What Does Moms for Liberty Really Want?

As folks in Florida--the steaming petri dish in which Moms for Liberty originally grew--it's important to remember the third founding member of the group.

"Founded in January 2021 by Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich, Moms for Liberty" is the pretty standard version of their one-line origin story. Descovitch and Justice make a fine pair of faces for the group--two moms who ran for their school boards, won once, and then once they had a track record, were rejected by voters a second time. 

M4L took a few months to find their footing, aka the issues that they could use to fire folks up. They got into the game by flogging masks, but quickly circled around to "CRT" panic, ferreting out naughty books, and anti-union grievance, all under the umbrella of parental rights. They added a seasoned PR pro in Quisha King (former regional coordinator of Black Voices for Trump), and they also moved pretty quickly to mute the involvement of the third founding Mom.

That's Bridget Ziegler. Ziegler squeaked out a victory for Sarasota School Board in 2018. Ron DeSantis thinks she's swell. And she's married to Christian Ziegler, who just decided not to run for re-election to a county commissioner seat because he'll be busy helping his wife and DeSantis each run their own campaigns (that and new rules that would have made it harder for him to win). Ziegler has some other gigs as well-- vice chairman of the Republican Party of Florida and head of his consulting firm Microtargeted Media LLC.

Christian Ziegler told the Washington Post that he has been "been trying for a dozen years to get 20- and 30-year-old females involved with the Republican Party, and it was a heavy lift to get that demographic" That was in October of 2021, when Ziegler's involvement had gone quiet; Tim Craig at WaPo reported that Ziegler's wife was "loosely" connected to M4L--not that she was a co-founder of this group that emerged to accomplish just what Ziegler had long searched for a tool to accomplish. 

Christian Ziegler's Microtargeted Media ("We do digital and go after people on their phones") was a big player in the 2020 Florida race, on the ground for Trump and other GOP candidates. He pulled in $300K from a Trump-related PAC. He was once a Heritage Foundation Fellow. He's buddies with Corey Lewandowski. He appears to be behind the Protect Wyoming Values PAC (a Trump anti-Liz Cheney proxy), Governor Kristi Noem's election integrity website, and a bunch of other conservative Trump-backing websites. You may remember Andrew Pollack, the Parkland parent who came out against gun control and in favor of hardening the target, getting an invite to Trump's White House among other places. How did he get such big exposure so quickly? Let Pollack explain himself:

Just days after the Parkland shooting, Christian with Microtargeted Media reached out and offered to help guide me with my communications, press relations and he launched my social media outreach channels, giving me a vital distribution channels to get my message out. Christian also helped connect me with his network of elected leaders, so that I could advocate for and eventually pass school safety legislation. This was all done pro-bono and simply because he had a passion to help.

In November of 2021 he was telling Breitbart about the shift in Florida's GOP-Dem balance because pro-freedom conservatives were flocking to Florida out of love for the Trump-DeSantis wing of the party, damping down the Democratic majority (so, sometimes replacement is good, I guess). His critics have called him an "empty-suit candidate" backed by developers' dark money.

All this for a guy who, in 2017 at the age of 29, was a "30 under 30 rising star of Florida politics." In that interview he told an admittedly cool story about meeting GW Bush on a plane at age 9, and opined about the importance of integrity and honesty in politics. He particularly admired business owners turned elected officials, like Medicare fraudster Rick Scott (so, wiggle room on that integrity and honesty thing).

Point is, Bridget Ziegler is married to a well-connected guy who would like to bag some votes for GOP candidates.

Moms For Liberty is very much a GOP joint. There was a time when they tried to lay claim to bipartisanhip; not so much these days. They even won an award from the Heritage Foundation. And they're backing parental rights, but Florida-style, as in all parents have rights to make choices about their children's education as long as the choices are acceptable. Parents should not be free to choose drag queen shows or Certain Naughty Books or a school with anything carrying the faintest whiff of "CRT" Justice has said that they're going to "take over" school boards and then fire everyone and get search firms to find new conservative leaders. 

I've seen choice fans argue "Hey, wait a minute, I thought the idea is parents could choose what they wanted," and no, that's not the idea at all, and I can almost feel bad for actual school choice advocates who have hitched their wagon to people like M4L who use the same language to mean something completely opposite. Choice MAGA style means choice only for the Right People-- Those Other People over there should have their preferences outlawed. 

So what are Moms For Liberty really after. I'm sure that varies from place to place. I'll bet there are some local M4L chapters with women who really just want their public school to pay attention to them.

But the further back you step and the larger the picture you look at, M4L just looks like one more sucker-covered tentacle of the outrage octopus, which is not so much interested in raising problems to solve them as it is in communicating that thrumming subtext of "Your government and your institutions are filled with evil people that you can't trust, so you'd better get out there and vote." Or as Laura Jedeed wrote in May of this year about the many Moms--

All of them—knowingly or not—are part of the best strategy to win the midterm elections since the Tea Party movement in 2010.

I've often said that M4L feels very Tea Party for me-- not completely astro-turf like, say, Parents Defending Education, but definitely not organic grass roots, either. Of course, what happened with the Tea Party was that the GOP establishment thought they could use a bunch of angry yokels to power up the party, and instead they found themselves pushed to the back of the tent and before they knew it--Donald Trump!. "Let's just poke this giant octopus until it gets angry enough that we can ride it into power," they said, just before the authentically pissed-off beast took a eight-piece bite out of their establishment asses. 

So hard to say what will happen this time. The plan may call for M4L to fade away, like attacking immigrant caravans and The War on Terror, once November passes and the results are in. But history (and recent history at that) tells us that even if you rouse the octopus with lies and baloney just so you can put its suckers to work for you, once it's really worked up and especially if it starts to feel powerful, you may not get it to sink back into the deep.

Which is unfortunate because M4L is doing real damage to teachers, students, public education, and the bonds of trust that help the country function. They may have been raised up to help agitate the base and win some elections; we'll see what else they decide to run at. 

FL: Looking For Staff In South America

 Another small bulletin from the Department of Effects of the Teacher Exodus.

Osceola County is in central Florida, home to roughly 389,000 people, over half of whom are Hispanic. It's the twelfth most Hispanic-majority county in the country, one of three such counties in the state. Their school system has faced the usual issues in recent years, from battles over masking to school board members in prolonged political clashes to hiring an ex-legislator to lobby for the district after that representative resigned his seat over a prostitution scandal. Okay, maybe that last one is a little unusual.

But they have one other usual problem--teaching positions they have trouble filling. 

Can't imagine why anyone in Florida would have trouble recruiting teachers. 140 positions remain unfilled. So they hired a company to headhunt for them--in South America.

School board Vice Chair Julius Melendez has some theories about the problem: confusion caused by the pandemic, disappointment over low salaries and fear of mass shootings, he suggested, "has made it hard to retain veteran teachers and recruit new ones." I suspect having state leaders who are openly hostile to public education doesn't help, either. 

It's not a brand new idea. In 2019, CNN did a whole feature story about districts looking to hire from overseas. Arizona was bringing folks in from the Philippines to fill spots back in 2014, and they must have been happy with the results because it was still a thing in 2019. Osceola calls this a short term fix, but they might want to talk to Arizona about that.

It's an educational rock and a staffing hard place. We know there is not really a teaching shortage, but more of a decent pay, working conditions, and treatment of the job respect shortage, but at this point, we're so far down this hole that if all of those conditions were solved tomorrow (spoiler alert: they won't be, and they especially won't be in Ron DeSantis's Florida) it would still take a couple of years to fill the pipeline again. 

"Any warm body" rules changes and "outsourcing to countries where people will put up with our crap" initiatives are not a solution to the actual problem. All these fans of the free market ought to understand, as I've said before, when I can't buy a Porsche for $1.98, that doesn't mean there's a car shortage. If you can't buy what you want (in this case, the labor of teachers) for what you're offering, you have to make a better offer. 

In the meantime, we'll get more creative solutions of the "anything but improve our offer" variety. Good luck, Florida.

Is There A School-Scripting Miracle In Kenya?

Short answer: no.

Now for the longer answer.

All of a sudden, the interwebz are buzzing, or at least humming mildly, with news of a highly-standardized education-flavored business that has been found accomplishing awesome things in Kenya, and, hey, maybe there's a lesson for schools everywhere in what they've accomplished. (You can find some of the gushing here and here.) The company is being unironically touted as a McDonald's. Yay?

This new enthusiasm is prompted by a working paper by some reputable economists (Guthrie Gray-Lobe, Anthony Keats, Noble winner Michael Kremer, Isaac Mbiti, and Owen Ozier)-- "Can Education Be Standardized? Evidence from Kenya."

We'll get to that in a moment, but let's set up a little context and history first.

About the company

NewGlobe is the corporation behind this operation, and Bridge International Academies is their product. (Actually, Bridge International Academies used to be the businesss, and at some point, fro some reason, they rebranded as NewGlobe.) We've looked at them on this blog before. 

Jay Kimmelman graduated from Harvard in 1999, launched an edu-business (Edusoft), sold it, and decided to make his mark in education more globally, opening the first Bridge Academy in 2009.

Kimmelman communicates his vision pretty clearly. On his LinkedIN page, the description of Bridge used to include this: "Bridge disrupts the education status quo by ensuring that every child, regardless
of parental income, has access to the education he or she deserves." But that word "deserves" cuts several directions, and it raises the question-- who decides what these children deserve? 

Nowadays his LinkedIn focuses on NewGlobe "supporting visionary governments to transform their public education systems at speed and scale" as the "world's leading cloud-powered learning solution for populations living on less than $2 per person per day."

The "cloud-powered" part is important to their model. Each Bridge teacher works with a Bridge-provided tablet, from which they get their highly-specific scripted instructions. Per the working paper, this is backstopped by supervisors who are supposed to check in "teachers" multiple times a day to make sure they're doing what they're supposed to be; these supervisors have scripts of their own, and  classrooms are built with large open windows on one wall so that supervisors can more easily check "teacher" work. Bridge often tries to downplay this lockstep standardization, as in this recent Education Next piece that tries to sell the model as just a bunch of supports and individual professional choices, but in this NPR piece from 2013, Kimmelman's co-founder and wife Shannon May, lays out the vision:

"If you were at one of the other 200 locations right now, you'd be seeing the exact same thing," she says. "In some ways, it is kind of the magic of it."

That "magic" of standardized lesson plans changes the role of the teacher. It allows Bridge to hold down costs because it can hire teachers who don't have college degrees.

Kimmelman himself has frequently compared the company to McDonalds or Starbucks and their model of standardizing and controlling the process so much that the individual meat widgets being employed don't really matter. The study notes that the schools use technology help standardize, "like many other firms, from Ford Motors to Uber."

You'll be unsurprised to know that neither Kimmelman, May, nor their other founding partner, serial entrepreneur Phil Frei (who has since moved on)-- none of them have actual background in education. It's no surprise that the vast majority of what's written about Bridge, both by itself and others, is focused on the business aspect. Take this paragraph from a 2013 profile in Wired.

The winning idea — basic education as a business — sounds counterintuitive, but it was central to planning for the couple and their cofounder, Phil Frei. For parents hovering around $2 in income per day, a potentially transformative education for their kids was just one of many things they couldn’t afford. The demand, however, remains enormous — the global market for low-cost private education is $51 billion annually. To meet the demand, May says, “we drive the price point low enough so parents can become consumers.”

From the beginning, not everyone was a fan. When Bridge angled to take over public education in Liberia, The New Dawn ("truly independent") of Liberia ran a headline about the government facing massive revolts over selling off the business of educating their poor:

International and local experts say such arrangement is not only a blatant violation of Liberia’s international obligations under the right to education, and have no justification under Liberia’s constitution, but will also deny indigents and poor access to quality education.

Eventually Bridge had to enter a new "partnership" arrangement in Liberia.

In Uganda, the government shut Bridge down. The BBC reported in 2016 that officials found problems with "teacher" absenteeism, as well as "teachers" not being able to pass basic literacy and math tests. Two thirds of the students didn't finish primary education. School buildings were unsanitary. After the government pulled the plug after just one year, Bridge took them to court--and lost. 

In 2018, the East Africa Centre for Human Rights, a Kenyan NGOI, filed formal complaints against Bridge, alleging that the Bridge violated national and international law with their operational model. 

A 2019 study in Kenya found Bridge to be an absolute mess. Officials who looked at the Kenyan Bridge schools “describe this method of teaching as ‘robotic’, ‘too controlling’, ‘disabling the teachers from using their creativity and innovativeness’, ‘neocolonial’ and representing a form of ‘slavery.’”

May's response to that critique, given in a friendly interview with Peter Coy, is special:

“I think of it like music,” May said. “There’s a certain order of notes. Those notes have been standardized. They’re on a clef. Piano or forte. The composer is guiding you.”

So there you have it. The lessons are in words, and the words are in a language, rendered in lines on a screen, so there you are. I'm not sure what her argument is here. Maybe it's that musicians have to follow the conductor and the printed music, so teachers should also be required to follow a single conductor. Musicians aren't really free, so teachers shouldn't be, either? But if we're after a music analogy, Bridge would be like requiring every musician in the country to only ever play the same piece on the same instrument at the same time. 

So, not great. But how are the test scores??

So the business model is using low-cost, mostly-unqualified "teachers" to deliver a scripted curriculum as a way to turn a profit serving poor Third World families. It is, admittedly, perhaps a step up from what might be otherwise available. At the same time, I doubt that any of the deep-pocketed venture money guys and philanthrocapilalists (Gates, Zuckerberg, the International Finance Corporation, even Pearson at one point have all ponied up $$) would allow their own children to be subjected to this form of edu-biz.

But back to why we're hearing about Bridge again. That study.

Some reformsters are excited, apparently, because maybe Bridge's work is a proof of concept for highly standardized education delivered by low-cost low-skill non-union widgets. Education Next's coverage has a more sedate headline now, but in the URL they're excited about the "McDonalds of African private schools."

The headline results are that primary students (eight grades) "gained 2.89 years of Kenyan schooling after being enrolled at Bridge for two years, an additional 0.89 years compared to pupils enrolled at other schools over the same period." Pre-primary students “gained 3.48 equivalent years of schooling, an additional 1.48 years compared to pupils enrolled in other schools.” That's based on Kenyan's five subject area tests (which raises the question of what kind of subject area tests is Kenya giving to pre-primary students). 

Let's start with the most obvious problem here: any time a study is measuring learning in time units, you know you're reading baloney. Days or weeks or years of learning are just a sleight of hand for making test scores seem meaningful. What the study actually finds is that test scores went up a little more for Bridge students than comparable Kenyan public school students. I'm not saying that's useless information, but let's talk about what we're really talking about. That will allow us to have the conversation we need to have about just how much we care about test scores (spoiler alert: way more than we have any good reason to). These are tests scores, not "dramatic learning gains."  Did I mention that the paper is by economists?

Also, don't be distracted by the phrasing of those gains-- it's the "additional" part that matters. but it's the bigger numbers that keep getting reported. 

We should remember, too, that getting big gains is easiest when you start in the basement. Kenya's education system has many, many problems.

Digging into the rest of the paper, one finds more of the same old information about Bridge. In Kenya, three quarters of the public and private school teachers have more than a high school diploma; at Bridge, the study found teachers were "younger, less experienced, and more likely to be novice (first-year) teachers" and only one quarter of them had more than a secondary school education. They were paid between one fifth and one third of average public school teacher, and worked longer hours, including Saturdays. Only 23% of Bridge's primary school teachers had a teaching certificate when hired.

Do these unprepared teachers get any training? The study reports that new Bridge "teachers" get a "ten-day training to introduce them to the tablet computers and provide instruction and practice on delivering lessons from the tablets as well as on entering student performance data." But thanks in large part to their low pay, Bridge's cost-per-pupil spending is one third of that in public schools. Ka-ching!

The study comments on Bridge's desire to operate "at scale" for one particular sector of the market. Again, other businesses provide the model:

Like McDonald’s, Walmart, and many other firms using standardization, Bridge is targeted to a mass market, not to consumers at the high end of the income distribution.

The report further notes, "the population served by Bridge tend to be non-elite." No kidding. But there attempt to scale through ordinary market means seems doomed. When the study was conducted, Bridge had 405 private schools; since the time of the study, they have closed 293 of them. The marketplace does not seem to want what Bridge is selling-- long hours, unqualified teachers, and "very basic physical structures." In 2017, says the report, almost half of the families that won the lottery for Bridge seats said, "Never mind."  But have no fear; Bridge moved to the model it has used in other countries of getting themselves hired by the government, rather than by parents, to help run public schools. Ka-ching!

And once again, as has been the case in multiple countries, Bridge failed at the basic job of keeping students safe, from unsafe building conditions to many teachers whose classroom management technique was a, literally, a big stick.

Peter Coy thinks Bridge is super duper, that they have "built a better mousetrap," which is one of the poorer metaphors for education I've read. Coy writes for the New York Times about--surprise--not education, but business and economics. He blames much of the pushback against Bridge on unions. 

Asked by Coy for a US analog of their approach of "rigorous public schools for low-income students," NewGlobe mentioned Success Academy (where the school carefully selects for families that fit their approach) and KIPP. KIPP is certainly an interesting choice; in recent years KIPP has seriously revamped its approach to focus on anti-racism. Co-founder Dave Levin wrote a letter of deep apology in June of 2020. 

There's a legitimate conversation to be had about Bridge's work in Africa, and whether or not it's a good idea to sell a bottom-shelf model to people who barely have access to any shelf at all, though if a Chinese company rolled into the Department of Education and said, "Let us have the contract for educating all your really poor people, but you can't regulate us at all," many people would have some words to say.

But to argue that Bridge has discovered something--anything--that can be used as a proof of concept or model for implementation in the US is baloney. Meanwhile, in 2013 Wired noted that  "The founders intend to be serving half a million children in 30 countries by 2015, and 10 million by 2025."

PA: Mastriano Would Be A Disaster For Education

Doug Mastriano upset the GOP establishment by walking away with the Republican nomination for governor. Everyone else is going to have ample opportunity to be alarmed by this far-right Christian nationalist in the months ahead.

Mastriano is a hard-core MAGA as they come. He has been a huge promoter of the Big Lie, including a a staged hearing that allowed more air time for a parade of debunked Big Lie baloney (including a call-in from Beloved Leader). He has sworn that belief in the Big Lie will be job requirement #1 for his secretary of state. He got as bill through the PA Senate removing a residency requirement for partisan poll watchers (how could that possibly go wrong). Ban abortion completely. Unrestricted gun ownership. And his support from and for christianists is huge.

Based on all that, you can probably guess what Mastriano's ideas are about education, and I'm here to tell you that you haven't imagined anything radical enough.

In an interview, Mastriano laid out his plans. Here are some of the highlights.

Per pupil spending. Because per pupil spending varies from district to district, the average per-pupil spending estimates vary. According to the US Census, it's about $15,798. Conservative groups like to estimate it higher, the better to make the case for taxpayer relief. The right-leaning Commonwealth Foundation puts the number at $19,900. Mastriano is running with $19,000.

He would like to cut that in half. 

I think instead of 19,000, we fund each student around 9,000 or 10,000 and they can decide which school to go to, public school, private school, religious school, cyber school or home school. And the money goes to the kids. And I believe that would incentivize and drive down the costs of public education.

This idea--that about $10K ought to be enough, and by gutting spending we'll just unleash a storm of creative ways to "drive down the costs"-- is the same package that surfaced among the Free Staters of rural New Hampshire. It is, simply, nuts. There is no district anywhere in the state that is spending twice as much as it needs to just because it's not creative enough; that's why there's a long-standing lawsuit about adequate ed funding in PA winding its way through court. This is part and parcel of the far right initiative to end public education and replace it with taxpayer-funded religious schooling.

How would Mastriano accomplish this cut? By simply cutting property taxes to something between practically nothing and actually nothing. We don't need it, he argues, because private and charter schools are cheap. Vouchers will fix it. Just need a little "outside the box" thinking. This is less "outside the box" and more "dumb." We'll get into all the reason why another day, but for the moment, let's stick to just one-- since the state contributes roughly 35% of the funding for public education, ending property taxes would, in most areas, cut funding by more--in many cases way more--than 50%. Will the state be making that up? How?

Mastriano is heavy on vouchers all the way, insisting that by cutting funding, Pennsylvania will makes its schools better (based on "he just thinks so). He has some other thoughts about school quality as well

With the rise in broken homes in certain communities, more students are coming to school unprepared to learn. No amount of money is going to allow these schools to do what they cannot: fill in for disengaged or absent parents.

You know. "Certain communities." Those people.

There's more of the same. old baloney. Teachers get paid too much and schools are awash in money because of The Unions. So, trouble filling teaching positions not on his list of problems to address (but then, if everyone is schooling at home, on line, or in private religious schools, not a problem, I guess). 

Would his $9,500-ish vouchers pay for a good education? Charters cost more. The majority of private schools cost more. But people who had the resources to pay the difference would do fine. People with fewer resources (you know--in Certain Communities) would be stuck with whatever bargain basement education their voucher would fund. 

But that's the thing about vouchers. It's about the government washing their hands of parents, about saying, "We gave you a voucher. Your kid's education is now your problem. Go shopping in our unregulated market place, where schools may or may not be providing a good education, and schools don't have to take your kid if they don't want to! Good luck--it's your problem now."

Many observers are saying that Mastriano has no chance because he's too much of a whack job. But the signs in my neck of the woods say otherwise. And I'm sure we all remember the candidate in 2016 who was too whacky to have a shot. 

Still, Tom Corbett became a one-term governor because he was stuck with the blame for a $1 billion cut in education spending; Mastriano is proposing many billions more than that. That might be a problem for him. On the other hand, from books to LGBTQ issues to anything else they can come up with, the right has been pushing hard on the idea that public education can't be trusted. 

Columnist Will Bunch is concerned that more people aren't making a big deal out of Mastriano's education position, and I share that concern. Mastriano would be an absolute disaster for public education in Pennsylvania. I sure hope that people who care will be taking action in the months ahead.

ICYMI: Now We Are Five Edition (6/12)

This week the board of directors celebrated their most recent birthday. Also this week, they finished pre-school, and the CMO finished her year in the teaching trenches, so we are shifting into a whole other gear here at the Institute. Let's see what there is to read.

First North Dakota teacher named Albert Einstein Fellow from West Fargo Schools, but denied leave

Only fifteen educators get this recognition each year, but this teacher's district just sees a staffing problem--in other words, their problem. 

Tutoring our way to excellence?

Nancy Flanagan takes a look at what is actually necessary for a tutoring program to work (now that they're all the rage).

Clinton Democrats and Philanthrocapitalists

I suppose someone from a right-tilted school like Claremont McKenna College would be just the choice to dismantle the neo-liberal tech-loving reformster-plagued eduwonks of the Clinton administration. Lily Geismer has written the book, and Jan Resseger has the review for us here. 

Louisianna Legislature Unable to Address Gun Problem by Adding More Guns

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider takes a look at the unsuccessful attempt to sell more guns and put them in schools.

The pandemic's toll

Matt Barnum at Chalkbest looks at some numbers from the pandemic and concludes that child care workers were more likely to die from COVID than the average worker. There are tons of caveats here, but nobody else is even trying to run these numbers, and I consider Barnum the most trustworthy writer in the Chalkbeat stable.

We need to create pathways for Black teachers to stay

Jose Luis Vilson writing at Word In Black about the need to improve the terrible retention numbers for Black educators. 

Arts in the Apocalypse

Blue Cereal Education makes a case for the arts in education. #5 is my favorite.

The wheels on the bus

TC Weber reports on more shenanigans in Tennessee, like the education commissioners happy talk bus tour.

Signing Day

From a district just up the road from me-- what if students headed for blue collar jobs had the same kind of fuss made over them as students signing letters of intent for college sports?

Principal makes pit stop

My old school. A student couldn't be at graduation, so my old boss took graduation to him.

The Board of Directors in their birthday regalia

Charter Free Market Problems

When charter schools close, it's bad news. It's bad news for the school, it's bad news for the students and families, it's bad news for the public schools that have to suddenly absorb the displaced students. And it points to the trouble that charter advocates have selecting the right amount of Free Market Secret Sauce to include in the charter recipe.

The Network for Public Education report "Broken Promises" lays out some of the numbers. Looking at charter cohorts from 1998 to 2014, the report finds that 1,667 out of 9,413 charters (18%) closed within the first three years. By the end of five years, one in four charters have closed. When looking at schools funded by the federal Charter School Program (CSP), 12% of the schools never even opened, and when one adds in schools that closed, 40% of charters receiving those federal taxpayer dollars failed.

That closure rate has emerged as one of the major issues in the current drive to update CSP grant regulations. 

The stories appear with unfortunate regularity. Just today, two charter closure stories have crossed my desktop. One is from Philadelphia, where the district's charter school office is considering the closure of two charters even as the board is under fire for allegations of racial bias in its handling of charter schools. Meanwhile, NJ Spotlight has this headline: "Blindsided by decision to close school, families hope for a reprieve." 

These are typical stories. Charter shutdowns come in many flavors, from being shut down by authorizers to being closed up, sometimes suddenly and without warning, because operators find them no longer viable businesses. In some regions it is easy for authorities to shutter an underperforming school, while in others (looking at you, Florida) it is almost impossible to shut down even the most egregious actors. 

Charter supporters send out mixed messages about these issues. In response to the proposed rules changes for CSP, Nina Rees, president of the National Alliance for Public [sic] Charter Schools, says, even as she contests NPE's numbers, that “The closure of some schools is actually an example of the charter sector working as intended” At the same time, she has also tweeted out support for Philadelphia parents protesting charter closings. The argument here will be that these are two different sorts of things, and that's fair. But this dichotomy of argument is often the case for charter supporters; when confronted by closure numbers, they argue that that's how it's supposed to work, but when it comes to closing a particular charter school, they will fight back hard. 

The modern charter movement has always embraced free market forces, arguing that parental ability to "vote with their feet" is all the accountability needed. But this caveat emptors all the work onto parents, who may not have the expertise to evaluate information that may not even be particularly accurate or complete, either because the charter operators are themselves amateurs or they are bad actors out to hide their misbehavior.

The missing link in many cases is at the authorizer end. States vary. In Michigan, for example, charters can go shopping for an authorizer who will wave them on through in exchange for a chunk of money. Other states, like Pennsylvania, limit authorization to school boards. Charter supporters don't like this system, feeling it gives too much control to their competitors, but if you're going to take a bunch of money that taxpayers gave to fund education, why shouldn't you involve the people who've been elected as stewards of those funds. 

But regardless of the authorizers, a rigorous application process is one of the best safeguards against failing charter schools. Do they have a plan? Do they have the necessary financial skill? Do they have an actual education plan? Is there any good, solid reason to believe that they have what it takes to survive? 

It's not just the chaos created by a charter shutting down. A failing charter is also short-changing students as it limps along on its way toward the end. Why allow weak entries in the charter biz to take down students with them? Let's cull the weakest, most ill-fitted candidates before they can waste a single minute of student time.

This seems like a basic safeguard, yet charter supporters argue often to "streamline" the process. Betsy DeVos's American Federation for Children annually ranks state programs in part on how easily such programs can be launched. The Yass Prize and the Center for Education Reform have adopted the idea of "permissionless," highlighting the idea that nobody should have to ask permission, that the enterprise should be "free to exist and thrive without dependence on regulatory bodies."

An unregulated charter industry will get us more of what we have--way too many charter schools closing and leaving families high and dry. Charter supporters waffling between "that's a feature, not a bug" and "don't you close that charter school" aren't helping, and could help stabilize their own industry by supporting some tighter controls on who gets into it. We know that some of the groups get this, or at least they did back when NAPCS, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers and 50CAN came out in favor of stringer regulations for cyber charters. (As did the reliably reformy Fordham Institute).

Charter supporters are in a tricky spot these days; many choice supporters have cooled on charters now that they see path to abandon such half-way measures and go all in on vouchers. So the choice tide is rolling harder in the direction of free and open market "permissionless" school even as the feds are using CSP to create pressure for charters to act like the public schools they've always claimed to be. Charter fans are doing a high-wire tap dance in a tough cross wind. 

NY: Carl Paladino Is At It Again

It was 2014 when the Alliance for Quality Education and Citizen Action released a report that laid out in painful detail how Carl Paladino was getting rich in the charter school business. Paladino was running Ellicott Development, a large Buffalo area property development company, that was doing fine business with at least five major Buffalo charter school operators. Paladino was particularly fond of leaseback arrangements, and in least one case he was the sole investor in the charter school.

Paladino ran, successfully, twice, for Buffalo's school board, promising he would recuse himself from charter votes, only he latter clarified that to mean any deal in which he had a direct conflict of interest; as a board member, he actually promoted the heck out of charter schools. Paladino was charter schools' best friend on the public school board.

At the time, I called him a charter wolf in public school clothing, but that's not really accurate because Paladino made little effort to disguise himself. Asked by the Buffalo City News if he was profiting from his work with charters, he replied "If I didn't, I'd be a friggin' idiot."

Paladino's mouth was generally on racist, sexist autopilot, and the rest of the board often tried in vain to shut him up. In 2016 he released comments to a local newspaper, in which he wrote he wanted to see President Barack Obama dead of mad cow disease and first lady Michelle Obama “return to being a male and let loose in the outback of Zimbabwe where she lives comfortably in a cave with Maxie, the gorilla.” He acknowledged these comments were "inappropriate;" the standard Paladino non-apology apology generally is some variation on "I suppose it was a bad PR move to say that out loud." Finally, in 2017 the state education commissioner booted him from the board for disclosing confidential information about contract negotiations with the teachers union. Paladino claimed this was a violation of his First Amendment rights. Sure.

But Paladino, who had an earlier unsuccessful run for governor under his belt, just can't quit politics. When Chris Jacobs withdrew after committing the unforgiveable GOP sin of suggesting that maybe not everyone needs to own an AR-15 style weapon that has no use except to murder human beings, Paladino jumped into the ring, quickly pulling an endorsement from Elise Stefanik.

First, he shared a post on Facebook linking mass murders (like the one that had just happened in Buffalo) to various bizarro mind control. Called on it, he went first with the "wasn't me" defense, then moved on to the "I forgot" and landed on a combo of "It was written by a good buddy of mine" and "I didn't actually read the whole thing before I posted it" (which, in all fairness, is about 95% of the people who post things on social media) while throwing in a dash of "I don't believe all the things in the article." Which begs the question of which things he does believe, but okay--damage mostly contained.

The Paladino went on the radio to talk about the need to rouse people up, and his mouth went off again:

I was thinking the other day about somebody had mentioned on the radio Adolf Hitler and how he aroused the crowds. And he would get up there screaming these epithets and these people were just — they were hypnotized by him. That’s, I guess, I guess that’s the kind of leader we need today. We need somebody inspirational. We need somebody that is a doer, has been there and done it, so that it’s not a strange new world to him.

Media Matters caught the interview and published the quote. Paladino responded that implying his comments meant that he supports Hitler would be "a new low for the media." Because quoting his words is just really below the belt, I guess? He went on to say that he was wrong to mention Hitler. "I understand that invoking Hitler in any context is a serious mistake and rightfully upsets people," which is again a version of "That was a bad PR choice" and not "What I said was wrong."

At any rate, if you're in New York and thinking you've heard Paladino's name before, especially in conjunction with saying awful things, you probably have. For people who care about public education or just human beings in general, this is probably not the guy to vote for.