Arizona's Teacher Desert

This week in the New York Times, Fernando Santos and Motoko Rich took a look at the continuing teacher shortage in Arizona, where leaders continue to demonstrate that they understand neither education nor the free market forces that they claim to love.

Arizona's history with reformster nonsense goes way back. Bill McCallum was a professor at the University of Arizona back when he became one of the co-authors of the Common Core. Arizona has long camped out at the bottom of most education lists-- spending, test results, you name it, they've sucked at it. When reformy governor Jan Brewer backed Tea Party fave Doug Ducey all the way to the capital, that was not good news for education.

Ducey brought in reformsters Paul Pastorek, obliterator-in-chief of New Orleans schools, and Joel Klein, who never met a public school that he didn't want to shut down. Pastorek and Klein showed up to help promote the idea of a charter-choice non-public school system where children carrying tax dollars in their backpacks travel from school to school begging to be admitted. At that same event, Ducey (previous job: CEO of Cold Stone Creamery) declared a need for more positive view of Arizona:

"I believe that too many have fallen into a doom-and-gloom cycle where everything is wrong, where the cynic is winning, telling others that nothing is right," Ducey said. "I say it's time we shed an inferiority complex inside this state."

It's funny-- I would think that an acolyte of Competition and Free Market Forces would recognize that a good way to shed an inferiority complex would be to take steps to stop being inferior.

That has not always been the Arizona way. A year ago their legislature was seriously discussing a bill to shut educators up, barring them from "distributing electronic materials to influence the outcome of an election or to advocate support for or opposition to pending or proposed legislation." (It was shouted down in the 11th hour.) Arizona has also led the country in anti-Hispanic legislation, banning Mexican-American studies from the classroom.

Through all of this, Arizona has continued to have a teacher problem.

Last fall, Arizona schools were trying to fill teaching positions by recruiting in the Philipines. An Arizona Department of Education task force on teacher retention and recruitment issued a report in January of this year, and the picture was not pretty. Two years ago Arizona schools began the year with around a thousand unfilled teaching positions (out of a complete teaching force of a bit over 60,000). Going forward, things just look worse, with the impending retirement of up to a quarter of the current teaching force.

The report also shows the level of experience plummeting. In 1987-88, the most common experience level for teachers was 15 years. In 2011-12, it was five years. In 2013-14, 24% of first year teachers and 20% of second year teachers left their jobs "and were not reported as teaching in Arizona." In other words, just under a quarter of Arizona's newest teachers either left teaching or Arizona.

There are not too many mysteries about why Arizona cannot hold onto a complete teaching force. For starters, if you live anywhere else, you may think you know what low spending on schools looks like. But take a guess at what Arizona's per-pupil spending is, according to most recent reports--

$3,400.

That puts Arizona dead last in the US. So teachers in Arizona get bupkus in financial resources for meeting the needs of their students.

Can't they just fill in the gap out of their own pockets, like other teachers all across America? I'm sure they'd like to, and I'll bet many do-- but the pockets of an Arizona teacher do not run very deep. The report says that the average starting salary is $31,874. Keep in mind-- that's an average, which means that all sorts of folks are starting out a even less than that. The report notes that is an increase of 20% over 2003 starting salaries, meaning that teaching has grown far slower than "other degreed professions."

In the NYT article, we meet John-David Bowman, the 2015 Arizona Teacher of the Year. He hasn't had a raise since 2008. If he retires in twenty years, he'll do so with a salary under $50K.

Unsurprisingly, many Arizona school districts have frozen or cut spending. As the visit of Pastorek and Klein would suggest, Arizona has for years been pursuing a policy of cutting state spending, which leaves three options for local districts: A) raise local taxes to make up difference, B) let school spiral downward and be declared a distressed failure, or C) all of the above.

That man-made disaster suits some folks just fine. Among Arizona's many low, low grades in education, there is one high mark. The Center for Education Reform, a group devoted to pushing charters anywhere and everywhere, gave Arizona one of a handful of A's for being a great state for charters. The NYT article includes a quote from a parent who has reluctantly gone charter rather than send her small children into a classroom of forty students.

Protection for teachers? Well, the Fordham Institute issued a report back in 2012 ranking state teacher unions for power an influence in their states, and there we find Arizona dead last on yet another list. Arizona is a right to work state, with no collective bargaining rights. Tenure ("continuing status") still exists, but low test scores can be a reason to fire "tenured" teachers. And when furloughs are called for, districts may not consider seniority as a factor. (By which I don't mean "it might not happen" but rather "they aren't allowed to do it")

How bad is the attitude about education in Arizona? That same study of retention and recruitment includes recommendations for improving the situation. It includes recommendations for policymakers including:

* Elevate positive reinforcement for the role our educators play in ensuring success for all students
* Publicly acknowledge the value of the teaching profession and the critical need for effective teachers in all Arizona classrooms
* Help to improve the respect afforded educators
* Publicly acknowledge the value of the teaching profession

Let those sink in. The Arizona Department of Education thought these were things that policymakers needed to be told, implying that these are things policymakers didn't already know (after all, campaign consultants don't tell their candidates "Kiss babies. Say nice things about America. Remember to keep breathing.") It is bad enough in Arizona that "show teachers respect" qualifies as bold new policy advice.

So. Low pay, poor workplace resources, no job security, difficult work conditions, and no respect from state leaders. How could Arizona possibly have a teacher shortage?

You would think free market conservatives could figure this one out. If I walk into Cold Stone Creamery and say, "Give me a four scoop hot chocolate sundae with crushed nuts and strawberries, and I want to stand on that side of the counter and poke you in the nose while you make it. I'll pay you a quarter" I am not going to get my wish. If you want to purchase goods and/or services, and people won't sell them to you under the conditions you set, you have to up your offer. This is not rocket science. The invisible hand does not set prices based on what we'd like to pay; otherwise, we would all buy new cars for $1.50. But free marketeers always seem to want to bite the invisible hand that feeds them when it says that they have to fork over real money to pay for labor and materials.

The solution to Arizona's teacher shortage is neither mysterious or complicated. Pay a living wage. Take care of your schools properly. Provide the resources needed to do the job. Treat your teachers, both by word and by policy, with respect.

Ducey may have caught on, at least a little. Last Thursday he announced a plan to pump an additional $2 billion into schools. This will be financed by dipping into Arizona's state land trust permanent fund, a fund that gains money from sale of land and resources of the land held in trust by the state; currently that fund is enjoying success from stock market investments. So, yeah-- selling off publicly held resources and investing the money in the market. There's no way this could end badly.

It is tossing a bone to public schools. (Universities, which continue to take heavy hits, get no such bone.) It was greeted with "cautious optimism." But for now, I would not put Arizona on my list of Great Places To Pursue a Teaching Career. Not until Arizona policymakers indicate they have found stopped wandering in the desert and have finally located a clue.

Easter and the Free Market

I grew up Methodist (United Methodist, actually), went through a long Between Churches spell, and eventually settled back into a sort of relationship with the local Episcopalian church. My religious faith has stayed fairly steady (though, as a good born New Englander, I am not going to talk to you about it), but if the Christian Church were on Facebook, I would mark our relationship "it's complicated."

But I still love Easter. I have always loved Easter far more than Christmas, and the years have only strengthened those feelings.

It is the tritest of cliches to point out that Christmas is overly commercialized, but that commercialization is instructive, because in it we can see the Invisible Hand of the Free Market on a crazed, drunken rampage. In the three months of the season, there is absolutely nothing that can happen in stores, malls, back alleys or any other temple of commerce that could shock or surprise me.

This is the untethered free market in action, the rudderless, anchor-deficient free market that has long since stopped asking "What is the real point and purpose of this activity" and instead asks "How can this activity be leveraged to create a revenue stream?" With most free marketified activities, we can at least take comfort in the notion that injection of free market profit-driven innovation will bring us to a higher better pursuit of our main goal.

But Christmas can't even try to pretend that the proliferation of holiday tchotchkes and corporate advertising somehow aids in the worship and honoring of the Great I Am. The Creator of All That Is and Will Be is not honored by special beer steins. No, the vast majority seasonal tie-ins have lost the plot, descending into some sad Godless money-grubbing romp.

Easter, however, stays relatively impervious to the seduction of the Invisible Hand. Perhaps it's that Christmas reduces to simple charming ideas-- babies are sweet and people should be nice to others-- but Easter is harsh and dark an then, for many folks, metaphysically improbable.

It may be a matter of how easy it is to keep up appearances. In other words, I can sell you Christmas stuff and still pretend that it has something to do with the central message of Christmas. But the crucifixion does not play well on t-shirts and halftime advertising.

A unmoored free market doesn't just subvert the virtue and purpose of an activity-- it twists and distorts everything into a fun-house shadow if its true self. Folks who have a childlike faith in the free market and believe that an unleashed market will automatically breathe virtue into whatever it comes near-- those folks need only look at Christmas, a holiday that has literally had the virtue beaten out of it by the club-wielding invisible hand.

Compare and contrast with Easter. Easter is not broadly celebrated; it is not culturally required for every single person of whatever faith to observe it, and so there was no need to water it down for mass marketing. Nor has it bee infused with the Great Money Chase, and so other aspects can stay in place.

Easter is about renewal, rebirth, and resurrection; it's about finding a path forward in even the darkest of moments. It's about finding direction and guidance from a higher power. It's about somehow seeing beyond the limited boundaries of our lives into something so infinite and beautiful that we can barely grasp it.

It does not cry out to be fixed. It does not need corporate interests to come in and say, "This holiday is a national disgrace, a sad failure. We must not let people condemned to this lame holiday because their prospects are controlled by their calendar." Easter does not need somebody to come up with National Holiday Standards so that it can be measured against them (to prove it's failing). Easter does not need a shot of Holiday Reform. There may indeed be great potential depths of untapped riches in the holiday, but there is no value to the holiday in trying to tap those riches.

There are some things the Free Market should just leave alone, because the Free Market too easily loses track of the Actual Point of the things it tries to "fix."

I had a good Easter morning. I get up and go out to eat with all my family in the area, and I play a brass instrument in church. This year as a bonus my grandson was baptised. I can't think of anything that would lead me to think, "If only corporate interests could get their hands on this and turn it into the same great holiday that they made Christmas."

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

Charter Sales

There's a great Steve Jobs clip I've used before. In it, Jobs offers his explanation of how the bean counters end up in charge of a company.

The basic principle is simple. Initially, a business prospers based on its ability to make stuff or provide a service, and the better they do stuff, the more money they make. And for a while, doing stuff better pays the bills and makes the profits.

But eventually doing the stuff doesn't increase the revenue stream, because you've pretty well hit all of the market you can hit. The product has attracted all the money it can-- on its own.

At that point it's up to the sales force and the bean counters. To keep the revenue stream thriving, you need people who can push sales in new markets and fiddle with the money. You need marketeers and accountants to run the company. The people who create the product are not so important, because making the product better will not make the business more profitable. Put another way, you can only drive so many sales by being good at your product. After that, you can only drive more sales by being good at selling.

It puts the sales people in charge, and that immediately starts to destroy the product, because the sales-oriented management turns to the people who actually create the product and says, "Never mind making products that work well-- I want a product that we can sell. Our market research says that people really want pink flying weasels as pets, so stop whining and get in there with that pink spray paint and staple some wings on those weasels. Of course it's bad for the weasels and the customers, but we have sales to make today. We'll worry about tomorrow the next time the sun rises."

It's a model worth understanding when considering charter schools. A company that makes computers or cheese-curlers or hamster shoes will take a while to get to sales-over-product stage, but a charter is bean counter ready from day one. From the moment it opens, the modern charter's main business is not education-- it's sales.

We've seen this repeatedly. The K12 cyber chain has been plagued by lawsuits that turn up former employees who complain of a company that is focused primarily on making sales any way it can. K12 has been particularly notorious for churn-- just trying to get new names on the roster faster than the old ones struggle and give up. At one point, K12 operations in Ohio were posting a staggering 51% rate of churn.

K12's mission creep was so great that even cyberschool supporters were bothered. Houston Tucker was the company's marketing director, and he left saying, "The K12 I joined isn't the one I left."

K12 is a striking example of the charter's need to market above all else, but they're hardly an anomaly. A public school without a marketing department is like a weasel without wings, but a modern charter without a marketing department is like a weasel without food

Just google "charter school marketing vp"-- Charter Schools USA, KIPP, Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools-- over a million hits come back and even if we assume that only 2% of those are actual charter school marketing jobs, that's still a huge number of people in charter school sales. And that's before we get to people like Eva Moskowitz-- would you say that Moskowitz is more about providing pedagogical leadership for Success Academy, or about fundraising and marketing for the chain. Certainly the budget for marketing at these schools is stunningly large. A similar quick-and-dirty search for public school marketing officers came up empty.

When modern charter and choice advocates extol the virtues of competition, they're really demanding that public schools meet them on the field of combat where marketing and advertising are the tools of battle. And if public schools go to meet them there, schools lose regardless of the outcome. It's the triumph of the sales department and bean counters over product people, the rise of an education system that thinks of itself as an industry and which is far more concerned about marketing than educating and which thinks nothing of stapling onto weasels.

Involuntary Free Market

I've written before about how the free market is a terrible match for public education (here, here and here, for example).

The actual free market (or as we actually experience it in America, the free-ish market) offers plenty of examples of the such a market wouldn't really serve education well at all. There are myriad examples of the triumph of marketing over quality, or market forces discouraging excellence, but for the moment, I'm going to ignore all of that.

Instead, let's consider one way in which the educational "marketplace" differs from every other free market arena-- involuntary customers.

We recently shopped for coffee makers at my house, so let's use them as an example. The coffee gadget market has a wide range of choices, ranging from cheap crap with a limited lifespan up to really expensive machinery that will carry itself to planned obsolescence with style and grace. But they all have one in common-- they are all made to be marketed to people who want to drink coffee.

But what would happen if Congress passed the Personal Use Coffee Maker Act of 2015, requiring every single person in the country to have a working coffee machine?

PUCMA would have little effect on people already owning a perfectly good coffee maker. But now the market would expand to include people who don't actually want to drink coffee, and wise coffee maker makers would find ways to market to that group as well.

Here's a coffee maker that makes verrrrry tiny cups of coffee, so you don't have more than spoonful to drink. Here's a coffee maker whose main feature is that it looks pretty on your counter. Here's a coffee maker that is an absolute piece of useless crap, but it is as cheap as we could make it and still be PUCMA compliant. Here's a coffee maker that actually makes decent hot chocolate. This one is actually a smoothie machine. This one makes a great cheese sandwich.

When a market is expanded to include people who don't actually want your product, market forces not only fail to foster excellence, but they actually foster crappiness.

I believe in the power and importance of a K-12 education; that's why I chose the work that I do. But I recognize that not everybody sees value in pubic education. I have met parents who would like their children to attend a school that never, ever gives any assignment that requires work outside of school. I have met parents who would like their children to attend a school where only sports matter. I have met parents who would like their children to attend a school that only requires the child to show up only a few days out of every week. In a free market education world, could I make money marketing a school for those parents? You bet I could. Just as I could make money marketing a school that will never challenge a child's beliefs with science, or a school devoted to The One True Religion (whichever one will give me the best market share), or a school that lets them sit at home in their PJs and never do school work unless they're in the mood.

In fact, the one free market option that rarely comes up in these discussions of the power of competition in a free market is the option to not be part of the market.

You want to make a true free market for education? Repeal all mandatory school attendance laws.

Of course almost nobody wants to do that because we recognize that it would not only create chaos for the schools and, worse yet, a long-term mess for our whole society because (as I've said many times) parents are NOT the only stakeholders when it comes to education.

We don't repeal mandatory school attendance laws because it would be bad for society as a whole. Why would it be any better to allow a system in which a child could choose Might As Well Not Be Bothering To Attend High School? I'm thinking of the K12 cyber charter ads in PA that made the pitch, "Pick a school that won't get in the way of your kids' sports schedule" or asked "Is your child happy in school." Charter and voucher fans can say, "Oh, but there are no schools out there pretending to offer an education while marketing to students and families who want to look like they're doing the school thing without having to deal with any of the stuff they find annoying," and that's possibly largely true, but of course, given the lack of oversight in most states, we don't really have any way of knowing, do we?

A Free Market Lesson from the Airlines

In today's Slate, Alison Griswold addresses the issue of cranky travelers and the ever-shrinking world of air travel amenities, and in the process, she delivers a lesson in how the free market sometimes works.

Everyone complains about the shrinking world of air travel. Smaller seats. Less legroom. Fees for every conceivable. I fully expect that at some point airlines will charge not only to transport the clothing in our luggage but also to let us transport the clothes on our back. Why, oh why, do the airlines keep providing less and less for travelers at increasingly nickle-and-dime prices? Griswold has an answer--

Because air travelers choose to make it so.

One pair of stats tell the story. The most loathed, the most complained-about, the most customer-annoying airline by far is Spirit. And the airline that is tops in turning a profit? Also Spirit. While people may pay lip service to the idea of quality, when it comes time to dig out the wallets, people cast their vote for As Cheap As We Can Stand, partly because people are cheap and partly because people just don't have that much money to spend.

Here is yet another example of how the free market does not necessarily foster a drive for excellence at all. In the case of the airlines, the Invisible Hand is apparently tightly grasped around a wallet.

Once again, the idea that free market competition in schools will somehow bring about an era of educational excellence-- well, it just doesn't look like how things work in the real world. In the real world, the free market drives competition to make some products and services just as cheap as we can stand. Many folks in the education biz will recognize As Cheap As We Can Get Away With as a not-uncommon guiding principle in school system budgeting.

But the airline example is not completely applicable to schooling-- schooling is actually even worse.

If an education is a plane ticket to San Jose, then we might well figure we can put up with a lot just to keep things cheap. But since our schools are funded by all taxpayers, for many folks an education is really like buying a plane ticket to San Jose for somebody else. And if somebody else is going to ride in that tiny seat with no leg room-- well, heck, that doesn't really inconvenience me much here at home at all. Even if we assume a voucher system in which taxpayers give students a lump of money to go buy their ticket to San Jose, the amount taxpayers will pitch in for the ticket will still tend to be low.

So the favored few will travel in First Class because they can afford it, and occasionally the airline will upgrade some lucky traveler, but most folks will travel in crappy cramped coach conditions. And the invisible hand of the free market will not make the slightest move toward pursuing excellence.

Schools, Transparency, and the Free Market

Scoop of the Week award goes to Stephen Dyer, who reported on his blog the surprising words of CREDO charter fan Margaret Raymond, who was speaking in Cleveland when she said

I actually am kind of a pro-market kinda girl. But it doesn’t seem to work in a choice environment for education. I’ve studied competitive markets for much of my career. That’s my academic focus for my work. And (education) is the only industry/sector where the market mechanism just doesn’t work. I think it’s not helpful to expect parents to be the agents of quality assurance throughout the state. I think there are other supports that are needed… The policy environment really needs to focus on creating much more information and transparency about performance than we’ve had for the 20 years of the charter school movement. We need to have a greater degree of oversight of charter schools. But I also think we have to have some oversight of the overseers.

This is not surprising in a "Gee I never thought of that" way. It's surprising in a "consider the source" way, coming from someone who works with a raftload of people who believe in the Invisible Hand and its magic powers.

Now, I disagree with her about education being the only sector where market mechanism doesn't work-- health care comes rapidly to mind followed by the food industry and by the military-industrial complex and by, well, almost everything. The free-ish market in this country is heavily bound up in regulation and government control, and much of that is not exerted on behalf of citizens, but on behalf of corporations for whom government regulation is just one of the avenues for using giant piles of money to tilt the scales. From Vanderbilt to Carnegie to Gates, rich folks just love the free market until they're winning, at which point they aren't so keen on the "free" part.

But you can get her point, particularly in follow-up comments that she sent to Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post.

In other industries, real markets are able to develop and function because suppliers and consumers get to meet each other in an unfettered set of offers and demands for goods or services.  There are no intermediary agents who guard access to supply or who aggregate demand and thus sway the free exchange of supply and demand.  Part of that free exchange relies on complete transparency about the attributes of the goods on offer and their prices, and the transactions are “known” by the participants in an open and complete way.

Again, I think she overestimates how many real markets work like this, but her point is well taken. To have a free market, you have to have transparency about all aspects of the transaction.

You also have to have some agreed-upon vocabulary. If I'm trying to sell you a "luxury" automobile or "good" maple syrup, we both have a pretty good idea of what I mean. But if I'm trying to sell a "good" school, nobody is sure what the heck I mean. The reformsters have tried to clear this up by imposing a definition of "good" on schools and teachers, but that definition is "high scores on a couple of standardized math and English tests" and nobody really believes that it's correct.

Some markets have taken years, decades to create that shared vocabulary. For instance, most of the market agrees that "good" maple syrup is "rich and thick."  Except that if you grew up around actual maple syrup, you know that it's thinner and slicker than water and cuts into your food like the sweetest battery acid ever imagined. Marketers had to train the public to associate rich and thick with maple syrup, just as marketers taught us that breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

The American free market doesn't run much on transparency. For some products, like cigarettes and beer, the market depends on a definite lack of transparency. We Americans are hustlers. We like smoke and mirrors. We expect to hear and see bullshit, and we deal in a little bit of it ourselves from time to time. I'll repeat myself here-- the free market does not foster excellent products; the free market fosters excellent marketing.

When it comes to education, the general public does not agree on what they want, how to get it, or how to recognize it when they see it. Add that education is a product that every citizen is required by law to purchase, putting educators in the unique market position of having to market a product to people who do not want that product. And that education is a product that everybody thinks they are qualified and capable of producing. Open the market, as the Obama administration and various state governments, and you have a market that is absolutely ripe for charlatans, humbugs, and well-meaning incompetents.

Finally, layer on our love of invisible regulation. We hate regulation, but we take for granted that nothing we buy in a store could actually hurt us. We hate regulation, but we never check our groceries for possible poisons, and we assume that any electrical appliance we bring into our home will not electrocute us. We like to believe that our world is just naturally safe in some magical unregulated way.

In that same way, people in the education marketplace have just assumed that some place that calls itself a school must automatically have certain programs in place, must address certain student concerns, must have some actual commitment to staying open. As many many many folks in Ohio can now tell you, making assumptions about what a charter is going to do (or not do) turns out to be a huge mistake.

I think Raymond's love of the free market blinds her to many hard truths about it. But as with any bad relationship, it's great to see her at least recognize that things aren't working out now. I believe that her faith that things can some day work out between the market and education is misplaced, but baby steps. Baby steps.

Free Market & Strippers

One of America's super-duper examples of how the free market can unlock innovation and advance education is back in the news. With strippers.

Fast Train College has been out of the news since the feds raided it in 2012. Fast Train had unlocked the innovation of the free market with such great innovations primarily related to Applying for Free Federal money, with such competitive approaches as Faking High School Diplomas. They also embraced another principle of the Free Market (American Style) in which one makes sure that a legislator or two has your back. In their case it was apparently Alice Hastings, who has been a staunch supporter of For Profit schools, including working to defend them back in the early teens against Obama's initiative to shut down predatory for-profit schools (bet she's feeling silly now that the administration has demonstrated that "shut down predatory for profit colleges" actually means "protect profits of predatory for-profit operators")

Fast Train is now the subject of a federal suit (it must have taken two years just to shovel through the mountains of misbehavior). Amongst the many lies that Fast Train College used to grab some of that sweet, sweet federal cash (like lying about whether or not students actually attended classes), we find the money detail-- they hired strippers and exotic dancers as admissions officers.

The college unlocked the forces of free market innovation by sending strippers out for high school visitations, recruiting young men whose interest in the beauty of round, firm education drove them to sign up as federal education money procurement tools for the edupreneurial wizards looking to make a quick buck by pursuing educational excellence.

Had this not involved crushing set and failed educational dreams for thousands of students, this would be a fairly hilarious story (confession-- I picked the story up from Seattle morning drive time DJ's). As it is, it's one more reminder that when you turn free market forces in education, you do not drive excellence in education. Market forces do not foster excellent products; market forces foster excellent marketing.-- and if your target demographic is 18-year-old males, strippers make a certain kind of marketing sense.

P.S. Fast Train College was based in Florida. Surprise.

100% Charter Fail

Writer-researcher Mark Weber published a piece about charters on NJSpotlight this week that deals with charter schools in New Jersey, but which has implications for the charter movement all across the US.

Weber is perhaps better known in the edubloggoverse as Jersey Jazzman, and his research prowess (coupled with that of Julia Sass Rubin of Ruthers) is highly respected. This piece brings together much work that he's published in the past; a trip through the pages of his blog will reveal considerable more detail for those who want it.

The bottom line is that New Jersey charters do not serve the same population as the districts that house them. Specifically, they serve a smaller percentage of poor students and students with extra learning challenges.

As Weber reports, even Cami Anderson has admitted this in public. And the numbers, readily available from public sources, fully support this conclusion. There really are no grounds on which to dispute it. And yet many charteristas continue to do so.

Why? The most obvious reason would be that the numbers explain away what little success some charters can claim. It raises the bar of expectations of charters-- if you've creamed all the better students, why aren't you doing any better than you are?

But more importantly, it reveals the limits of the charter business model.

New Jersey can never be a 100% charter state system. At least not with the current charter operating system. Let's sort students into two groups-- let's call students who come from better economic backgrounds and have no special needs Low Cost Students, and students from lower economic backgrounds or with special needs will be called High Cost Students. If the state wide ratio of LCS to HCS is 3:1, but the ratio inside charters is 12:1, we cannot get all the students in New Jersey into a charter school. Somewhere we're going to have a big old pile of leftover High Cost Students.

In the meantime, it would also be nice to have Condoleeza Rice visit NJ and see how charters provide the machinery for de facto segregation. Charter opponents are racist, my ass.

Plenty of folks have always assumed that this was the end game: a private system for the best and the-- well, if not brightest, at least the least poor and problematic-- and an underfunded remnant of the public system to warehouse the students that the charter system didn't want.

But those folks may have underestimated the greed, ambition and delusions of some charter backers. "Why stop at the icing," operators say, "when we can have the whole cake?" And chartercrats like Arne Duncan, with dreams of scaleability dancing in their sugarplum heads, may really think that full-scale charter systems can work because A) they don't understand that most charter "success" is illusory and B) they don't know why.

It's telling that while chartercrats are cheering on complete charter conversions for cities from York, PA to Memphis, TN, no charter chains have (as far as I know) expressed a desire to have a whole city to themselves. The preferred model is an urban broker like Tennessee's ASD or the bureaucratic clusterfarfegnugen that is Philadelphia schools-- charter operators can jostle for the juiciest slice of the steak and try to leave the gristle for some other poor sucker.

It's not even that charters are worried about how successful they will look. The business model is still evolving, and charters are learning how to spin and market almost anything that comes out in their numbers. They do need good numbers, and they have gotten better at getting them. But the numbers that they are most attentive to are the ones on the bottom line, and that's why no charter operators in their right minds would want a 100% charter system that they had to be responsible for.

I sorted students into High Cost and Low Cost because that's how charter operators see them. It's not that it's easier to get good numbers out of a smart, rich kid. It's that it's cheaper. Students with special needs, students from poor backgrounds, students who have behavioral issues-- these students cost more money. And never forget-- every dollar that a charter operator has to spend on s student is a dollar the charter operator doesn't get to put in his pocket.

Here's one more reason that free market economics do not belong in public education-- in the free market, all customers are NOT created equal. All customers are NOT equally desirable to businesses. And the free market deals with these undesirable customers very simply-- it doesn't serve them. (This is why, for instance, when you hire FEDex or UPS to deliver a package to your uncle on some back road in Bumfargel, PA, FEDex and UPS turn around and hire the United States Postal Service to deliver it for them.) In a charter system, those High Cost Students become human hot potatoes.

"Well, we'll just require charters to serve a certain segment of the population in our 100% charter system," you say. And I will remind you of one other critical difference between charters and true public schools. True traditional public schools do not say, "It's too hard to turn a profit in this business environment, so we are just going to close our doors." Traditional public schools are in it for the long haul. Charter operators are in it as long as it makes business sense to be in it. If they don't like the deal you're offering them, they don't have to stay.

A effective total charter system is not going to happen. If you're not convinced by the ongoing slow-motion disaster in New Orleans, just look at the number from New Jersey. It's unsustainable and unscaleable.

The Market Hates Losers

Fans of market forces for education simply don't understand how market forces actually work.

What they like to say is that free market competition breeds excellence. It does not, and it never has.

Free market competition breeds excellent marketing. McDonald's did not become successful by creating the most excellent food. Coke and Pepsi are not that outstandingly superior to RC or any store brand. Betamax was actually technically superior to VHS, but VHS had a better marketing plan.

The market loves winners. It loves winners even if they aren't winning-- Amazon has yet to turn an actual profit, ever, but investors think that Bezos is a winner, so they keep shoveling money on top of him. And when we enter the area of crony capitalism, which likes to pretend it's the free market, picking winners becomes even less related to success. Charter schools were once a great idea with some real promise, but the whole business has become so toxically polluted with crony capitalism that it has no hope of producing educational excellence in its present form.

But then, the market has only one measure for winning, and that is the production of money. The heart of a business plan is not "Can I build a really excellent mousetrap?" The heart of a business plan is "Can I sell this mousetrap and make money doing it?"

There is nothing about that question that is compatible with pursuing excellence in public education.

The most incompatible part of market-driven education is not its love of money-making winner, but its attitude about losers. Because the market hates losers. The market has no plan for dealing with losers. It simply wants all losers to go away.

Here's the problem. I teach plenty of students whom the market would consider losers. They take too long to learn. They have developmental obstacles to learning. They have disciplinary issues. They may be learning disabled. They have families of origin who create obstacles rather than providing support. What this means to a market-driven education system is that these loser students are too costly, offer too little profit margin, and, in their failures, hurt the numbers that are so critical to marketing the school.

In PA, we already know how the market-driven sector feels about these students. It loves to recruit them by promising a free computer and a happy land of success where nobody ever hounds you about attendance and all homework can be completed by whoever is sitting by the computer. But sooner or later, those students are sloughed off and sent back to public schools. And by "sooner or later," I mean some time after the cyber-charter has collected the money for that student.

The market sheds its losers, its failures (well, unless they can convince some patron or crony that they are just winners who are suffering a minor setback). Schools cannot.

For the free market, failure is not only an option, but a necessity. Losers must fail, be defeated, go away. For a public school system, that is not an option. Only with due process and extraordinary circumstances should a student be refused a public education. And certainly no traditional respectable public school system can simply declare that it has too many loser kids, so it's going to shut down.

The free market approach to schools must inevitably turn them upside down. In a free market system, the school does not exist to serve the student, but the student exists to serve the interests of the school by bringing in money and by generating the kinds of numbers that make good marketing (so that the school can bring in more money). And that means that students who do not serve the interests of the free-market school must be dumped, tossed out, discarded.

To label students losers, to abandon them, to toss them aside, and to do all that to the students who are in most need of an education-- that is the very antithesis of American public education. The free market approach to schools will no more unleash innovation and excellence than did 500 channels on cable TV. What it will do is chew up and spit out large numbers of students for being business liabilities.

Free market forces will not save US education; they will destroy it. To suggest that entrepreneurs should have the chance to profit at the cost of young lives is not simply bad policy-- it's immoral. It's wrong.