology school, but I have a degree in Word Stuff, and I respect the artful use of the word "only" to subtly tilt that question. Not surprisingly, 48% went with the major changes. Beck called this result "a big wake-up call."
Also, a ranking question asked "Regardless of your position on vouchers or charter schools, what do you think is the BEST reason to increase school choice in America." This allowed the report to claim that "quality of education" is the top reason to "embrace school choice," even if it represents people whose response was, "I hate school choice, but if I had to ever pick a reason to support it, it would be quality of education, a thing I don't believe choice actually fosters." Some folks did buck the system and say that we shouldn't have school choice, but that number was low (but only 2 points lower that the people who believed that competition creates excellence).
The Results
You can read the full report here. I'll touch on its "major findings."
Two-thirds of respondents support the concept of school choice, with an even bigger jump for special needs scholarships. Public charter schools are popular. At least, they're popular when your poll describes them as "independently managed public schools that receive taxpayer dollars and are open to all students." I'm not sure how the response would have run if they'd described public charters as schools that keep only the students they want and which never allow any auditing or transparency about how they spend the tax dollars they receive. I feel like that description might have changed the numbers a bit.
The top three talking points for school choice are:
1) rescues students in failing schools who need help right now
2) the zip code line, as in poor students shouldn't be stuck in schools because zip code
3) vouchers give poor students in crappy schools an escape to a better education. This talking point also throws in the not-exactly-truthful lines about students in "these programs" having higher achievement and higher graduation rate.
Voucher supporters mostly support them for everyone, not just poor kids. And AFC sees broad support among voters for the idea that competition improves education.
Fun side note. The poll results show Romney leading Bush in the GOP primary race.
Conclusions
This poll does not pass the smell test.
It was produced by someone whose business is producing results for political purposes, not attempting to ferret out actual truth. It uses a sample that is oddly collected and "weighted." It was produced under the auspices of an organization that even pretended to say, "Well, you know, we just wanted to check and see if we were right in our thinking."
In fact, we know what the purpose of the poll is. Closing out the press conference Chavous said that "all the candidates [for President] need to take heed." Beck (who by the end of the press conference seemed like an actual member of AFC and not any sort of independent pollster) agreed and said she is waiting to hear more from the candidates.
You might say, "What difference do any of their biases make if their findings are True." I might reply, "If a woman goes to the alter and marries me, what difference does it make whether she wants to live a life or mutually supportive joy and union or she is just waiting to slice me open and steal my vital organs?"
This is not an attempt to further an honest and open discussion about the course of US public education-- it's just an attempt to leverage some political clout. And maybe grab some of public education's vital organs.
Purpose
The purpose of the poll was telegraphed right up front in the subject line for their email announcing the press event announcing the poll-- "Is school choice a 2016 sleeper issue ?"
Kevin Chavous, executive counsel for the AFC, underlined that point in his opening comments. His reading of the 2014 mid-term elections is that pro-choice candidates (that would be, of course, supporters of school choice, not reproductive choice) swept the election, sent a message to the two largest teacher unions, and put Presidential candidates on notice of which way the wind is blowing. Yes, the AFC would like Presidential hopefuls to set sail for Choiceland, and they are here to try to fill those sails with a little more hot wind.
Chavous introduced the pollster, Debbie Beck of Beck Research, a public opinion research firm. He assures us that she's seasoned with fifteen years of experience and has "represented" major corporations, which strikes me as an extraordinarily odd word to use for a pollster, unless of course you think the business of pollsters is to create "research" to help push particular opinions, and not to be unbiased collectors of facts. But then, she's been a consultant on several political campaigns and has worked for folks like Mayor Michale Bloomberg and StudentsFirst, and introduced herself as a Democratic pollster. Who knew that there was such a thing as a pollster who was partisan on purpose?
So Beck stepped up and announced that their study found that modern charters are not widely supported and lead to segregation and the bleeding off of resources from public schools, so the American Federation for Children would withdraw their support from school choice and instead work to make sure that each child in America gets an iPad and a pony. Ha! Of course not. The report that these choice advocates bought and paid for turns out to prove that they've been right all along!! And People Who Want To Be President should damn well listen to this organization and make school choice part of their platform.
Methodology
I did not study pollology in college, so I have no professional standing to critique some of their methodology. But I can say that I found some parts interesting.
They used a sample of 1800 likely voters. 800 of those were a full-on national sample. 1000 were an over sample from ten states (100 per state). The ten states were Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, Nevada, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Wisconsin. That does not look like an education reform cross-section of America to me, not even if I squint. But this oversample was "case-weighted" into the national samples "so that the number of voters in each state is proportional." "Weighting" in polls is basically about using math to correct bad numbers in your random sample-- say your male/female ration of responders is 70/30 instead of 50/50, so you use math to make the samples "weigh" equally. I'm not sure what that has to do with this study, but I am sure that somehow we've got 1000 respondents from educationally regressive states in the mix somehow. If someone wants to edify me in the comments, I welcome the education.
The breakdown of respondents has some interesting data points. The liberal/moderate/conservative breakdown is tilted away from liberals (22/32/39). Education is pretty evenly distributed, as is gender. Age is distributed pretty evenly by decade until we get to "65 and over," which gives us 29% of the respondents.
Some of the questions on the survey are... well.. not exactly what we'd expect in an unbiased search for The Truth. One portion of the survey tests out both pro- and anti- choice talking points (just in case, you know, anybody who happened to be running for a certain higher office might want to know how to spin). One anti-choice point was "Vouchers allow students to attend private schools that teach creationism, focus on religious studies and oppose homosexuality." Yes, I'm sure the school choice issue is best decided based on how one feels about The Gays.
Perhaps the most egregious fishing expedition in the form of a question was a choose-one-or-the-other question that asked respondents to say whether "we need to make major changes to the ways that public schools are run" or "we only need to make minor changes to the way that public schools are run." I didn't go to pollology school, but I have a degree in Word Stuff, and I respect the artful use of the word "only" to subtly tilt that question. Not surprisingly, 48% went with the major changes. Beck called this result "a big wake-up call."
Also, a ranking question asked "Regardless of your position on vouchers or charter schools, what do you think is the BEST reason to increase school choice in America." This allowed the report to claim that "quality of education" is the top reason to "embrace school choice," even if it represents people whose response was, "I hate school choice, but if I had to ever pick a reason to support it, it would be quality of education, a thing I don't believe choice actually fosters." Some folks did buck the system and say that we shouldn't have school choice, but that number was low (but only 2 points lower that the people who believed that competition creates excellence).
The Results
You can read the full report here. I'll touch on its "major findings."
Two-thirds of respondents support the concept of school choice, with an even bigger jump for special needs scholarships. Public charter schools are popular. At least, they're popular when your poll describes them as "independently managed public schools that receive taxpayer dollars and are open to all students." I'm not sure how the response would have run if they'd described public charters as schools that keep only the students they want and which never allow any auditing or transparency about how they spend the tax dollars they receive. I feel like that description might have changed the numbers a bit.
The top three talking points for school choice are:
1) rescues students in failing schools who need help right now
2) the zip code line, as in poor students shouldn't be stuck in schools because zip code
3) vouchers give poor students in crappy schools an escape to a better education. This talking point also throws in the not-exactly-truthful lines about students in "these programs" having higher achievement and higher graduation rate.
Voucher supporters mostly support them for everyone, not just poor kids. And AFC sees broad support among voters for the idea that competition improves education.
Fun side note. The poll results show Romney leading Bush in the GOP primary race.
Conclusions
This poll does not pass the smell test.
It was produced by someone whose business is producing results for political purposes, not attempting to ferret out actual truth. It uses a sample that is oddly collected and "weighted." It was produced under the auspices of an organization that even pretended to say, "Well, you know, we just wanted to check and see if we were right in our thinking."
In fact, we know what the purpose of the poll is. Closing out the press conference Chavous said that "all the candidates [for President] need to take heed." Beck (who by the end of the press conference seemed like an actual member of AFC and not any sort of independent pollster) agreed and said she is waiting to hear more from the candidates.
You might say, "What difference do any of their biases make if their findings are True." I might reply, "If a woman goes to the alter and marries me, what difference does it make whether she wants to live a life or mutually supportive joy and union or she is just waiting to slice me open and steal my vital organs?"
This is not an attempt to further an honest and open discussion about the course of US public education-- it's just an attempt to leverage some political clout. And maybe grab some of public education's vital organs.
Monday, December 29, 2014
Choice and Disenfranchising the Public
School choice is one of those policy ideas that just never goes away, and it probably never will. For some people, it is an irresistible way to unlock all those public tax dollars and turn them into private profits. For some people, it's a way to make sure their children don't have to go to school with Those People. And some people have a sincere belief that competition really does create greatness.
I'll save my disagreements with those folks for another day. Because there is a huge fault with school choice that we discuss way too rarely.
School choice disenfranchises the public.
Our public school system is set up to serve the public. All the public. It is not set up to serve just parents or just students. Everybody benefits from a system of roadways in this country-- even people who don't drive cars-- because it allows a hundred other systems of service and commerce to function well.
School choice treats parents as if they are the only stakeholders in education. They are not. We all depend on a society in which people are reasonably well-educated. We all depend on a society in which people have a reasonably good understanding of how things work. We all depends on a society in which people have the basic abilities needed to take care of themselves and the people around them. We all depend on dealing with doctors and plumbers and lawyers and clerks and neighbors who can read and write and figure. We hope for fellow voters who will not elect a politician because he promises to convert straw to gold by using cold fusion. We all depend on a society that can move forward because it is composed of people who Know Things.
This is why everybody votes for school board members-- not just the people who have kids in school. Everybody has a stake in the students who come out of schools, and every taxpayer has a stake in the money spent on schools.
A choice system says no-- you only get a say in how education works if you have a kid.
Reformsters like to make the argument that schools need to be more responsive to what employers and businesses are looking for in graduates, but in a choice system, these folks have even less say. Charter operators and other choice beneficiaries don't have to listen to anybody except the people who affect market share.
This has the potential of serious long-term harm for the choice schools themselves. Most notably, disenfranchising the public literally moves them from the list of stakeholders. It will vastly increase the list of people saying, "Well, I don't have a kid in school. Why do I have to pay taxes, anyway?" The day those people make a large enough group is the day that choice school operators suddenly find the pie shrinking as voters decide they're tired of paying for a system they've been cut out of.
But the biggest damage will come to communities themselves, because choice and charter systems are based on business principles, not education or community principles. And the most basic business principle is, when you aren't making money, close up shop.
There has been a lot of shock and surprise around the country as charter schools just close their doors. People tend to assume that part of being a school means staying open in your community, and they keep being surprised to discover that a charter school is not a school-- it's a business. Charter and choice systems don't just disenfranchise the public in saying how schools in the community should work-- charter and choice systems also take away any choice about whether there are schools in the community or not.
A public school system cannot suddenly just close its doors, even just a few of its doors, without answering to the taxpaying and voting public. But when it comes to decisions about whether to stay open or not, even the parents themselves are disenfranchised. A choice system in your community doesn't only mean that the public has lost the ability to decide what kind of schools they'll have today. A choice system also means they've lost control over how much longer they'll have any schools at all.
That's the trade. A few people get to have a choice about schools today, and in return, nobody gets a choice about what schools, if any, to have in the community tomorrow.
I'll save my disagreements with those folks for another day. Because there is a huge fault with school choice that we discuss way too rarely.
School choice disenfranchises the public.
Our public school system is set up to serve the public. All the public. It is not set up to serve just parents or just students. Everybody benefits from a system of roadways in this country-- even people who don't drive cars-- because it allows a hundred other systems of service and commerce to function well.
School choice treats parents as if they are the only stakeholders in education. They are not. We all depend on a society in which people are reasonably well-educated. We all depend on a society in which people have a reasonably good understanding of how things work. We all depends on a society in which people have the basic abilities needed to take care of themselves and the people around them. We all depend on dealing with doctors and plumbers and lawyers and clerks and neighbors who can read and write and figure. We hope for fellow voters who will not elect a politician because he promises to convert straw to gold by using cold fusion. We all depend on a society that can move forward because it is composed of people who Know Things.
This is why everybody votes for school board members-- not just the people who have kids in school. Everybody has a stake in the students who come out of schools, and every taxpayer has a stake in the money spent on schools.
A choice system says no-- you only get a say in how education works if you have a kid.
Reformsters like to make the argument that schools need to be more responsive to what employers and businesses are looking for in graduates, but in a choice system, these folks have even less say. Charter operators and other choice beneficiaries don't have to listen to anybody except the people who affect market share.
This has the potential of serious long-term harm for the choice schools themselves. Most notably, disenfranchising the public literally moves them from the list of stakeholders. It will vastly increase the list of people saying, "Well, I don't have a kid in school. Why do I have to pay taxes, anyway?" The day those people make a large enough group is the day that choice school operators suddenly find the pie shrinking as voters decide they're tired of paying for a system they've been cut out of.
But the biggest damage will come to communities themselves, because choice and charter systems are based on business principles, not education or community principles. And the most basic business principle is, when you aren't making money, close up shop.
There has been a lot of shock and surprise around the country as charter schools just close their doors. People tend to assume that part of being a school means staying open in your community, and they keep being surprised to discover that a charter school is not a school-- it's a business. Charter and choice systems don't just disenfranchise the public in saying how schools in the community should work-- charter and choice systems also take away any choice about whether there are schools in the community or not.
A public school system cannot suddenly just close its doors, even just a few of its doors, without answering to the taxpaying and voting public. But when it comes to decisions about whether to stay open or not, even the parents themselves are disenfranchised. A choice system in your community doesn't only mean that the public has lost the ability to decide what kind of schools they'll have today. A choice system also means they've lost control over how much longer they'll have any schools at all.
That's the trade. A few people get to have a choice about schools today, and in return, nobody gets a choice about what schools, if any, to have in the community tomorrow.
Sunday, December 28, 2014
Christmas Truce (Part II)
As a guest blogger over at Rick Hess's EdWeek blog (everyone still with me?), Mike McShane started last week with a call for a Christmas truce. You can find a link to that original piece here in my response to it.
McShane promised a follow-up, and he delivered. It was kind of a disappointment; if the first truce call wasn't really a call for a truce, the second is even less of one.
McShane is an edu-guy at AEI, home of conservative market-style education advocacy. You can see him walk-and-talk his way through some ideas about how to gut public education right here.
In Part I, McShane floated the idea that people on different sides of the education debate share a desire to disempower large stupid impersonal institutional approaches to education. In Part II, he's going to offer some concrete steps to turn that philosophical alignment into real world action. It's a couple of winners and a huge whiff.
1. Dig deeper than the party label
Win. "If you are interested in understanding where the real fault lines are in education debates, party ID will probably not help you." Many of us have said as much in a variety of ways. There are plenty of reformsters wearing a Democrat label, and there are plenty of Republicans who actually value the traditional institution of public education. You have to pay attention to what people actually do if you are going to identify your allies.
2. Argue on the right terms
Win. McShane argues that the debate about what works has become a hopeless mess with the toxic side-effect of testing run amok. We need to refocus on the question of who needs to know what and how we could best collect and distribute that information. I suspect McShane and i have huge disagreement about the answers to that question, but I agree that it's a better to start with that question than to continue insisting that a couple of high stakes tests will provide useful information about students, teachers, schools, programs and educational techniques that can be put to good use by teachers, administrators, bureaucrats, government agencies and parents.
3. Let old wounds heal
Win. This is really another version of #1. Being opposed to anything that Talky McBlabsalot says because you've decided he's always wrong, and besides, that son-of-a-bitch once wrote something that really hurt and pissed you off-- that's always a mistake. It is always a mistake to evaluate what somebody says before they actually say it. There are reformsters who I suspect are going to be wrong 99.9% of the time, but I will still hear them out. Ideas should rise and fall on their own value, not on the value of their source.
4. Choice might be the answer
Fail. After all this fairly well-reasoned and thoughtful writing, McShane wraps up by veering off into choice territory. In other words, the final part of McShane's argument is "The way to achieve truce is for you to recognize that my side is actually correct." His analysis of the argument over choice is fair:
But, in order to find common ground, liberals have got to internalize that many conservatives support charter schools and school vouchers because they see them as an opportunity for community organizations to get involved and create new schools in neighborhoods. They like churches and non-profits and want to empower them to help serve kids. To put it another way, in school choice they see Edmund Burke, not Gordon Gekko. It would also help if more conservatives understood that most liberals oppose school choice programs for the exact same reasons. They think that school boards are a better guarantor of community input and values than markets are. They worry that for-profit companies or even far-away non-profit entities are trying to invade communities and instill their values and their vision on children, whether families like it or not. They see charter schools or voucher systems as cold, impersonal, and destructive.
He has missed a point or two here. First, while "many conservatives" may pursue choice out of these values, many conservatives are, in fact, Gordon Gekkoing all over the ed business. The biggest players in the charter school biz are not community groups-- they are hedge fund operators. And that has led to the spread of charter and choice schools that are devoted to making money, and specifically by making money by serving only a portion of the community. There is a huge gulf between the mission of serving some students and serving all students, and public and choice systems sit on opposite sides of that gulf.
McShane offers three "safeties" to make charters more palatable and representative of the shared values he believes are there.
First, vouchers or stipends or whatever we're going to call the money that follows kids around has to be scaled to the kids. In other words, the high cost students that charters currently dump would come with more money to make them less dump-likely. Second, community groups get "first crack" at charters, before the outside operators come in. Third, schools should be free to do as they wish pedagogically; students will vote with their feet.
Why that doesn't work for me
That still doesn't close the gap for me, though I'm going to keep mulling over that sliding cost scale for students. I've written tons about this, but let me see if I can hit my main objections in short lines.
In my universe, any charter operator must contract for an extended period. Twenty, thirty, fifty years-- I'm not sure I can think of a period that would be too long. No shutting down after two years or one year or six months because it just isn't making enough money any more. Public schools don't just promise to educate every child-- they promise to be there for every child that ever lives in that community in the years to come. "We'll be right here as long as it suits us," is an unacceptable vision for a public school.
In my universe, we do not disenfranchise the taxpayers. Every choice and voucher system ever created has one thing in common-- it tells all childless taxpayers that they are no longer stakeholders in public education. That's wrong. Dead wrong, completely wrong, absolutely unjustifiable. Every citizen of this nation is a stakeholder in public education. Are parents stakeholders? Certainly. Are they the only stakeholders? Absolutely not. Charter advocates keep trying to shade this with the market-tested idea of having the money follow the child so that families can choose the educational option they prefer. That's baloney.
Christmas is over
So, I don't think we're getting a truce, exactly. Personally, I'll keep reading and listening and trying to make sense of people all over the map on the issue of public education, so maybe I've already been observing a kind of truce all along (and that may also be affected by the fact that I have no real power or ammunition other than whacking away at this blog).
I appreciate the effort, Mr. McShane, and I think you've drawn some important connections, but no truce yet.
McShane promised a follow-up, and he delivered. It was kind of a disappointment; if the first truce call wasn't really a call for a truce, the second is even less of one.
McShane is an edu-guy at AEI, home of conservative market-style education advocacy. You can see him walk-and-talk his way through some ideas about how to gut public education right here.
In Part I, McShane floated the idea that people on different sides of the education debate share a desire to disempower large stupid impersonal institutional approaches to education. In Part II, he's going to offer some concrete steps to turn that philosophical alignment into real world action. It's a couple of winners and a huge whiff.
1. Dig deeper than the party label
Win. "If you are interested in understanding where the real fault lines are in education debates, party ID will probably not help you." Many of us have said as much in a variety of ways. There are plenty of reformsters wearing a Democrat label, and there are plenty of Republicans who actually value the traditional institution of public education. You have to pay attention to what people actually do if you are going to identify your allies.
2. Argue on the right terms
Win. McShane argues that the debate about what works has become a hopeless mess with the toxic side-effect of testing run amok. We need to refocus on the question of who needs to know what and how we could best collect and distribute that information. I suspect McShane and i have huge disagreement about the answers to that question, but I agree that it's a better to start with that question than to continue insisting that a couple of high stakes tests will provide useful information about students, teachers, schools, programs and educational techniques that can be put to good use by teachers, administrators, bureaucrats, government agencies and parents.
3. Let old wounds heal
Win. This is really another version of #1. Being opposed to anything that Talky McBlabsalot says because you've decided he's always wrong, and besides, that son-of-a-bitch once wrote something that really hurt and pissed you off-- that's always a mistake. It is always a mistake to evaluate what somebody says before they actually say it. There are reformsters who I suspect are going to be wrong 99.9% of the time, but I will still hear them out. Ideas should rise and fall on their own value, not on the value of their source.
4. Choice might be the answer
Fail. After all this fairly well-reasoned and thoughtful writing, McShane wraps up by veering off into choice territory. In other words, the final part of McShane's argument is "The way to achieve truce is for you to recognize that my side is actually correct." His analysis of the argument over choice is fair:
But, in order to find common ground, liberals have got to internalize that many conservatives support charter schools and school vouchers because they see them as an opportunity for community organizations to get involved and create new schools in neighborhoods. They like churches and non-profits and want to empower them to help serve kids. To put it another way, in school choice they see Edmund Burke, not Gordon Gekko. It would also help if more conservatives understood that most liberals oppose school choice programs for the exact same reasons. They think that school boards are a better guarantor of community input and values than markets are. They worry that for-profit companies or even far-away non-profit entities are trying to invade communities and instill their values and their vision on children, whether families like it or not. They see charter schools or voucher systems as cold, impersonal, and destructive.
He has missed a point or two here. First, while "many conservatives" may pursue choice out of these values, many conservatives are, in fact, Gordon Gekkoing all over the ed business. The biggest players in the charter school biz are not community groups-- they are hedge fund operators. And that has led to the spread of charter and choice schools that are devoted to making money, and specifically by making money by serving only a portion of the community. There is a huge gulf between the mission of serving some students and serving all students, and public and choice systems sit on opposite sides of that gulf.
McShane offers three "safeties" to make charters more palatable and representative of the shared values he believes are there.
First, vouchers or stipends or whatever we're going to call the money that follows kids around has to be scaled to the kids. In other words, the high cost students that charters currently dump would come with more money to make them less dump-likely. Second, community groups get "first crack" at charters, before the outside operators come in. Third, schools should be free to do as they wish pedagogically; students will vote with their feet.
Why that doesn't work for me
That still doesn't close the gap for me, though I'm going to keep mulling over that sliding cost scale for students. I've written tons about this, but let me see if I can hit my main objections in short lines.
In my universe, any charter operator must contract for an extended period. Twenty, thirty, fifty years-- I'm not sure I can think of a period that would be too long. No shutting down after two years or one year or six months because it just isn't making enough money any more. Public schools don't just promise to educate every child-- they promise to be there for every child that ever lives in that community in the years to come. "We'll be right here as long as it suits us," is an unacceptable vision for a public school.
In my universe, we do not disenfranchise the taxpayers. Every choice and voucher system ever created has one thing in common-- it tells all childless taxpayers that they are no longer stakeholders in public education. That's wrong. Dead wrong, completely wrong, absolutely unjustifiable. Every citizen of this nation is a stakeholder in public education. Are parents stakeholders? Certainly. Are they the only stakeholders? Absolutely not. Charter advocates keep trying to shade this with the market-tested idea of having the money follow the child so that families can choose the educational option they prefer. That's baloney.
Christmas is over
So, I don't think we're getting a truce, exactly. Personally, I'll keep reading and listening and trying to make sense of people all over the map on the issue of public education, so maybe I've already been observing a kind of truce all along (and that may also be affected by the fact that I have no real power or ammunition other than whacking away at this blog).
I appreciate the effort, Mr. McShane, and I think you've drawn some important connections, but no truce yet.
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