Mount St. Mary's University is a relatively small school in Maryland, "located in the middle of everything." And their president would like to drown some bunnies.
Okay, only metaphorically. What Simon Newman would like to do is improve the university's retention numbers. And he would like to do it by "counseling out" students early who are judged likely to drop out later. Here's the lead from the college newspaper's story about the plan:
Even before this year’s freshman class arrived on campus in August, President Simon Newman was developing a plan to dismiss 20-25 of them before the end of September as a means of improving the Mount’s student retention numbers.
Newman was hired by the university just over a year ago. His previous experience? Thirty years in finance and investment. Perhaps that's why he used a less-than-felicitous metaphor to explain his plan. Unfortunately for him, the university apparently has a student newspaper that does real reporting, and they reported on Newman's plan-- and a few other things. As reported in Inside Higher Education:
The student newspaper also reported (and The Washington Post quoted a professor confirming) that Newman told some faculty members they needed to change the way they think of struggling students. He reportedly said, “This is hard for you because you think of the students as cuddly bunnies, but you can’t. You just have to drown the bunnies … put a Glock to their heads.”
The Mountain Echo quotes emails from Newman as they lay out the specifics of the plan to "cull the class." The entering freshmen would take a "survey" that would help decide their fate (it was not called the "Have you made a terrible mistake by coming here" survey). In discussions by email with faculty who clearly had some misgivings about the plan, Newman had this to say:
My short term goal is to have 20-25 people leave by the 25th [of Sep.]. This one thing will boost our retention 4-5%. A larger committee or group needs to work on the details but I think you get the objective.
Several groups of faculty lobbied hard to head off Newman's plan, but found him unwilling to bend. When one suggested that using the survey in this manner could result in dismissing perfectly good students, Newman reportedly replied that "there will be some collateral damage."
Ultimately, the plan was thwarted because the committee responsible for coming up with te list of students to be "dismissed" simply refused to do the job, submitting no names.
Meanwhile, the university's board chairman has responded to the Mountain Echo article-- by blasting the newspaper. In a letter to the paper (which the paper published) John E. Coyne, III, blasts the article for giving a "grossly inaccurate impression." Plus he's really upset that the journalists are using private emails. And that they're using it to "advance your journalistic interests" and are doing so "without any concern for either the individual privacy interests of the faculty involved or the damage you will render to this University and its brand." As I am neither a real journalist nor affiliated with the University and its brand, I feel comfortable saying that the letter suggests that Coyne is a tool. But then, Coyne is also an investment banker, so he may feel protective of his banking bro.
But, those damn journalists, and their interest in telling people what's actually going. Why can they not understand that brands are not damaged by people doing stupid, secret, just-plain-wrong things, but are damaged by the people who reveal those secrets? Remember-- facts are only important when they are useful facts that help your brand. Otherwise, shut up and follow the talking points.
There are many lessons here, including the one about putting investment bankers in charge of education. But perhaps the biggest one is how the Law of Unintended Consequences intersects with Campbell's Law. There are so many plans to gather data about post-secondary schools by measuring things like graduation rate and retention rates, but here's just another example of how trying to Make Your Numbers invariably conflicts with the actual purpose of the institution.
In other words, if we insist on those kinds of metrics for colleges and universities, Newman is not going to be the last unqualified university head to get caught trying to drown the bunnies. In the meantime, the university might want to work on the wording of its acceptance letter-- "Congratulations! You have probably been accepted to Mount St. Mary's University. We'll see you in the fall, but you probably shouldn't unpack for a week or two."
Hats off to the reporters and editors and advisor of the Mountain Echo. Makes me feel good to know that in this day and age, there are still people trying to do the real job of journalism. Keep it up!
Wednesday, January 20, 2016
Tuesday, January 19, 2016
Jebucation Follies (Part II: The Nuts, Bolts and Screws)
Jeb! Bush has a shiny new education plan, and he hopes that it will be the big lightning bolt that will shock his comatose candidacy back to life. In Part I, I examined his premises and theories, arguing that the big crack in his foundation is the conservative-thwarting oxymoron of imposed choice. In this part, I want to look at the actual nuts and bolts of Bush's grand plan.
I'm using the "backgrounder" that EdWeek is kindly hosting on its site. After three pages of general argument, the plan gets down to some nitty with a side order of gritty. Here are the pieces of this master action plan.
Empower Parents and Students with Quality Options
For some reason or other, part of this list includes some specific plans for DC. Why federal ed proposals need to keep singling out one district in the whole country remains a bit of a mystery, unless, of course, it has to do with DC-dwelling bureaucrats and policy makers wanting to exercise local control over their local school district.
Beyond the beltway, Bush wants a thousand charter schools to bloom. He invokes the oft-debunked spectre of waitlisted students. Bush wants to double the amount of money that the feds would throw at charter schools, which is curious since I keep hearing that more money is not the solution in education. Bush also threatens to use the bully pulpit, which is kind of cute, given that the bully pulpit arguably hasn't had any effect on American policy for over a century (and given that Bush's powers of oratorical persuasion are currently earning a solid "below basic" from the citizenry). Plus, fewer regulations. Let's expand charter schools so that "students around the country have all the options they want, need and deserve" which is nice but A) who decides what they deserve and B) do any of them really want more than one good school to attend (granted, you can make a case for B since many waitlist students are on multiple waitlists-- maybe they do want to attend many schools at once).
Support States With The Flexibility and Resources To Create Great Pubic Schools
Specifics include "Defend State Control of Education" by keeping the feds out of everyone's business. "The federal government cannot, and should not, impose a one-size fits all [sic] model of anything on states," says the man who pushed Common Core forever, and when he stopped saying its name still insisted that all states should adopt Core-like standards.
"States need to be held accountable for serving their citizens, not federal bureaucrats," says Jeb! But he doesn't say who will hold the states accountable, or how.
Bush wants to make Title I portable by way of bock grants to the states, so that states can be free to shaft low-income high-needs students in new and creative ways. He also wants to make IDEA funds portable because, again charter choice argle bargle. I can't think of a better example of the inefficiency of choice. How does it work to have several schools trying to duplicate the expensive technology and services required by students with special needs, instead of using one facility to consolidate those costs. But, choice!
Bush also wants to reward student success. All this involves is the federal government giving out extra money to states that match the federal government's idea of success. Somebody explain to me how this is different, in principle or in execution, from Obama/Duncan's Race to the Top program. Bush thinks it's different because those programs were bullying and punitive, but rewards are different. But this is splitting hairs. A bonus is only a bonus if all your essential needs are already taken care of, and that describes very few school districts. If you "reward" me with supper, then "not rewarding" and letting me go hungry feels an awful lot like punishment.
Reward Great Teaching and Successful Student Outcomes
Bock grants with Title II money blah blah teachers valuable resource blah blah rewarding top teachers blah blah blah and at the end of it all, student success is still defined by the feds. Want to bet it looks a lot like "good test scores."
Give Parents, Teachers and Taxpayers The Information They Need
We'll have public reports of critical student outcome measures. Who decides what qualifies as a critical outcome measure? According to ESSA, that is still mostly the feds, mostly test scores. Is Jeb running on Obama's education record? Will it be long before someone calls him Jebama?
Bush wants to guarantee parent and teacher access to information, and coming from the guy whose state went all in on meaningless letter grades for schools, that's a nice step forward. The question will be, "How much of what information?" For instance, information in the form of copies of the tests that the students took, showing how each student answered each question-- that would be great. Bush does promise teachers information about last year's test result before next year starts.
But at the same time, student privacy must be preserved with "strong governance, use of best practices in information security and privacy protection" and also more training. Sigh. I feel like 21st Skills and Knowledge include understanding that if you're going to put it in the system, somebody will be able to get at it. As we repeatedly say to starlets with nekkid online pictures, "If you don't want anyone to see it, don't put it out in the digital world to begin with."
Drive Innovation and Research To Break The Stranglehold of the Status Quo
Bush is being direct and clear-- he would like to get rid of traditional public education. He thinks schools still work like they did two generations ago (there is no excuse for this belief). And he likes blended learning and competency based education, which means he is destined to meet the same people who hammered him over Common Core, only they'll be carrying different signs.
Also, remember-- it's important to give parents and students a choice, as long as they choose the choices that Bush chooses for them. Under Bush, you can have lots of choices-- except for a traditional public school.
Post Secondary Education and Training
Jeb! has noticed that people are making an issue out of post-secondary education, so he's on that, too. He has noticed some problems in access to the level of education "critical to upward mobility" (though he hasn't noticed that upward mobility is itself in big trouble). But he has a smorgasbord of ideas:
* Education savings accounts. Complete with $50K line of credit, because more loans will help with debt? I'm not seeing how this works. Was anybody having trouble getting in debt already?
* Drive down costs and hold post-sec institutions accountable. Somehow-- also puppies for everyone. He would put institutions "on the hook" for a portion of what grads can't repay.Super. So colleges will make sure not admit or give financial aid to poor students. Genius.
* Expand student access to innovative types of training. It's possible this idea is not stupid, although how it should involve the feds is less clear.
* Give students and families the information they need to make good decision. Again, requiring that the feds decide what information they "need."
* Help existing borrowers repay their loans. Jeb-grants for everyone! No, sorry. Somehow this will be part of the Jebbified finance system that will be helping bankers make more money from college loans helping students pay for school. Also, easier bankruptcy, so there's that.
So what have we got here?
Man, if Jeb! wanted to woo back conservatives, this figleaved federalism is probably not going to do it. I mean, Rick Hess likes it, and Rick Hess is no dummy, but to me it looks like rehashed reformsterism with a side order of Same Old Thing We've Had for the Past Decade. There's not a new idea in sight, and not a single old idea that comes equipped with an example of how well it worked anywhere. I suppose Bush can get points for having scrubbed Common Core from his resume, but it's going to take a lot more than that and sucking up to all the venture vultures who want their slice of money baked in an edu-charter pie to resuscitate the Bush shot at Presidency. Certainly, I don't see anything new and exciting or worn and practical about which to get edu-excited.
I'm using the "backgrounder" that EdWeek is kindly hosting on its site. After three pages of general argument, the plan gets down to some nitty with a side order of gritty. Here are the pieces of this master action plan.
Empower Parents and Students with Quality Options
For some reason or other, part of this list includes some specific plans for DC. Why federal ed proposals need to keep singling out one district in the whole country remains a bit of a mystery, unless, of course, it has to do with DC-dwelling bureaucrats and policy makers wanting to exercise local control over their local school district.
Beyond the beltway, Bush wants a thousand charter schools to bloom. He invokes the oft-debunked spectre of waitlisted students. Bush wants to double the amount of money that the feds would throw at charter schools, which is curious since I keep hearing that more money is not the solution in education. Bush also threatens to use the bully pulpit, which is kind of cute, given that the bully pulpit arguably hasn't had any effect on American policy for over a century (and given that Bush's powers of oratorical persuasion are currently earning a solid "below basic" from the citizenry). Plus, fewer regulations. Let's expand charter schools so that "students around the country have all the options they want, need and deserve" which is nice but A) who decides what they deserve and B) do any of them really want more than one good school to attend (granted, you can make a case for B since many waitlist students are on multiple waitlists-- maybe they do want to attend many schools at once).
Support States With The Flexibility and Resources To Create Great Pubic Schools
Specifics include "Defend State Control of Education" by keeping the feds out of everyone's business. "The federal government cannot, and should not, impose a one-size fits all [sic] model of anything on states," says the man who pushed Common Core forever, and when he stopped saying its name still insisted that all states should adopt Core-like standards.
"States need to be held accountable for serving their citizens, not federal bureaucrats," says Jeb! But he doesn't say who will hold the states accountable, or how.
Bush wants to make Title I portable by way of bock grants to the states, so that states can be free to shaft low-income high-needs students in new and creative ways. He also wants to make IDEA funds portable because, again charter choice argle bargle. I can't think of a better example of the inefficiency of choice. How does it work to have several schools trying to duplicate the expensive technology and services required by students with special needs, instead of using one facility to consolidate those costs. But, choice!
Bush also wants to reward student success. All this involves is the federal government giving out extra money to states that match the federal government's idea of success. Somebody explain to me how this is different, in principle or in execution, from Obama/Duncan's Race to the Top program. Bush thinks it's different because those programs were bullying and punitive, but rewards are different. But this is splitting hairs. A bonus is only a bonus if all your essential needs are already taken care of, and that describes very few school districts. If you "reward" me with supper, then "not rewarding" and letting me go hungry feels an awful lot like punishment.
Reward Great Teaching and Successful Student Outcomes
Bock grants with Title II money blah blah teachers valuable resource blah blah rewarding top teachers blah blah blah and at the end of it all, student success is still defined by the feds. Want to bet it looks a lot like "good test scores."
Give Parents, Teachers and Taxpayers The Information They Need
We'll have public reports of critical student outcome measures. Who decides what qualifies as a critical outcome measure? According to ESSA, that is still mostly the feds, mostly test scores. Is Jeb running on Obama's education record? Will it be long before someone calls him Jebama?
Bush wants to guarantee parent and teacher access to information, and coming from the guy whose state went all in on meaningless letter grades for schools, that's a nice step forward. The question will be, "How much of what information?" For instance, information in the form of copies of the tests that the students took, showing how each student answered each question-- that would be great. Bush does promise teachers information about last year's test result before next year starts.
But at the same time, student privacy must be preserved with "strong governance, use of best practices in information security and privacy protection" and also more training. Sigh. I feel like 21st Skills and Knowledge include understanding that if you're going to put it in the system, somebody will be able to get at it. As we repeatedly say to starlets with nekkid online pictures, "If you don't want anyone to see it, don't put it out in the digital world to begin with."
Drive Innovation and Research To Break The Stranglehold of the Status Quo
Bush is being direct and clear-- he would like to get rid of traditional public education. He thinks schools still work like they did two generations ago (there is no excuse for this belief). And he likes blended learning and competency based education, which means he is destined to meet the same people who hammered him over Common Core, only they'll be carrying different signs.
Also, remember-- it's important to give parents and students a choice, as long as they choose the choices that Bush chooses for them. Under Bush, you can have lots of choices-- except for a traditional public school.
Post Secondary Education and Training
Jeb! has noticed that people are making an issue out of post-secondary education, so he's on that, too. He has noticed some problems in access to the level of education "critical to upward mobility" (though he hasn't noticed that upward mobility is itself in big trouble). But he has a smorgasbord of ideas:
* Education savings accounts. Complete with $50K line of credit, because more loans will help with debt? I'm not seeing how this works. Was anybody having trouble getting in debt already?
* Drive down costs and hold post-sec institutions accountable. Somehow-- also puppies for everyone. He would put institutions "on the hook" for a portion of what grads can't repay.Super. So colleges will make sure not admit or give financial aid to poor students. Genius.
* Expand student access to innovative types of training. It's possible this idea is not stupid, although how it should involve the feds is less clear.
* Give students and families the information they need to make good decision. Again, requiring that the feds decide what information they "need."
* Help existing borrowers repay their loans. Jeb-grants for everyone! No, sorry. Somehow this will be part of the Jebbified finance system that will be
So what have we got here?
Man, if Jeb! wanted to woo back conservatives, this figleaved federalism is probably not going to do it. I mean, Rick Hess likes it, and Rick Hess is no dummy, but to me it looks like rehashed reformsterism with a side order of Same Old Thing We've Had for the Past Decade. There's not a new idea in sight, and not a single old idea that comes equipped with an example of how well it worked anywhere. I suppose Bush can get points for having scrubbed Common Core from his resume, but it's going to take a lot more than that and sucking up to all the venture vultures who want their slice of money baked in an edu-charter pie to resuscitate the Bush shot at Presidency. Certainly, I don't see anything new and exciting or worn and practical about which to get edu-excited.
Jebucation Follies (Part I: The Conservative Conundrum)
I give Jeb! Bush credit for one thing-- sincerity. While other politicians have adopted and disinherited reformster policies quicker than you can say "political expediency," Bush has stuck to his guns, even when those guns are aimed squarely at his own feet. Even when he's dead wrong about everything.
Now Bush, whose campaign seems designed to spin rich backers money into vapor, has gone back to the education well one more time with a comprehensive-ish education plan. It really is worth a look, as long as you think of it less as "Jeb! Bush's Bold Plan for US Education" and more "A Compendium of Current Reformster Greatest Hits." I'll be using the "backgrounder" that EdWeek kindly posted on their site. Let's wade in, shall we?
I'm going to address the plan in two parts. Here in Part I, I'll take a look at the lump of self-contradictory principle that is the foundation of Bush's plan. In Part II, we'll get into the nuts and bolts.
Bush opens with a general statement of his guiding theory of change. Here's the critical paragraph:
Governor Bush’s goal is to ensure that all Americans, no matter their background or zip code, graduate from high school, college or career ready, and have the opportunity to pursue affordable post-secondary education or training. Achieving this goal requires a complete overhaul of a system from one that serves bureaucracies to one that serves the needs of families and students. Empowering individuals doesn’t require additional money or programs designed by Washington. What we need is a national focus on fueling innovation and providing quality choices for every student in this country.
We might examine the question of whether or not the current education system serves bureaucracy, and if so, how much of that bureaucracy is the one that Jeb! and other reformsters have put in place over the last decade. The notion that we can fix education without spending another cent (he later calls his plan "budget nuetral") is just foolish, as is the notion that fueling innovation and choice will magically transform the education landscape. Jeb! did his best to use charters to transform the Florida education landscape, and after all these years, there are no innovative successes to point to.
But Bush's statement of principles lays out exactly where the cognitive dissonance lies.
This platform reflects the fundamental belief that every student can learn and that parents — not bureaucrats should make decisions for their child.
Except, of course, that bureaucrats are the ones who will make the decisions about what choices are available, whether parents want those choices or not. Every single implementation of a choice system in this country has involved bureaucrats and policy makers descending on a community and telling that community that they must have choice, and they must have the choices that will be chosen for them by their Betters, even if democratic processes like locally-elected school boards have to be suspended to do it.
It is the great conservative puzzle at the center of reform-- we must empower parents and community members, and we must do it by taking away their elected school boards and telling them what choices they must have.
This paradox runs throughout Bush's plan. His four guiding principles are
* Education decisions should be made as close to the student as possible.
* Choice -- of all kinds -- should be expanded across the board
* Transparency is essential to choice, quality, and results-based accountability
* Innovation requires flexibility
So after giving us Point #1, Jeb! follows with three more points that delineate decisions that will be made at the state and federal level. Choices will be expected and expanded, irregardless of what the locals want. Transparency will provide information about school quality-- as quality is defined by federal authorities. The fourth point is baloney-- Jeb! wants to promise that the feds will hand over money without strings or rules-- except that we just said everyone has to meet accountability standards. One of the ongoing ideas for conservative reformsters has been, "Hey, the taxpayers gave you a big pile of money, and we're entitled to know how you spent it." It's not an unreasonable position, but it hardly meshes with conservative laissez faire principles, and Bush is kidding himself with his "We'll just hand out block grants of Title money and let the states do as they will."
Conservative writer Rick Hess has often observed "The problem is that Washington conservatives can have trouble tackling education in a manner that is faithful to principle." But as long as you have, on the federal level, a particular vision of how educational freedom and quality are supposed to look, you have a conservative conundrum. There's no good, traditional conservative way to say, "We are giving you freedom, and you will get it the way we want you to, and you will get the results that we define as success."
For all the conservative love for choice and freedom, it never seems to include the choice and freedom to do things that conservatives believe are Very Wrong, or to say, "We will pick our own choices to choose from, thanks." That's in part because the very idea of school choice is fundamentally flawed.
First, nobody wants choice. Rich kids don't have an advantage because they have choice-- they have an advantage because they have access to an excellent education. People want a good school. That's it. If someone gets a restaurant meal that is undercooked and cold, they don't say, "Bring me a dozen mediocre meals to chose from." They want what they want, done right.
Second, choice is not "budget neutral." When facing a tight budget, no school district says, "No need to shut down any buildings. It wouldn't save us any money." You can't operate several sets of schools (with several sets of administrators) for the cost of one. Anybody who tries to set up a choice system without a plan to fully fund it is smoking something.
Third, choice as currently conceived, disenfranchises a huge part of the electorate and cuts social responsibility out of the picture. If you don't have a child, you don't have a say in how tax dollars are spent. Choicer "it's the family's choice" rhetoric only goes so far-- nobody is seriously suggesting that vouchers be literal vouchers that students can use to go to school, buy a car, or take a vacation in Europe. Choice never seems to include "I choose no school at all." Choicers haven't suggested doing away with compulsory education, but they can't admit that it's because the students have a level of responsibility to the country that's paying for their education, because that would mean admitting that families are not the only stakeholders in education, which would conflict with the "the money belongs to the family" theory.
But even if we get past those, we arrive again at the conservative conundrum-- if you allow freedom and choice, you have to accept that people may choose things you don't like, including NOT having a bunch of choices. Conservatives-- and Bush is no exception here-- keep calling for a system of imposed choice, which is a big screaming oxymoron.
More to the point, a system of imposed choice is a conservative contradiction, a fundamental violation of traditional conservative principles. For that reason, everything that's going to follow in Part II is actually moot. Bush's foundation is not solid, and the house he tries to build upon it is doomed to fail.
Now Bush, whose campaign seems designed to spin rich backers money into vapor, has gone back to the education well one more time with a comprehensive-ish education plan. It really is worth a look, as long as you think of it less as "Jeb! Bush's Bold Plan for US Education" and more "A Compendium of Current Reformster Greatest Hits." I'll be using the "backgrounder" that EdWeek kindly posted on their site. Let's wade in, shall we?
I'm going to address the plan in two parts. Here in Part I, I'll take a look at the lump of self-contradictory principle that is the foundation of Bush's plan. In Part II, we'll get into the nuts and bolts.
Bush opens with a general statement of his guiding theory of change. Here's the critical paragraph:
Governor Bush’s goal is to ensure that all Americans, no matter their background or zip code, graduate from high school, college or career ready, and have the opportunity to pursue affordable post-secondary education or training. Achieving this goal requires a complete overhaul of a system from one that serves bureaucracies to one that serves the needs of families and students. Empowering individuals doesn’t require additional money or programs designed by Washington. What we need is a national focus on fueling innovation and providing quality choices for every student in this country.
We might examine the question of whether or not the current education system serves bureaucracy, and if so, how much of that bureaucracy is the one that Jeb! and other reformsters have put in place over the last decade. The notion that we can fix education without spending another cent (he later calls his plan "budget nuetral") is just foolish, as is the notion that fueling innovation and choice will magically transform the education landscape. Jeb! did his best to use charters to transform the Florida education landscape, and after all these years, there are no innovative successes to point to.
But Bush's statement of principles lays out exactly where the cognitive dissonance lies.
This platform reflects the fundamental belief that every student can learn and that parents — not bureaucrats should make decisions for their child.
Except, of course, that bureaucrats are the ones who will make the decisions about what choices are available, whether parents want those choices or not. Every single implementation of a choice system in this country has involved bureaucrats and policy makers descending on a community and telling that community that they must have choice, and they must have the choices that will be chosen for them by their Betters, even if democratic processes like locally-elected school boards have to be suspended to do it.
It is the great conservative puzzle at the center of reform-- we must empower parents and community members, and we must do it by taking away their elected school boards and telling them what choices they must have.
This paradox runs throughout Bush's plan. His four guiding principles are
* Education decisions should be made as close to the student as possible.
* Choice -- of all kinds -- should be expanded across the board
* Transparency is essential to choice, quality, and results-based accountability
* Innovation requires flexibility
So after giving us Point #1, Jeb! follows with three more points that delineate decisions that will be made at the state and federal level. Choices will be expected and expanded, irregardless of what the locals want. Transparency will provide information about school quality-- as quality is defined by federal authorities. The fourth point is baloney-- Jeb! wants to promise that the feds will hand over money without strings or rules-- except that we just said everyone has to meet accountability standards. One of the ongoing ideas for conservative reformsters has been, "Hey, the taxpayers gave you a big pile of money, and we're entitled to know how you spent it." It's not an unreasonable position, but it hardly meshes with conservative laissez faire principles, and Bush is kidding himself with his "We'll just hand out block grants of Title money and let the states do as they will."
Conservative writer Rick Hess has often observed "The problem is that Washington conservatives can have trouble tackling education in a manner that is faithful to principle." But as long as you have, on the federal level, a particular vision of how educational freedom and quality are supposed to look, you have a conservative conundrum. There's no good, traditional conservative way to say, "We are giving you freedom, and you will get it the way we want you to, and you will get the results that we define as success."
For all the conservative love for choice and freedom, it never seems to include the choice and freedom to do things that conservatives believe are Very Wrong, or to say, "We will pick our own choices to choose from, thanks." That's in part because the very idea of school choice is fundamentally flawed.
First, nobody wants choice. Rich kids don't have an advantage because they have choice-- they have an advantage because they have access to an excellent education. People want a good school. That's it. If someone gets a restaurant meal that is undercooked and cold, they don't say, "Bring me a dozen mediocre meals to chose from." They want what they want, done right.
Second, choice is not "budget neutral." When facing a tight budget, no school district says, "No need to shut down any buildings. It wouldn't save us any money." You can't operate several sets of schools (with several sets of administrators) for the cost of one. Anybody who tries to set up a choice system without a plan to fully fund it is smoking something.
Third, choice as currently conceived, disenfranchises a huge part of the electorate and cuts social responsibility out of the picture. If you don't have a child, you don't have a say in how tax dollars are spent. Choicer "it's the family's choice" rhetoric only goes so far-- nobody is seriously suggesting that vouchers be literal vouchers that students can use to go to school, buy a car, or take a vacation in Europe. Choice never seems to include "I choose no school at all." Choicers haven't suggested doing away with compulsory education, but they can't admit that it's because the students have a level of responsibility to the country that's paying for their education, because that would mean admitting that families are not the only stakeholders in education, which would conflict with the "the money belongs to the family" theory.
But even if we get past those, we arrive again at the conservative conundrum-- if you allow freedom and choice, you have to accept that people may choose things you don't like, including NOT having a bunch of choices. Conservatives-- and Bush is no exception here-- keep calling for a system of imposed choice, which is a big screaming oxymoron.
More to the point, a system of imposed choice is a conservative contradiction, a fundamental violation of traditional conservative principles. For that reason, everything that's going to follow in Part II is actually moot. Bush's foundation is not solid, and the house he tries to build upon it is doomed to fail.
CA: Teacher Spanked for Tech Generosity
A story from California reminding us that reformsters are not responsible for every single stupid thing that school administrations do.
Chowchilla is a small place, located on the highway between Bakersfield and Modesto, just a little north of Fresno. So, not the lush, money-soaked part of California. This story comes from the Modesto Bee.
Union High School English teacher Kim Kutzner thought she could team up with her husband to help her students out, and the two of them bought a reported almost $80,000 worth of used laptops at auction. The mister refurbished the ninety computers and hooked them into a custom-made classroom network. The classroom network has no internet access; Kutzner talks mostly about using the computers for writing projects.
Chowchilla is not a large place, with a population of around 19,000-- counting the population of the men's and women's prisons in town. Otherwise it is an agricultural town, "completely surrounded by farmland and dairies." Free and reduced lunch school population runs around 67%, but with a graduation rate of 92%. The high school has about 950 students, and over 50% of them are Hispanic. The school has some computer labs, but few classrooms have sets. The school has one computer tech and one IT director (whose education includes Evergreen Valley, San Jose State and University of Phoenix).
So you would think having someone who wanted to go ahead and provide the equipment and expertise to wire up her own classroom would be counted as a win.
But the district says no. Well, at first it said, "That's great of you." Then it said no. The report is a little fuzzy on why, exactly.
Chowchilla Union Principal Justin Miller said the concern is with district policies about outside equipment and whether student data, and what students have access to, is protected under Kutzner’s custom system.
“The biggest concern the district has is making sure that it’s safe and passes all the rules and state and federal governmental regulations, since it was brought in from the outside,” he said. “Depending on the filter and things like that, they might not be safe, so we are reviewing everything and trying to be as safe as possible.”
"Outside equipment." I am trying to imagine a school okaying every piece of... well, anything, that was to come into a building. But it's the technoconcerns that are facepalm-worthy. Kutzner's network is not connected to the internet, but even if it were connected, it would be through the school's internet which the school could then monitor. I'm looking at the school on Google maps, and the only free wi-fi in town appears to be at a Starbucks, a KFC and a Micky D's, all several blocks away from the school. I teach in a school that has one-to-one computing and wi-fi for BYOD (bring your own device) coverage, and every single thing that gets in and out of the building over the internet passes through our firewalls and is monitored. Is it perfectly undefeatable or supremely secure? Of course not. Neither are the cell phones all my students carry.
My point is that if a school is scared that any activated computer can let the demons in that will let students do Terrible Things, A) welcome to the 21st century and B) there are technological tools for dealing with these issues.
But to freak out because somebody brought a computer into the building without having it expressly approved is just kind of bizarre. Do Chowchilla students bring computers from home? Do they carry smart phones?
And to spank a teacher who used her professional judgment and access to donated expertise to upgrade her own classroom is just one more example of an administration's failure to trust the expertise of their professional staff. This is, after all, a teacher described by the superintendent as "one of our best teachers in the district."
I appreciate the district's desire to be cautious about what their students come in contact with; that's an appropriate stance for a district. But it's 2016 and way past time for administrators to have more than just a smattering of technological savvy, and not just view pieces of computer tech as some sort of scary monster that might make Vaguely Bad Things happen.
Chowchilla is a small place, located on the highway between Bakersfield and Modesto, just a little north of Fresno. So, not the lush, money-soaked part of California. This story comes from the Modesto Bee.
Union High School English teacher Kim Kutzner thought she could team up with her husband to help her students out, and the two of them bought a reported almost $80,000 worth of used laptops at auction. The mister refurbished the ninety computers and hooked them into a custom-made classroom network. The classroom network has no internet access; Kutzner talks mostly about using the computers for writing projects.
Chowchilla is not a large place, with a population of around 19,000-- counting the population of the men's and women's prisons in town. Otherwise it is an agricultural town, "completely surrounded by farmland and dairies." Free and reduced lunch school population runs around 67%, but with a graduation rate of 92%. The high school has about 950 students, and over 50% of them are Hispanic. The school has some computer labs, but few classrooms have sets. The school has one computer tech and one IT director (whose education includes Evergreen Valley, San Jose State and University of Phoenix).
So you would think having someone who wanted to go ahead and provide the equipment and expertise to wire up her own classroom would be counted as a win.
But the district says no. Well, at first it said, "That's great of you." Then it said no. The report is a little fuzzy on why, exactly.
Chowchilla Union Principal Justin Miller said the concern is with district policies about outside equipment and whether student data, and what students have access to, is protected under Kutzner’s custom system.
“The biggest concern the district has is making sure that it’s safe and passes all the rules and state and federal governmental regulations, since it was brought in from the outside,” he said. “Depending on the filter and things like that, they might not be safe, so we are reviewing everything and trying to be as safe as possible.”
"Outside equipment." I am trying to imagine a school okaying every piece of... well, anything, that was to come into a building. But it's the technoconcerns that are facepalm-worthy. Kutzner's network is not connected to the internet, but even if it were connected, it would be through the school's internet which the school could then monitor. I'm looking at the school on Google maps, and the only free wi-fi in town appears to be at a Starbucks, a KFC and a Micky D's, all several blocks away from the school. I teach in a school that has one-to-one computing and wi-fi for BYOD (bring your own device) coverage, and every single thing that gets in and out of the building over the internet passes through our firewalls and is monitored. Is it perfectly undefeatable or supremely secure? Of course not. Neither are the cell phones all my students carry.
My point is that if a school is scared that any activated computer can let the demons in that will let students do Terrible Things, A) welcome to the 21st century and B) there are technological tools for dealing with these issues.
But to freak out because somebody brought a computer into the building without having it expressly approved is just kind of bizarre. Do Chowchilla students bring computers from home? Do they carry smart phones?
And to spank a teacher who used her professional judgment and access to donated expertise to upgrade her own classroom is just one more example of an administration's failure to trust the expertise of their professional staff. This is, after all, a teacher described by the superintendent as "one of our best teachers in the district."
I appreciate the district's desire to be cautious about what their students come in contact with; that's an appropriate stance for a district. But it's 2016 and way past time for administrators to have more than just a smattering of technological savvy, and not just view pieces of computer tech as some sort of scary monster that might make Vaguely Bad Things happen.
Monday, January 18, 2016
Cheap or Excellent??
So I'm on twitter, "discussing" this piece by Eric Hanushek. (I air-quote "discussion" not because of any qualities of the people involved, but because nobody can wax eloquent with depth and nuance at 140 characters a shot).
The piece belongs to the genre I think of as Befuddled Mysteries of Failure, in which reformsters scratch their heads at how reformy ideas have not worked. Hanushek's meditation on the intractability of the "achievement gap" (I air-quote "achievement gap" because it's a euphemism for "standardized test score gap") ends in typical bemusement.
Vastly more jarring is that the central goal of the report—the development of an education system that provides equal educational opportunity for all groups, and especially for racial minorities—has not been attained. Achievement gaps remain nearly as large as they were when Coleman and his team put pen to paper, even when better research has suggested ways to close them and even when policies have been promulgated that supposedly are explicitly designed to eliminate them.
"When Coleman and his team put pen to paper" is fifty years ago. But I tweeted that the mystery of why we hadn't yet closed the gap -- well, here, read for yourself the exchange that followed
Because it always starts with talking about the achievement gap and the non-wealthy, non-white students who are being denied as good an education as the burbians get, but then it ends up with insistence that we fix this problem on the cheap.
How could it possibly be cheap? Seriously-- we're talking, particularly if we go back to pre-Civil Rights segregated Jim Crow America, about a system that has systematically and deliberately provided low socio-economic students with underfunded, understaffed, under-resourced schools. How could it possibly NOT involve lots of money to fix that?? I don't honestly know if the 4X figure is correct or not, but if it is, there's another explanation for why we've failed to close any gaps-- because 4X 1954 education spending strikes me as not nearly enough of an increase.
You have two children sitting at a table. Pat is regularly eating full healthful meals packed with nutrients and all the food groups. Chris is eating bread and water and an occasional cup of cereal. Somebody comes in and says, "Well, this is clearly wrong. Chris is starving, while Pat is doing well. Chris should get to eat just as well as Pat does."
The dining room chief comes in and says, "Yes, you're right. But we should only spend as much to feed both of them as we are spending just to feed Pat." How does that even make sense.
This has been the reformster mantra for decades-- we should have better schools for everyone, but it shouldn't cost any more than what we're paying now. Possibly even less. After all, we've already been spending more money every year and it hasn't fixed everything yet. We've quadrupled spending since 1954!! How could we possibly spend more??
Many of the reformsters know better-- particularly the charter boosters. "Send your child to our charter school. It's located in a crumbling shell of a building, and we have no books or computers or other facilities because we understand that schools don't need any of that," said no charter operator ever. No-- charters know several secrets of success and one of those secrets is money. You spend money for a nice building and you spend money for nice resources and you spend so much money that you use both the public tax dollars that "follow" the students plus venture fund investment money plus contributions from well-heeled supporters.
But somehow, the reformster call is still for combating the effects of poverty on the cheap. "We'ver increased spending and that's been a huge waste," is the refrain, based on any one of several theorries, some crazier than others.
Crazy theory number one is that all the money has been stolen by teachers and their unions. People become teachers for the cushy job and the big bucks and to become teachers, they enter into a dark conspiracy with the union, in which the union and teachers agree to make each other rich and powerful while bilking the taxpayers with a bunch of smoke and mirrors and quite possibly refusing to unleash the Secret Methods they know for making students learn. The problem with schools is teachers (just as the problem with health care is doctors and the problem with marriage is husbands and wives). And there are people who fully believe this and I would just as soon argue metallurgy with a 9/11 truther as try to convince them otherwise.
But what about the non-crazy proponents of this theory? What's their theory?
There's the theory of huge waste, that schools are spending money on the educational equivalent of the Pentagon's thousand-dollar hammers. There's the theory of widespread incompetence, and that so much money is just being pissed away by so-called experts who don't know any better. There's the theory that by turning teaching into low-wage piecework, millions of dollars can be liberated (even if that results in a crappy educational "product"). There's the theory, popular among many who work in education, that government regulations have increased the number of non-classroom employees that a district needs (e.g. even a smallish district has probably added in the last fifty years at least one employee whose job is basically to take care of government paperwork). And there is certainly a theory that many things have gotten more expensive since 1954, or even 1984, which dovetails nicely with the theory that schools are asked to provide far more services that they were decades ago. Plenty of us would also agree with the theory that a ton of money never actually makes it to the classroom at all, increasing the per student cost but not actually affecting the students. Plus, as always, the theory that there are many other complicated factors involved, too.
And you know what? I'm a taxpayer in my own district, and I have no desire to see my property taxes ramped up just so we can hand my district a giant pile of money and say, "There you go. We trust you'll do something swell with it." There has to be oversight and accountability.
But it's still not rocket science. If I'm feeding a hundred kids, and I spend $75 on fifty of them and $25 on the other fifty, and I want everyone to be fed the way I'm feeding the high-side fifty, I can't do it with that same hundred dollars. I can't do it by trying to use a slice of the money to fund several other separate charter cafeterias while still running my original one-- there is no economic efficiency in running multiple duplicate services.
Can you look at the pictures coming out of Detroit schools, look at those, scratch your head and say, "Gee, I don't know what these crumbling decaying broken down unrepaired buildings could possibly need. Certainly not any more money. They already got some money."
In 1954, there were all sorts of cost-cutting measures baked into the system. Black kids? We don't really need to educate Those People, so we can do that cheap. Forty kids in a classroom? Sure, why not. It's cheaper than hiring another teachers. Students with any kind of special needs? We don't need to educate Those People, either. Just let them flounder in a regular classroom, or warehouse them in a back room somewhere. In 1954, the graduation rate was 60%-- any students who had problems could just stop being students. That was also a major savings. And teachers, because we are by and large dedicated and clever people (and not part of a dark money-sucking conspiracy) have done great things with small resources, thereby contributing to the illusion that money shouldn't matter.
But how can you possibly hope to bring equity to a system whose major problem has always been a systemic underfunding and underserving or some groups without fixing the financial inequities stuck in the heart of the system. I am tempted to say the true cost of guaranteeing each child an excellent school in his or her neighborhood is impossibly daunting, but then I remember that we somehow "found" a few trillion dollars (I air-quoted "found" because we actually use a combination of time-travel and theft) for war-waging purposes. But that was irresponsible, and I'm not going to advocate for irresponsible spending for anything, even something as essential as education.
Do we want education cheap, or do we want it excellent?
No, you can't say "both." We can't have both. We aren't made of money, so we can't have the caviar-covered Lexus of education for the whole country, and we can certainly make better use of the money we have in some places, and there are certainly areas where we need to discuss aims and goals and systems and equity and proper full funding and all the rest. There are many things about finances and excellence that we need to discuss as a nation.
But we can't have that discussion if we're going to keep lapsing into fantasy mode and suggesting that we should be able to have a new caviar Lexus and used peanut butter Kia prices. We can't say we're going to buy winter coats for everyone, but we'll do it with the same money we used to use to buy winter coats for just a few. We can't keep insisting that setting up cost-inefficient mediocre charters that serve a small percentage of the population are anything like a solution to anything.
If we really want excellent education for everybody (and not just "access" to it-- everybody on the damn Titanic had "access" to a lifeboat), we have some hard choices and some real thinking to do, and right now we've got a bunch of magical thinkers, conspiracy theorists, and cynical profiteers hogging the "conversation" (and I airquote "conversation" because people who are actual lifelong experts are rarely listened to or even invited to speak).
Don't order the steak and then bitch that it costs more than a Big Mac. Don't buy a mega-mansion and complain that it's more expensive to keep than a shotgun shack. And don't insist that you want an equitable education system for all students, then complain that it can't be done for the same amount as the problematic 1954 version.
The piece belongs to the genre I think of as Befuddled Mysteries of Failure, in which reformsters scratch their heads at how reformy ideas have not worked. Hanushek's meditation on the intractability of the "achievement gap" (I air-quote "achievement gap" because it's a euphemism for "standardized test score gap") ends in typical bemusement.
Vastly more jarring is that the central goal of the report—the development of an education system that provides equal educational opportunity for all groups, and especially for racial minorities—has not been attained. Achievement gaps remain nearly as large as they were when Coleman and his team put pen to paper, even when better research has suggested ways to close them and even when policies have been promulgated that supposedly are explicitly designed to eliminate them.
"When Coleman and his team put pen to paper" is fifty years ago. But I tweeted that the mystery of why we hadn't yet closed the gap -- well, here, read for yourself the exchange that followed
Perhaps. One of those policies was to increase per-pupil spending by 4x since 1954. @palan57 @boardseyeview
— Dmitri Mehlhorn (@DmitriMehlhorn) January 18, 2016
And a whole bunch of people just loved that response. Liked it, retweeted it. And I realized, watching the retweets pile up, how tired I am of this particular argument.Because it always starts with talking about the achievement gap and the non-wealthy, non-white students who are being denied as good an education as the burbians get, but then it ends up with insistence that we fix this problem on the cheap.
How could it possibly be cheap? Seriously-- we're talking, particularly if we go back to pre-Civil Rights segregated Jim Crow America, about a system that has systematically and deliberately provided low socio-economic students with underfunded, understaffed, under-resourced schools. How could it possibly NOT involve lots of money to fix that?? I don't honestly know if the 4X figure is correct or not, but if it is, there's another explanation for why we've failed to close any gaps-- because 4X 1954 education spending strikes me as not nearly enough of an increase.
You have two children sitting at a table. Pat is regularly eating full healthful meals packed with nutrients and all the food groups. Chris is eating bread and water and an occasional cup of cereal. Somebody comes in and says, "Well, this is clearly wrong. Chris is starving, while Pat is doing well. Chris should get to eat just as well as Pat does."
The dining room chief comes in and says, "Yes, you're right. But we should only spend as much to feed both of them as we are spending just to feed Pat." How does that even make sense.
This has been the reformster mantra for decades-- we should have better schools for everyone, but it shouldn't cost any more than what we're paying now. Possibly even less. After all, we've already been spending more money every year and it hasn't fixed everything yet. We've quadrupled spending since 1954!! How could we possibly spend more??
Many of the reformsters know better-- particularly the charter boosters. "Send your child to our charter school. It's located in a crumbling shell of a building, and we have no books or computers or other facilities because we understand that schools don't need any of that," said no charter operator ever. No-- charters know several secrets of success and one of those secrets is money. You spend money for a nice building and you spend money for nice resources and you spend so much money that you use both the public tax dollars that "follow" the students plus venture fund investment money plus contributions from well-heeled supporters.
But somehow, the reformster call is still for combating the effects of poverty on the cheap. "We'ver increased spending and that's been a huge waste," is the refrain, based on any one of several theorries, some crazier than others.
Crazy theory number one is that all the money has been stolen by teachers and their unions. People become teachers for the cushy job and the big bucks and to become teachers, they enter into a dark conspiracy with the union, in which the union and teachers agree to make each other rich and powerful while bilking the taxpayers with a bunch of smoke and mirrors and quite possibly refusing to unleash the Secret Methods they know for making students learn. The problem with schools is teachers (just as the problem with health care is doctors and the problem with marriage is husbands and wives). And there are people who fully believe this and I would just as soon argue metallurgy with a 9/11 truther as try to convince them otherwise.
But what about the non-crazy proponents of this theory? What's their theory?
There's the theory of huge waste, that schools are spending money on the educational equivalent of the Pentagon's thousand-dollar hammers. There's the theory of widespread incompetence, and that so much money is just being pissed away by so-called experts who don't know any better. There's the theory that by turning teaching into low-wage piecework, millions of dollars can be liberated (even if that results in a crappy educational "product"). There's the theory, popular among many who work in education, that government regulations have increased the number of non-classroom employees that a district needs (e.g. even a smallish district has probably added in the last fifty years at least one employee whose job is basically to take care of government paperwork). And there is certainly a theory that many things have gotten more expensive since 1954, or even 1984, which dovetails nicely with the theory that schools are asked to provide far more services that they were decades ago. Plenty of us would also agree with the theory that a ton of money never actually makes it to the classroom at all, increasing the per student cost but not actually affecting the students. Plus, as always, the theory that there are many other complicated factors involved, too.
And you know what? I'm a taxpayer in my own district, and I have no desire to see my property taxes ramped up just so we can hand my district a giant pile of money and say, "There you go. We trust you'll do something swell with it." There has to be oversight and accountability.
But it's still not rocket science. If I'm feeding a hundred kids, and I spend $75 on fifty of them and $25 on the other fifty, and I want everyone to be fed the way I'm feeding the high-side fifty, I can't do it with that same hundred dollars. I can't do it by trying to use a slice of the money to fund several other separate charter cafeterias while still running my original one-- there is no economic efficiency in running multiple duplicate services.
Can you look at the pictures coming out of Detroit schools, look at those, scratch your head and say, "Gee, I don't know what these crumbling decaying broken down unrepaired buildings could possibly need. Certainly not any more money. They already got some money."
In 1954, there were all sorts of cost-cutting measures baked into the system. Black kids? We don't really need to educate Those People, so we can do that cheap. Forty kids in a classroom? Sure, why not. It's cheaper than hiring another teachers. Students with any kind of special needs? We don't need to educate Those People, either. Just let them flounder in a regular classroom, or warehouse them in a back room somewhere. In 1954, the graduation rate was 60%-- any students who had problems could just stop being students. That was also a major savings. And teachers, because we are by and large dedicated and clever people (and not part of a dark money-sucking conspiracy) have done great things with small resources, thereby contributing to the illusion that money shouldn't matter.
But how can you possibly hope to bring equity to a system whose major problem has always been a systemic underfunding and underserving or some groups without fixing the financial inequities stuck in the heart of the system. I am tempted to say the true cost of guaranteeing each child an excellent school in his or her neighborhood is impossibly daunting, but then I remember that we somehow "found" a few trillion dollars (I air-quoted "found" because we actually use a combination of time-travel and theft) for war-waging purposes. But that was irresponsible, and I'm not going to advocate for irresponsible spending for anything, even something as essential as education.
Do we want education cheap, or do we want it excellent?
No, you can't say "both." We can't have both. We aren't made of money, so we can't have the caviar-covered Lexus of education for the whole country, and we can certainly make better use of the money we have in some places, and there are certainly areas where we need to discuss aims and goals and systems and equity and proper full funding and all the rest. There are many things about finances and excellence that we need to discuss as a nation.
But we can't have that discussion if we're going to keep lapsing into fantasy mode and suggesting that we should be able to have a new caviar Lexus and used peanut butter Kia prices. We can't say we're going to buy winter coats for everyone, but we'll do it with the same money we used to use to buy winter coats for just a few. We can't keep insisting that setting up cost-inefficient mediocre charters that serve a small percentage of the population are anything like a solution to anything.
If we really want excellent education for everybody (and not just "access" to it-- everybody on the damn Titanic had "access" to a lifeboat), we have some hard choices and some real thinking to do, and right now we've got a bunch of magical thinkers, conspiracy theorists, and cynical profiteers hogging the "conversation" (and I airquote "conversation" because people who are actual lifelong experts are rarely listened to or even invited to speak).
Don't order the steak and then bitch that it costs more than a Big Mac. Don't buy a mega-mansion and complain that it's more expensive to keep than a shotgun shack. And don't insist that you want an equitable education system for all students, then complain that it can't be done for the same amount as the problematic 1954 version.
LA: Buying a School Board
Danielle Dreilinger of the Time-Picayune and NOLA.com published an incredible story last week, outlining how some businessmen worked to buy themselves some members of the Jefferson Parish School Board in the 2010 election.
The Times-Picayune/NOLA.com had to sue its way to the Louisiana Supreme Court, but the eventual result was 285 pages of emails from the government account of Lucien Gunter, former executive director of the public Jefferson Economic Development Commission and the private Jefferson Business Council and Committee for a Better Jefferson. Those emails leave no doubt that some business interests set out to push the teachers union aside, put their own people on the board, and make sure that their elected people did as they were told.
The time lag is due in part to a suit by one of Gunter's correspondents to keep the emails from being released, a suit that resulted in emails that were released, but with many private citizen names redacted. Dreilinger does not mention it, but I'm willing to bet that the lawsuits have also resulted in some government in-service training on How Not To Use Your Government Email Illegally For Your Own Private Baloney.
Journalists have done a lot of digging through those pages, and I recommend that you read the full article for the whole ugly picture. But here are some of the uglier parts.
The coalition, which called itself the "Enough Is Enough" coalition was led and coordinated by Jim Garvey, an elected member of the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. In fact, in a "white paper" written by the business interests, he was called "the leader of their 'Strike Force'" Think about that for a second-- an elected member of the state education board conspiring with local businessmen to make off with a local school board election.
The Committee for a Better Jefferson was resurrected specifically to run the campaign, which kicked off by seeking out and recruiting the candidates they wanted.
Now, you may think, politicians and businessmen look for and support like-minded candidates all the time. It's part of how a democracy works, kind of.
But the CBJ required each recruited candidate to sign a "detailed pledge" that was basically their marching orders, including boosting charters and Teach for America, and then each candidate wa assigned a handler who coached them on talking points. This is not the support of like-minded candidates. This is setting up some sock puppets to hold elected public office while being stricty answerable to private inerests.
The emails express a sense of ownership. One person wrote, "We need to be aware of and in control of our candidates meetings with incumbents." When one candidate made a public comment about wondering who might help him raise money, Gunter jumped in: "These candidates have been briefed on more than one occasion and that kind of comment is unacceptable," he wrote, and spoke darkly of penalizing the "guilty" party.
The details are numerous and depressing. One email writer notes that he hasn't yet given his check to "the guy who is running in my home district (and can't even remember his name) Please send me his name."
The emails cover the collecting and funneling of campaign money for the sock puppets. Garvey wants to avoid any obvious buying of candidates and suggests making the checks in smaller amounts. Another member of the committee spins ideas about keeping school buses busy on election day so that they can't be used to take people to the polls.
They were also careful to make sure that the campaign seemed to come from a collection of concerned individuals and not a coalition of business groups.
Ultimately the sock puppets won, and Garvey et al were ready with transitional plans for them. At that point the email supply ends.
The good news is that the sequel to the 2010 election was the 2014 election in which pro-union candidates pushed the sock puppet majority out. But the bigger lesson is that if teachers, students and school leaders in some parts of the country have the feeling that business leaders and state-level elected officials are actively, but semi-secretly, working against them, they are correct.
Read the full article here, then add it to your file of "No, the privatizers really are pulling every dirty trick in the book to get their hands on public tax dollars" stories.
The Times-Picayune/NOLA.com had to sue its way to the Louisiana Supreme Court, but the eventual result was 285 pages of emails from the government account of Lucien Gunter, former executive director of the public Jefferson Economic Development Commission and the private Jefferson Business Council and Committee for a Better Jefferson. Those emails leave no doubt that some business interests set out to push the teachers union aside, put their own people on the board, and make sure that their elected people did as they were told.
The time lag is due in part to a suit by one of Gunter's correspondents to keep the emails from being released, a suit that resulted in emails that were released, but with many private citizen names redacted. Dreilinger does not mention it, but I'm willing to bet that the lawsuits have also resulted in some government in-service training on How Not To Use Your Government Email Illegally For Your Own Private Baloney.
Journalists have done a lot of digging through those pages, and I recommend that you read the full article for the whole ugly picture. But here are some of the uglier parts.
The coalition, which called itself the "Enough Is Enough" coalition was led and coordinated by Jim Garvey, an elected member of the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. In fact, in a "white paper" written by the business interests, he was called "the leader of their 'Strike Force'" Think about that for a second-- an elected member of the state education board conspiring with local businessmen to make off with a local school board election.
The Committee for a Better Jefferson was resurrected specifically to run the campaign, which kicked off by seeking out and recruiting the candidates they wanted.
Now, you may think, politicians and businessmen look for and support like-minded candidates all the time. It's part of how a democracy works, kind of.
But the CBJ required each recruited candidate to sign a "detailed pledge" that was basically their marching orders, including boosting charters and Teach for America, and then each candidate wa assigned a handler who coached them on talking points. This is not the support of like-minded candidates. This is setting up some sock puppets to hold elected public office while being stricty answerable to private inerests.
The emails express a sense of ownership. One person wrote, "We need to be aware of and in control of our candidates meetings with incumbents." When one candidate made a public comment about wondering who might help him raise money, Gunter jumped in: "These candidates have been briefed on more than one occasion and that kind of comment is unacceptable," he wrote, and spoke darkly of penalizing the "guilty" party.
The details are numerous and depressing. One email writer notes that he hasn't yet given his check to "the guy who is running in my home district (and can't even remember his name) Please send me his name."
The emails cover the collecting and funneling of campaign money for the sock puppets. Garvey wants to avoid any obvious buying of candidates and suggests making the checks in smaller amounts. Another member of the committee spins ideas about keeping school buses busy on election day so that they can't be used to take people to the polls.
They were also careful to make sure that the campaign seemed to come from a collection of concerned individuals and not a coalition of business groups.
Ultimately the sock puppets won, and Garvey et al were ready with transitional plans for them. At that point the email supply ends.
The good news is that the sequel to the 2010 election was the 2014 election in which pro-union candidates pushed the sock puppet majority out. But the bigger lesson is that if teachers, students and school leaders in some parts of the country have the feeling that business leaders and state-level elected officials are actively, but semi-secretly, working against them, they are correct.
Read the full article here, then add it to your file of "No, the privatizers really are pulling every dirty trick in the book to get their hands on public tax dollars" stories.
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