Management By Screen

If you remember the film classic Aliens (a film classic that James Cameron made way before he decided to remake Ferngully for a gazillion dollars), you remember his nightmare vision of soldiering in the not-too-distant future. Lt. Gorman is the "leader" who expects to manage his troops from a mobile office loaded with screens that are in turn loaded with data. It is an effective narrative shorthand for leadership that is detached, impersonal, and ultimately fatally ineffective. And in 1986, it was an convincing portrayal of how things could go wrong.

Well, it's almost thirty years later, and Lt. Gorman is real.

Not so much in the military, perhaps, but Management By Screen is alive and well in the private sector.

My brother has worked in the manufacturing world most of his adult life, and he tells me hair-curling tales of the things going on out there. The hot, new, with-it manager is a data god. He is sure to live at least forty miles away from the location of the plant, because you can't make the necessary hard-nosed brutal decisions you need to make if you're personally familiar with the people and community that will be affected.

And this data god's management style looks kind of like this

Yes, you should be able to manage a facility from your desk. Just make sure you're collecting the necessary data.

The photo is from an investment firm, which helped me connect some dots. We know that lots of economists think they know how to re-organize schools. Is it any wonder that they envision a world in which data is king, and collecting and managing data is the main function of educational leaders? That's the world they know. Talking to live humans is just a distraction. It's all just data. Just manage the data.

Management By Screen has certainly been successful in some settings. Wal-Mart has managed to dominate its sector by superior interconnection of data-- the cash registers and store inventory counters and warehouse inventory and supplier and manufacturers are all linked in one big web of tightly wound, stuff-providing data. When the checker swipes your widget at the cash register, data flows all the way up the line to the widget factory. And it can all be managed by screen in an office somewhere.

That, of course, is the model that some imagine as an educational paradise. If we can somehow turn every student activity into data generation, and the collect all that data, and then use that data to tweak the data-generating activities, like adjusting the speed on a assembly-line unit or the temperature on a baking unit or the response time on supplier response-- well, that wold just be schooling heaven. We would be able to scale up, plug hundreds--thousands!-- of data generation units students into the system, and just watch those outputs and throughputs reach optimal state on the screen, eventually connecting all of it to employers and health care providers and everything would eventually be connected in the great chain of life and death and supply and labor, without us having to interact directly with any of them.

And while you may think I have phrased that in such a way as to highlight its awfulness, you should realize that there are people who would read that paragraph and not see a single thing wrong with it.

Do not ask them to explain how any of this would help. For them, it is self-evidently great to have people all plugged into a system that removes human variables and which can be run through the beautiful, elegant screen. Of course this is a terrible way to work with humans, but in some corporate settings, that just doesn't matter. But the goal of schooling is to make a better life for the human beings who pass through the schools. This does not matter to the screen management people. Their goal is not to make life better for the students. Their goal is to make the system better.

They are the bombadiers of education, flipping a switch, watching the sights line up elegantly, and existing in a small quiet space far away from the actual carnage and destruction. Flesh and blood are messy and difficult. But everything looks better on a screen.

Bad News from Minneapolis

Per yesterday's report in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Minneapolis public school system is showing bad signs of advanced charteritis.

The city schools have been hit by low enrollment; they planned for 900 more students this year, but the actual number was two. That translates into a huge loss of state money. “For a long time we were the big player in town. That has created a sense of complacency,” said Robert Doty.

Doty is the Chief Operations Officer for the district, and if that sounds more corporate than educational, then you are just starting to get the picture. Here's the rest of that quote: “We haven’t focused on student retention and student recruitment as others in the market have.”

Yes, the Minneapolis public school system is not suffering from low enrollment-- they are suffering from a diminishing "market share." And they need to find ways to "recruit and retain" students.

This is free market schooling in action. It's not a contest of educational excellence-- it's a battle of marketing prowess, and it creates some tough choices for the people charged with running--well, managing, I suppose, Minneapolis's school system. And it highlights all the things fundamentally wrong with such a system.

First, it takes focus off doing a good job of creating education and puts it on doing a good job of selling seats in a building.

You can claim that, well, of course, the best way to market schools is to make them really excellent. But at the last meeting, Doty did not call the board together to talk about education. "At Tuesday night’s meeting, Doty and other staff members gave the board an update on the grim enrollment numbers and proposed the creation of a comprehensive marketing plan."

And this isn't just a philosophical problem-- marketing plans cost money. The outrage and upset over having a band program cut because of budget slashing or shifting resources to more test prep-- that outrage is old hat at this point. But imagine finding out that your child's band program must be cut because the board needs money to buy a series of tv spots and billboards. It's alarming, but as long as charter chains like K12 can divert taxpayer dollars directly into an advertising budget, what other choice does a public school have?

Free market schooling does not demand superior schools. It demands superior marketing.

It's not all lost in Minneapolis. At that same meeting, "some" board members tried to get back to business. Board member Alberto Monserrate suggested that the board need to stop worrying about marketing and get its focus back on educating students.

“We need to stop our obsession with market share,” Monserrate said at the board meeting. “We are not a business. At some point you have to have the right product to market.”

Yes, that's right. The guy whose point was "we need to stop talking about school like it's a business" then went on to talk about schools like they are a business. Sigh.

Not that Doty heard a word Monserrate said.

Doty said he agrees on the need to improve student achievement, but said he’s confident that the district’s new strategic plan will address the issue. The plan will require schools to increase math and reading scores by 5 percent every year for the next five years. For students of color, leaders want those standards to increase by 8 percent each year.

Maybe there's more to this than the paper reported, but I bet not. If you've worked in retail, you will recognize this management approach. Set numbers for the new quarter. Then institute your "plan" by pushing those numbers down the line. Some suit in the Big Boardroom says, "We will increase these numbers by 5%," and a month later, a store manager is telling a part-time, minimum wage sales person, "These are your target numbers for the quarter. Hit them, or else." It's a very popular management technique, because although it's absolutely destined for failure, it pushes blame for that failure down to the least important, most expendable people in the company.

So kudos, Mr. Doty, for bringing yet another time-tested business technique to schools.

[Update: I'm still learning about the Minneapolis situation, including the role of the Kramer family who are, it should be said, kind of amazing. My esteemed colleague edushyster profiled these folks a few years back. Dad used to own the newspaper, and the children (most of whom went the TFA-to-Master of the Universe education route) include a boss of TFA, a couple of charter honchos,and a director of a charter-promoting group in Minneapolis. Plus active roles in many reformster organizations nationally, as well as chipping in to buy support their very own school board candidate. And these days Dad runs a site that promotes the whole package. Clearly Minneapolis is a great town to be rich and committed to reformsterizing schools even as your charterfy your way to more riches. No wonder the public schools are on the ropes.]

Meanwhile, the Minneapolis public school system is being bled dry. The charters have scooped up about 20,000 students, leaving 34,000 in the public system. The dollar amounts being drained from the public schools are huge, putting the district in "triage" mode. But of course it lacks the charter power to pick and choose its students. So the money is drained, the cream is scooped off, and the public system must increasingly carry the weight of inevitable failure-- all while trying to divert some of its meager resources to marketing plans. And of course marketing becomes increasingly difficult because in this scenario, the public schools will sooner or later be largely failing-- not because they collapsed, but because they were attacked, their resources stripped, and their remaining schools charged with the task of educating all the students that the charters don't want.

I do not know how to reverse this, other than to require that charter schools function like the public schools they pretend to be (though of course that would make them far less profitable and therefor far less interesting to the hedge fund masters of the universe currently pushing them). You would also have to fix the funding system of the state, and it might be a good idea to slap some sort of legislative lid on advertising activities so that tax dollars meant for education are not being wasted on marketing.

But fundamentally you have to get back to the idea that public education is a public trust and that we have an obligation to maintain it for the benefit of all students. As long as we keep treating it like a consumer good to be marketed like breakfast cereal and automobiles, for the profit of corporate investors and for the use of those few customers who can afford the very best-- as long as we keep doing that, Minneapolis is the future for many cities.

Can Any Teacher Make a Case for CCSS?

More teacher-fans of the Common Core have been uncovered. This time they're in Bismark, North  Dakota. For instance, here's Amanda Peterson, an English teacher at Bismark High.

“They have allowed us to bring in more nonfiction selections that help us better understand, better critically analyze the literature we are reading,” she said.

The focus is no longer on recalling the plot of a story, she said, explaining that it no longer matters that students can recall the color of a car in a particular chapter of a book.

“Being able to make connections between the text and between real life and the news and the world around them and seeing how those patterns have continued over time is something I find incredibly important and valuable,” she said.

So what do you think? Was Ms. Peterson forbidden to bring in non-fiction before the state told her district they had to allow her? Who exactly had forced her to ask these car color questions in the past? Had the school district kept students and teachers walled off from the outside world so that she was unable to connect reading to patterns? Who exactly had forbidden her to use these approaches that she finds "incredibly important and valuable"?

Or was it not a matter of permission. Was Ms. Peterson free to do all these things, but simply unaware that such pedagogical approaches existed? Did she ask questions about the color of a car because she simply couldn't think of anything else to ask?

And here comes middle school English teacher Meagan Sharp.

She said seventh-grade students in her class used to read only one novel. They now participate in book clubs, where they read four novels per year.

Sigh. Same question for Ms. Sharp. Was she restricting her students to one novel because she was forbidden to teach more, or because she didn't realize that such a thing was humanly possible.

This narrative is repeated again and again and again. A teacher breathlessly announces that her classroom has been revolutionized and revived by Common Core, because the Core made it possible for her to use techniques that have been in use for forever by reasonably competent educators. Sometimes it's even an approach that isn't actually in the Common Core (I'm still waiting for someone to show me which ELA standard calls for critical thinking).

I keep trying to explain. When you say things like this:

“The connections that they make between the characters is deeper than I have ever seen since I started teaching,” she said.

you may think you're saying "This Common Core special sauce is amazing" but what I hear is "I have never had any idea about how to do my job."

It is possible that the message here is "I just teach out of the book that the school gives me, and now the book I teach out of has cool new stuff." Again, this does not tell us nearly as much about the Common Core as it tells us about your professional skills. And if we're talking about what is embedded in the script that you read lessons from-- well, I am accepting of wide varieties of techniques, but anybody who is happy "teaching" from a script does not belong in a classroom.

Here is one of the things I find striking about the Common Core is that here we are, well into the rollout, and here I am, reading mile after mile of verbage written about it, and I have yet to read a single credible endorsement of the ELA standards by a classroom teacher. Instead we get endorsements of techniques already well-known to capable teachers; these techniques may or may not actually be in the Core, but the Core still gets credit for them. On the rare occasions that a Core enthusiast talks about a technique not already in regular use, it's because the technique was long ago discredited and abandoned.

So, to you teachers who insist that Common Core revolutionized and revitalized your classroom, I will be impressed if you can successfully answer any of the following questions--

1) What's a thing that you would have to stop doing in your classroom tomorrow if the Common Core were repealed?

2) What's a thing that Common Core made possible that had never been possible in a classroom before?

I will not hold my breath. I don't think it's possible to make a case that the Core can do a thing to help an actual classroom teacher in the daily performance of her duty. Argue the need for national standards to get everybody on the same page if you must, but don't pretend that Common Core invented the wheel.

Arne Blows Standardized Smoke

As soon as CCSSO and CGCS announced their non-plan to provide PR coverage for the high stakes test-and-punish status quo, Arne Duncan was there to throw his tooter on the bandwagon. On top of an official word salad on the subject, Arne popped up yesterday in the Washington Post.

There was a time when Duncan could be counted on to at least say the right thing before he went ahead and did the wrong thing. And I cannot fault his opening for the WaPo piece.

As a parent, I want to know how my children are progressing in school each year. The more I know, the more I can help them build upon their strengths and interests and work on their weaknesses. The more I know, the better I can reinforce at home each night the hard work of their teachers during the school day.

He's absolutely correct here. It's just that his words have nothing to do with the policies pursued by his Department of Education.


Duncan welcomes the stated intention "to examine their assessment systems, ensure that assessments are high-quality and cut back testing that doesn’t meet that bar or is redundant."Duncan does not welcome an examination of the way in which standardized testing is driving actual education out of classrooms across America.

He makes his case for standardized testing here:

Parents have a right to know how much their children are learning; teachers, schools and districts need to know how students are progressing; and policymakers must know where students are excelling, improving and struggling.

As a case for standardized testing, this is wrong on all three points.

1) Parents do have a right to know how much their children are learning. And standardized tests are by far the least effective instruments for informing them. They are minute snapshots, providing little or no description of how students are growing and changing. Standardized tests measure one thing-- how well students do on standardized tests.

2) Teachers, schools and districts need to know how students are doing. And if a teacher needs a standardized test to tell her how her students are doing, that teacher is a dope, and needs to get out of teaching immediately. I measure my students dozens of times every single week, collecting wide and varied "data" that informs my view of how each student is doing. A standardized test will tell me one thing-- how that student does with a standardized test. If the school or district does not know whether they can trust my word or not about how the student is doing, the school and district are a dope. Standardized tests offer no useful information for this picture.

3) Explain, please, exactly why policymakers need to know how my third period class is doing on paragraph construction? Why do the bureaucrats in state and federal capitols need to know where students are "excelling, improving and struggling"? Is Congress planning to pass the "Clearer Lesson Plans About the Rise of American Critical Realism Act"? Are you suggesting that there are aides in the DOE standing by to help me write curriculum? Because I cannot for the life of me figure out why the policymakers (nice term, that, since it includes both the legislators who pass policy and the unelected suits who write it for them) need to have standardized results on every single kid in this country.

Duncan follows this up with a reference to another of his pet theories-- that students with learning disabilities just needed to be tested harder in order to fix their difficulties.

Duncan goes on to admit that "in some places" testing is eating up calendars and stressing students.

Policymakers at every level bear responsibility here — and that includes me and my department. We will support state and district leaders in taking on this issue and provide technical assistance to those who seek it.

In one sense, Duncan is correct. Policymakers at the state and local level bear responsibility for not telling the federal government to take its testing mandates and shove them where the NCLB-based money threats don't shine. Duncan's Department of Education bears responsibility for everything else.

This is the worst kind of weasel wording. This is the kid who sets fire to the neighbors house and then says to the kids who just tried to talk him out of it, "So, we're all in this together, right?"

It was the Duncan/Obama Education Department that twisted every state's arm up behind its ear and said, "If you want your Get Out Of NCLB Free Card, you will make testing the cornerstone of your education system." Duncan does not get to pretend that this testing mania, this out of control testing monster, somehow just fell from the sky. "Gosh," Duncan says and shrugs. "I guess there was just something in the water that year that made everybody just suddenly go crazypants on the testing thing. Guess we'll all have to try harder, boys."

No. No no no no. Testing mania is the direct mandated result of NCLB and its ugly stepsister RttT. It didn't just happen. The federal government required it. And if Duncan really though this was an actual problem and not just a PR problem, he is the one guy who could wave his magic waiver wand and say, "My bad. Your waiver no longer requires you to test everything that moves and use the test results as the basis for all educational system judgments."

I mean-- the states did not just suddenly all say, "You know, wouldn't it be fun to make test results part of teacher evaluations." That was a federal freaking mandate. It was a part of the NCLB based extortion, written into the offer that states could not refuse. NCLB enfederalized high stakes testing, and Race to the Top tripled down on it, and no policymakers outside the beltway ever had a say.

So no, Arne-- you do not get to pretend that "policymakers at every level" are responsible for the test-based gutting of education. Policymakers at your level-- specifically the policymakers who work in your office-- are responsible. All by themselves. No others.

Then it's back to the usual baloney. We've been falling behind educationally for "a generation" (because, kids these days). Dropout rates are down; college enrollment is up (because, you know, college is magic). Educators are taking steps to improve US education, because they are now "empowered to be creative and to teach critical thinking skills" (because creativity and critical thinking were only invented four years ago, and had never before been used in classrooms).

Also-- this whole testing problem is also going to be solved because we totally spent a bunch of free federal money on grants to develop super duper awesometastic tests that will be sooooo much better than current bubble tests (which are apparently not so great, though that has not led to anyone in DC saying, "yeah, you probably shouldn't use those any more"). These tests will be hella amazing and OMGZ-- they will measure writing and critical thinking exactly the same way for every single student in the country. Because if there's one thing we know about critical thinking and good writing, it's that they can always be measured exactly the same way for exactly the same results across the entire population of a country.

At this point I don't know if Duncan is a extraordinary liar or staggeringly clueless. But the WaPo piece ends with this line:

The writer is U.S. secretary of education.

So the piece at least begins and ends with something true. It's only everything in between that is wrong. 

CCSSO & CGCS Offer No Useful Change on Testing

The big news on the street is that the CCSSO and CGCS (state ed leaders and big city school folks respectively) have announced an intention to rein in the testing juggernaut. 

I'm not impressed. To begin with, they put front and center NY State's John King, Louisiana's John White, and DC Public's Kaya Henderson-- three big fresh faces of the anti-public school reformster movement (two TFA temps and a charter profiteer). That's a big fat signal that this not about changing course, but about protecting the current high-stakes test-driven status quo.

And in fact these folks were not there to say, "We realize something is wrong and we're committed to fixing it." They were there to say, "We recognize that we're taking some PR heat on this, so we're going to see if we can't tweak the optics enough to get everyone to shut up while we stay the course." They're going to "look at" testing. Maybe "audit" the number.

Andy Smarick broke the non-event down into Ten Big Takeaways. He tries to sell this as a "smart 'third-way' approach," but it certainly looks like the same old spam to me. Smarick tries to sell the new ... well, "plan" seems like an overstatement. Maybe "expression of a general new inclination"? At any rate, he tries to paint this as a compromise, but it's not.

The whole trick of this new position is that it carefully avoids the most important question. And so we're having a conversation about having less testing without discussing the quality of testing and its role in driving education. We're going to combine tests and streamline tests, but we're not going to discuss the value of the tests or the uses of their results. It's as if we discovered that students were getting arsenic on their school lunch every day and the compromise response was, "Well, let's just look at putting a little less on there." It's like living in a crime-ridden neighborhood and being told, "Good news! The muggers have gotten together and decided that they will coordinate more carefully so that you only get robbed once a day."

John White earns the Dumbest Statement award for the phone conference. He suggests that most of the daily testing is from the everyday work in schools, and characterized local testing as "nonessential." According to the Washington Post, he said, "We believe we can work together with our districts to make sure the testing we have in our states at the state and local level is the minimum necessary to inform our decisionmaking."

So the kind of daily assessments that teachers do in order to know, right now, how well students are grasping the material-- that's what White thinks is nonessential??!! Meanwhile, we need to keep our commitment to standardized testing programs that are no instructional help to classroom teachers at all.

No, the announcement is nothing more than a sort-of-commitment to make testing more efficient, which is about as comforting as knowing that the guy who's planning to punch you in the face is getting a nice manicure.

I am not surprised that reformsters are circling the wagons and figuring out how to protect the testing industrial complex. But I am bum-foggled that people are reporting this under headlines that talk about vows and changes.

The fundamental problem remains-- a systematically toxic dependency on tests that do not measure what they purport to measure in order to use data that is not true to prove things that the data cannot prove, while at the same time reducing public education to a test prep process that steals time and resources from the real process of actual education in order to feed a process bent on reducing students to trained circus animals and teachers to clerical workers.

This is not a step forward. In fact, to the extent that it convinces people we're taking steps forward, it's a step backwards.

It Is Not Sunny in Philadelphia

If New Orleans public schools were dropped directly into the depths of reformster-built torture by the assault of Hurricane Katrina, Philadelphia schools have experienced a decades long descent, sliding slowly down the on ramp of the highway to public school hell. And as instructive as the mess in New Orleans can be, we should be paying close attention to Philadelphia. Unlike NOLA's meteorological catastrophe, Philly's mess is man-made. If they come for the public schools in your city, it's likely to look a lot more like the assault on Philly's school system.

I live in Western PA, and if you know Pennsylvania politics, you know that nobody dislikes Philadelphia more than everybody else in every other place in Pennsylvania. But I take no joy in following their struggle. Teachers are on the beachhead of one more reformster assault against schools, caught between a history of financial humbuggery, city level mismanagery, and a first term governor desperate to prop up his hopes for a second term.

Setting the Stage

Pennsylvania funds schools by collecting local property taxes, throwing them in a big pot, and sending them back out according to various arcane formula. It is a system that pretty much nobody likes, but fixing it has been-- well, here's the thing. PA has the fourth highest senior citizen population. That means we're right up front in the battle to decide whether we should tax people who make money or people who own stuff. So we all agree we need to fix taxes, particular Grampa McFixedincome doesn't want to pay for schools because he owns a house.

It's also a contentious issue because Philly is a giant money pit, and people all across the state end up paying taxes so Philly can have mass transit and functioning infrastructure and schools that work.

By the 1990's, Philly was severely underfunded and not exactly setting the educational world on fire. Then-superintendent David Hornbeck decided to play chicken with the state legislature. "Give me enough money to open the schools, or I won't," he said.

"Fine," said the legislature. "You can have the money, but we're taking over your district." And so Pennsylvania became a pioneer in how to take the "public" out of public schools.

Not-so-public Education and Starving the Beast

As the millennium opened, Philadelphia schools were no longer run by an elected board, but by a group appointed by the state (3/5) and the city (2/5). This is the School Reform Commission (SRC), and they have not exactly accomplished great things in Philly.

One of the things they could not do was grow  money on trees. Pennsylvania has been starving its schools for a while now, and although it's fashionable to blame it all on Tom Corbett, his predecessor  Democrat Ed Rendell was no friend of public education, and his predecessor Tom Ridge was reportedly ready to hand Philly schools over to Edison way back before such privateering wasn't even fashionable yet. State funding of schools has dropped steadily down to a current low of 36%.

At the same time, local districts have had a cap slapped on raising local taxes. The state has effectively stripped funding from districts and made it impossible for them to replace those funds from local sources. As in, "Junior, I'm cutting your lunch money allowance in half, but you may only ask your grandmother for fifteen cents."

So Pennsylvania has been systematically starving its schools. It used stimulus funds to hide the starving, and Corbett is currently trying to sell the idea that pension spending counts as education spending to further obscure the picture (Pennsylvania pension funds were hammered by the financial collapse and Harrisburg dealt with it through advanced down-road can kicking).

The Charter Claws Come Out

Nobody got starved worse than Philly schools. Each year has brought another massive deficit, along with the unsurprising revelation that teachers working in underfunded, understaffed, decrepit surroundings with the children of poverty and deprivation-- those teachers do not get top "achievement" results. You could argue that Philly teachers have been struggling against huge odds, and that like salmon trying to spawn up mountains through onrushing alpine avalanches, every inch of progress they've made is nothing short of epically heroic.

You could argue that, but of course nobody in power in PA has been trying to. Instead, reformsters have unleashed the usual cries of, "OMGZ!! We must haz rescue students from these failing schools!! Bring in the charters! They shall save us!"

And so charters have been chip chip chipping away at Philly schools. Thanks to Pennsylvania's logic-defying funding formula for charters, charter schools can quickly become a massive drain on a school district's finances. It's being felt all across the state, but again, with its huge ongoing financial issues, Philly gets to feel it the worst.

As is typical with these charter gold rushes, there has been a steady parade of malfeasance and misbehavior. It has gotten bad enough that even the SRC has pushed back against charters, but even victory is messy. They won a battle to make one charter follow its enrollment cap rules, and now this week students at Walter D. Palmer Leadership Learning Partners Charter School will hold a lottery to determine which couple of hundred students will be looking for a school next week.

What Fresh Hell Is This

Over a year ago, Aaron Kase at Salon described Philly schools as "a public school system from hell." Kase was writing in August of 2013, the same month that the Philly teacher contract expired. As you might imagine, negotiations have not run smoothly.

The SRC has been asking for various rule suspensions because of their massive poorness. In August of 2013, they decided to go ahead and suspend seniority rules, hiring back laid-off teachers based on cost rather than seniority. This went hand-in-hand with the continuing series of cockamamie deals made with Harrisburg in an attempt to cobble together enough money to open the schools each fall, plus gigantic cuts in staff and schools.

But while the SRC and Harrisburg were practicing political posturing over the question of how to keep Philly schools open and functioning, the teachers of Philly were actually doing it. Buying supplies. Taking on extra duties. And working without contracts, even as the SRC didn't even pretend to be trying to negotiate. The teachers were seen as the heroes, the ones holding schools together, while the politicians were passing "doomsday budgets" and making convoluted deals to get a cigarette tax to help finance yet more shortfalls. The PA Supreme Court ordered the SRC to get to the negotiating table and the SRC... just didn't.

Meanwhile, Tom Corbett is on track to become the first one-term PA governor in half of forever, hugely down in the polls (anywhere between 17% and 33% depending on whose poll you ask) and he needed something, anything. Philadelphia City Papers had said in the summer of 2013 that Corbett's possible Hail Mary was to take on the Philly teachers' union.

Can It Get Uglier

Three weeks before the election, the SRC announced that they would no longer honor the old contract under which the teachers had been working since it expired. They might honor some pieces, but nobody was getting a raise, and they were taking the teachers' health care. And when I say "announced," I mean snuck in and out of an un-publicized meeting at an odd hour with no public input.

Harrisburg tried to get involved, but accomplished nothing, thanks to Harrisburg. Are you surprised to learn that the SRC can only be dissolved by action of.... the SRC.


Students walked out of schools to strike on behalf of their teachers. The school district celebrated parent appreciation night with a screening of  "Won't Back Down" and got a student protest instead. Gratifying, perhaps, but tiny compared to what's lined up against the teachers.

The superintendent went on NPR to say that teachers needed to be willing to sacrifice. A right-wing thinky tank, the Commonwealth Foundation, has a website set up to smear the Philadelphia Federation for Teachers, and hired people to attend today's teacher protest and counter-protest (though they dispute that verb, it sure seems about right).

Follow This Story

Tonight, that protest blocked the street in front of the district offices, as prelude to this evening's SRC meeting. That meeting, which allows some public comment, is likely to run a bit late. Probably a bit heated as well.

The game plan in Philly seems pretty straightforward-- starve the district until it fails, then send in the charters to scarf up the pieces. The big challenge is that Philly schools really are, by all accounts, in bad shape. That's the result of a systematic assault, not some inherent failure. But the end result is a district on the ropes, and bringing it back to health will not be as simple as taking the reformster boot off its neck.

Nor do I think the election will resolve this. Tom Wolfe may not be Tom Corbett, but I'm not so sure he's bent on rescuing public schools either. Wolf has since distanced himself from the point of view, but the man who led the drive to charterize York schools is an old Wolf friend.

So this isn't going to be quick or easy or pretty. But Philly teachers are up against the same wall that teachers are being backed up to all across this country, and they need and deserve the support of all of the rest of us. Their fight really is our fight. We need to watch and help and learn. These are men and women who are trying to do hard, important work in the middle of a storm that just keeps hammering away at their work, their livelihoods, and their professional futures. Everything I see tonight on line says that they are hanging tough and standing tall. But if you have a thought or prayer or dollar or word of support that you can send toward Philadelphia, now is the time to send it.

The Public Charter School Test

If you glance through the blog, you might conclude I hate charter schools. But like many critics of the current charter wave, I don't object to the idea of charters at all. Once upon a time, charters were actually a pretty good addition to the public education landscape.

The potential is still there. But to unlock it, charteristas will have to make true the mantra they keep repeating, that charter schools are public schools.

Charter schools, the modern version as represented by K12 and Success Academies, are not public schools at all. If they really want to earn the "public" label, they need to meet these four requirements.

Transparent Finances

As a taxpayer, I can walk into my local school district office and ask to see everything there is to see about the district finances. As a taxpayer, I'm entitled to a full accounting of how my money has been spent. To be a true public entity, you can't just take public funds-- you must give a public accounting of them as well.

That also means oversight. The modern charter is all too often tied up in all too shady financial dealings. Baker Mitchell of North Carolina is only the most recent example of a charter operator who uses a non-profit charter to funnel money to his own private firms. It is Modern Charter 101 -- set up charter school, hire yourself, your family, your friends to do everything from managing the school to washing the floors. And rent the building and equipment from yourself. K12 routinely uses public tax dollars to mount advertising campaigns.

A true public school is always strapped for cash, and taxpayers are always keenly aware of where that money comes from. When negotiating contracts, spending money on big ticket items, even deciding to outsource janitorial services, our school board members are subject to plenty of input, feedback and general kibbitzing from the people who will pay for all those things.

Meanwhile, modern charters have famously gone to court to keep state auditors from getting a look at their books. That is not how a public institution behaves. If you're a public school, your finances must be completely transparent.

Accountability to the Voters

Boy, do I ever get charter operators frustration on this count. My ultimate bosses are a group of educational amateurs who have to win election to stay in charge of me. It's a screwy way to run a business-- what other enterprise requires professional experts to work at the beck and call of people whose only qualification is that they managed to garner a bunch of votes? Oh, wait. I remember an example-- the entire local, state and federal government of the entire country. Because we're a democracy.

Reed Hastings famously articulated the modern charter operator position-- elected school boards are a nuisance. They're unstable and change their composition and therefor their collective mind. What schools need is a single CEO, a kinderfuhrer who can swiftly and boldly make decisions without having to explain himself to people, particularly voting people who can remove him from power if they don't like his answers.

This is not how public institutions are supposed to work in a democratic society. Yes, as some folks periodically rediscover, democracy is terribly messy and inefficient. But the alternative is efficient long-term mediocrity or short term excellence (followed by crashing and burning). Neither is an appropriate goal for a stable society, and neither is appropriate for running a school system meant to serve all citizens, regardless of their income or social status.

If the voters of your school district do not have a say in how the school is run, you are not a public school. It does not count if your tsar or board of tsars is appointed by a state-level elected official. If there is no way for local voters to change the school's management through local means, it is not a public school.

And yes-- that means that there are places like Philadelphia and Newark where the schools are no longer public schools in anything but name. Leaving the name alone-- that's how you steal an entire public school system from the public it is supposed to serve.

Play by the Rules

The charter movement, even the traditional one, has been all about getting around bad rules. This has never made a lot of sense to me, this business of government saying, "We've tied up public schools in so many dumb rules that we need a different kind of school as an alternative." Why not say, "We've tied up public schools in so many dumb rules that we are now going to rescind some of those rules. Because, dumb."


The "we need charters to escape dumb rules" argument is like filling up your own car with Long John Silver's wrappers and empty coffee cups and one day saying, "Well, damn. This car's a mess. Guess I have to buy a new car." If you've made a mess of things, clean up the mess!

So I'll agree that there are some public school rules that charters shouldn't play by, because nobody should have to play by them. Important note: I can identify these rules because they interfere with a teacher's ability to provide quality service for students.

But there are other rules charters don't want to have to play by. For instance, "hire licensed personnel" seems to be a popular corner to cut (the Gulen folks seem to trip over this one a bunch). Likewise, modern charters like skirting that nasty union rubbish, which helps with holding onto the option to terminate any "teacher" at any time. This is not about providing superior schooling for students; this is about maintaining a more easily controlled workforce that will be cheap and kept in line.

It goes back to that whole damn democracy thing. Modern charter operators want to be able to rule their company like a Bill Gates or a Leona Helmsley. They do not want to have to govern a public service trust like a Congress or a President, held ultimately accountable to a separate court or electorate (though don't worry-- they're working on that system, too).

Public schools are a trust, a service to the communities that house them and the country that holds them. If you want to be a public school, you have to play by the public school rules. You can certainly set up a private school outside those rules, but that's what it is-- a private school, not a public one.

Serve the Full Population

The same modern charter trick has been documented over and over. Behind every charter school miracle is a charter school that gets rid of students who might hurt their numbers.

They say that home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in. But in America, there's another place like that-- the public school.

A public school accepts every student. A public school does not bar a student for being too expensive to educate. A public school does not push out a student who gets lousy test scores. A public school must accept every single student who shows up on their doorstep, barring only those who reach a criminal level of threat to others (and sometimes not even that).

No school that turns students away, pushes students away, counsels students out, or even has the option of considering these actions because there is some other school that must take the student-- no school that does these things can call itself a public school. No school that has a student population substantially different from the student population of the area it serves can rightly call itself a public school.

I was tweet-challenged on this point the other day with the issue of magnet schools. That's a valid point-- a school designed to focus on the performing arts cannot be expected to have the same percentage of tone-deaf, stage-inept non-performers as the rest of its neighborhood. But magnet schools have a very specific, very explicit mission that clearly defines how their population will differ from the larger group. A performing arts school mission does not say "To foster great student arts, plus keeping out any ELL students, too." The careful focus was in fact one of the things that could, and did, and does, make classic charters great.

But another characteristic of modern charters is that they rarely have such a clearly defined mission. And certainly none have a mission that makes explicit upfront, as magnet schools do, exactly which students they plan to include and exclude. As far as I know, no modern charter has a mission statement that reads, "We will give a mediocre education to all poor kids except the ones who are difficult or have developmental problems or who can't hit our numbers."

You can certainly be selective about which students make it into your school (and get to stay there), but if you do, you are a private school. A public school accepts all students.

Public School and Virtue

I am not saying that you must meet all four of these requirements to qualify as a ethically upright and educationally sound school. I can think of several private schools that flunk all four tests (though all have far more accountability measures in place than many modern charters), and they are perfectly good schools. But they are private schools, not public schools.

I can think of some charter schools that pass all four tests. They are classic versions of charter education, and they deserve to be called public schools.

But to call the Success and Imagine and K12 and Hope-on-a-Shingle and all the rest of the hedge-fund backed, politically connected, ROI ROI ROIing their big financial boat modern charters may be many things.

But they are not public schools. Not. Public. Schools.