Administration Wants To Lock in Testing Forever

The US Department of Education this week released the guidelines for states getting ready to fill out those waiver applications. Just add this to my "I Told You So" list regarding last months supposed signal of a change in direction by education leaders and Arne Duncan. Once again, what we're seeing is not so much Change of Direction as it is Jam Foot Down On Gas Pedal.

The new guidelines are essentially like the old guidelines, with a hard line emphasis on basing evaluation of teachers, schools, students, principals, bus drivers, landscaping artists and the guy who delivers paper supplies to the school on standardized tests. It was just a month ago that Duncan was shrugging his shoulders and saying, "Dang. I don't know why the heck everyone got so obsessed with testy stuff. I guess it was all of us, huh?" Now he's back to "You will all eat, breathe, live and die by the tests. Or else."

The feds have tightened up the old sub-group requirements. We all remember this from the NCLB days-- a subgroup of twenty-or-so students (depending on your location) will carry the fate of the entire building in their test scores. Students who belong to subgroups may once again look forward to Special schedules featuring five hours of steady test prep. Congratulations, subgroup students.

The new waivers also feature a super-extended feature which will allow states to exist in whatever extra-legal limbo the waivers create well past President Obama's expiration date. This is a really novel stretch of a really novel idea. There is already some debate about whether the waivers are legal in the first place; now we get to ask if they can be made binding on a subsequent administration. I suppose we're fortunate that they didn't try to lock testing in until the tri-centennial.

Perhaps it's an attempt to weight state's consideration about whether to bother or not ("We could just skip the waiver application, and by the time the feds had gotten around to actually doing anything, we'd already be getting new rules from a new President anyway"). Or it could just be a mark of how deeply committed this administration is to the idea that an untested child is a wasted young life. maybe they're sincerely dedicated to making sure that every test maker gets to sell lots of product every child gets to experience the joys of soulcrushing standardized testing. Maybe they are trying to further confirm that it will make no difference how we cast our votes in 2016.

Or maybe they're just trying to give extra inspiration to movements like the one that rendered testing of seniors in Colorado completely moot. Imagine that-- students smart enough to figure out that the testing is a complete waste of time! I guess we're doing something right.

Whatever the case, this new set of waiver guidelines is great news for testing companies and terrible news for everyone who actually cares about public educations and the students who attend public schools. So, thanks a lot, Department of Education.

Washington: Disabilities Aren't Real

Following in the footsteps of one of the dumbest initiatives to come out of the US Department of Education, Washington state has arrived at some destructive fact-free findings regarding the education of students with special needs.

The Governor's Office of the Education Ombuds has created and released a report that...well, I will let the conclusion speak for itself:

The evidence is clear that disabilities do not cause disparate outcomes, but that the system itself perpetuates limitations in expectations and false belief systems about who children with disabilities can be and how much they can achieve in their lifetime.

So there you have it-- as previously suggested by the federal Department of Education, the disabilities that students claim to possess do not actually exist in any meaningful way. Any limitations that they appear to have are simply the result of the system's (i.e. teachers) low expectations:

But the vast majority of children  in special education do not have disabilities that prevent them from tackling the same rigorous academic subjects as general education students if they get the proper support, so those low numbers reflect shortcomings in the system, not the students.

You might think that link takes you to some research that supports this rather startling assertion. It doesn't. It takes you to the US ED statement on the subject, and that is supported by-- nothing. I addressed this before ("Quite Possibly the Stupidest Thing To Come Out of the US DOE"), but it hasn't gotten any less bizarre since last June.

I'm not sure which reading is more bizarre-- do they mean that schools take perfectly normal students and arbitrarily turn them into special needs students, or that schools could completely cure students of their disabilities if we just tried harder and expected more? I'm a big believer in expectations, but no matter how hard I expect my hair to grow back, it doesn't happen. Expecting a student to do the best she can is good teacher behavior; expecting a student to do what she cannot is just mean.

Nancy Bailey has written a fiery and pointed reaction to this "news," and sees it as one step in the abolition of special ed programs entirely. After all, the one size fits all nature of Common Core and the Core testing regimen will work so much more smoothly once we make every student the same, and the easiest and fastest way to do that is to just say it's so. This certainly fits in with the philosophy that the way to get all students to read at grade level is to just, you know, make them do it. Insist real hard. If we believe that we can get a student with a second grade reading skill read at the fifth grade level by just somehow making him do it, why can't we make a dyslexic student or student with other processing difficulties read at level by just expecting her to? "Stop pretending you're blind, Jimmy, and read this book right now!"

The report also concludes that special ed programs are too expensive and don't produce enough magical results, plus they have too much procedure and regulation as well as putting parents in adversarial positions (and, boy, isn't that a whole chapter of a book).

Bailey thinks Seattle is clearing the ground to cut special ed as a budget savings for the state. I can see one other impetus for removing special ed rules-- charters. Charters don't like students with special needs because they bring extra costs, and they bring special costs because of regulations that mandate services for them. But remove the mandated services and replace them with something cheap, like High Expectations, and a whole new market sector opens up.

Washington is concerned about the long term effects of this lack of magical high expectations. The report says that the failure of schools to erase all effects of the disabilities results in lives of "unemployment, poverty and dependence."

Good news!! I totally know how to fix this!

High expectations!!

After all-- these students are probably not getting hired for jobs like store manager or nuclear plant engineer or government ombudsperson because the employers don't expect they'll be able to do the job. Low expectations!

So we just mandate that employers must hire the first people who show up for a job. After all, if education results are just the product of randomly applied low and high expectations of the school system, then employment results are just the product of randomly applied low and high expectations of employers. If I can get all students to be awesome in my classroom just by expecting it, then an employer can get awesome results from any and all employees just by expecting them!

So all Washington (either one) has to say is, "Employers, you must hire blindly. Take whoever you get and make it work with the power of high expectations!" And excellence will rain down like manna from heaven. You're welcome.

100% Charter Fail

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Voice, Hypocrisy and Rashomon at AEI

On Thursday, Cami Anderson was supposed to speak at the American Enterprise Institute. Things did not go quite as planned. How they did go is, well, open to interpretation. We now present, "Rashomon at AEI"

One angry voice.

Bob Braun, hard-hitting journalist and defender of public education in New Jersey, recounted the events in his blog post "Cami Anderson: A National Embarassment."

Anderson, already an embarrassment to herself and the state of New Jersey, never did speak, at least not publicly. She canceled her PUBLIC speech. Why? Because a busload of 40 students, parents, and other community residents showed up to hear what she had to say and, perhaps, to ask her a few questions.  They had to go to Washington because Cami Anderson won’t talk to them in Newark. Won’t attend public board meetings. Hasn’t since January. The Hermit Queen of Newark.
So those 40 people who yesterday followed her to Washington literally scared her speechless, poor dear.

The Newark folks had registered to the event (all accounts agree pretty much on that point). But one of Anderson's aids spotted familiar crankypants faces and told AEI event organizers that barbarians were already inside the gates. Security did not evict them, but the "event" was moved, and somebody decided that a good way to roust the Jerseyites would be to turn out the lights in the room, which led to some angry chanting.

Braun notes the irony of a think tank devoted to freedom, open debate, and individual liberty deciding that some people needed to be forcibly barred from this particular conversation.

A historical voice

Over at the Washington Post, Lyndsey Layton covered both the non-event and the background of anger and contentiousness that preceded it. The people of Newark have been agitated about the state-selected school boss who has become their school tsar, to rule their schools and ignore their voices as she sees fit. Anderson claims it's a small fringe group, but somehow a new mayor of Newark was elected as an agent of that small fringe, which suggests they are correct when they say they're not a finge at all.

An aggrieved voice

Rick Hess of the AEI has a somewhat different take on the events. As with Braun, his point of view is loaded right up front in the title: "Cami Anderson and the Forces of Unreason."

Hess points out the irony that this event was the end result of Anderson's exception-taking to a Hess piece earlier this year that was indirectly critical of Newarks non-achievements. He was giving her a platform on which to discuss the many great things she's accomplished that nobody has heard about. (And she still got the platform-- just as a closed room videoed infomercial)

The event was to be an examination of Newark and the lessons it holds--not a celebration of Anderson's effort. As per usual, the session was to include a presentation by Anderson on her "One Newark" strategy, and then more than an hour of conversation and questions. Is Newark's strategy the right one? Is it working? That's what discussions like this are for. Should the governor control Newark's schools? Is Anderson the right person to be superintendent? Good questions, all. Well worth discussing and debating in the nation's capital.

But Hess is taken aback. He's surprised and disappointed. He's not yet clutching his pearls, but he does have them at the ready. AEI, he says, has hosted a wide variety of speakers from many sides of the education debates. He counts Randi Weingarten and Dennis van Roekel among the "different" (non-reformster) speakers, and by my count the reformster to resistance ratio runs about 4:1, but his point that AEI is not just playing echo chamber is still a fair-ish one.

Anyway, in all those speakers he has never encountered "a group so dead-set on trying to stop someone from simply being heard as this coterie from Newark." (I really, really love that he calls them a "coterie.") He is upset that they aren't called out more for being so vicious, but he is especially bothered by their hypocrisy. How can they demand to be heard while stifling the speech of others? And not even get ripped for it in the press?

Rick Hess is a smart guy. I often refer to him as one of my favorite writers that I usually disagree with. But I think he's missed a point or two here.

The Hypocrisy defense.

This is always a lousy defense, no matter which side is using it. The situation is usually something like this-- I punch you in the face, and you holler, "Hey, man! It's totally wrong to punch someone in the face!" But I keep punching. When you finally punch me back, I call "Hypocrite." It has two benefits. One is that it keeps the conversation away from discussing whether or not I'm punching you in the face and whether or not that's bad behavior. The other is that you can only win the hypocrisy argument by letting me punch you in the face without ever hitting back.

"Hey, you're being hypocritical" is often a rough translation of "No fair! You promised you weren't going to fight back!"

Voice and volume

Now, I think it's probably true that the Newark folks may have been a bit unruly. And if they weren't to start with, the videos on youtube suggest that they certainly got feisty once they realized that the elusive Anderson had slipped through their fingers again. And the accounts I've read from Newark suggest there has been a whole lot of raised-voice angry hollerization going on in NJ.

But instead of looking at this kind of hollering as a moral failing or a breach of etiquette (one simply doesn't holler at a think tank luncheon), let's look at it for what it really is-- the demonstration of a simple principle. I learned it years ago running committees, and confirmed it in many situations since then. It's a simple two-part principle of voice and volume.

1) People want to be heard.

2) If they do not believe they are being heard when they speak, they will keep raising their volume until they believe they are being heard.

I can't begin to count the number of difficult situations that I've seen defused by one side actually stopping and listening to the other. I can't begin to count the number of difficult situations I've seen made worse by one side trying to deal with dissent by silencing it.

It's Basic Leadership 101. You cannot get rid of disagreement by silencing its voice. I don't mean you shouldn't, as in a moral imperative (though I believe it is one)-- I mean you can't, as in it just doesn't work. People want to be heard. If they can't be heard when they speak, they will keep raising their volume, even to the point of rude and untoward behavior at proper thinky tank luncheons.

Yes, there's always a small percentage of folks who think being heard must mean being agreed with. But listening isolates them as a small fringe group takes the wind out of their sails. Pro tip: trying to combine not listening with characterizing them as a fringe group doesn't do you a bit of good.

Cami Anderson and her crew have provided an ongoing masters class in how to get all of this dead wrong. They have tried to rule by edict. Anderson has taken Not Listening all the way to Not Even Being In Same Room With People She Refuses To Listen To. And the enlistment of Tom Moran and the Star-Ledger has further reduced the ways in which opponents of Anderson can be heard. The increasingly loud, shrill, occasionally vicious, exceedingly impolite ratcheting up of her opponents' volume is an absolutely predictable result of Anderson's incompetence as a leader. It's not just that her policies are demonstrably failures, but her unwillingness to even make a five-cent politicians fake pretense of hearing any opposing voices. She is not the first nor the last leader to try to implement bad policies, but not all of them manage to do such a terrible job as managers that people are willing to take a day out of their lives to travel all the way to DC on the off chance that they might be able to force said incompetent leader to listen to them.

Well, I could go on. But if you want the full context of how the AEI non-event is further evidence that Anderson should be out of a job, read this post from Jersey Jazzman.

Volume and Power

I want to make one other observation about this raised volume thing. It's almost always a class and/or power thing.

When people with money and power feel they aren't being heard, they also raise the volume. But because they have money and power, they can raise the volume by spending $12 million to set up slick websites, or establishing "advocacy groups" to push their agenda out through their connections, or having polite luncheon dates. If Bill Gates thinks people aren't really hearing what he has to say about education, he gets out his checkbook or makes some phone calls. If Anderson and Hess feel that they aren't going to be heard, they retire to the studio in another room to record a professional-looking video to distribute through their internet channels; meanwhile, the folks they left behind are stuck recording their chants on cell-phone videos on the hope someone might pick them up on youtube.

Ordinary folks like the citizens of Newark don't have the rich and powerful options. They can't drop a few million dollars on an ad campaign or make some quick calls to highly-placed people of power and influence. When people without money, power or status want to raise the volume to be heard, they don't have any options except literally raising the volume and getting loud and unruly and even obnoxious. And then we can cue the complaints about their tone and rudeness and general misbehavior. Why they can't just be quiet and polite and unheard? Goodness!

The fact is, civil discourse is great-- if you have money and power and connections to back it up. Wouldn't it be interesting to go back in time to, say, that meeting between David Coleman and Gene Wilhoit and Bill Gates, and to say, "Gentlemen, you may pursue your dreams of an educational overhaul of this nation. But you must do it on a budget of $1.95, and you can't call any of your powerful friends to help you out. All you can use is a free blog and talking to people you can convince to listen to you."

"Let's all calm down and try to speak nicely," are the words of the people with power. "Listen to me RIGHT NOW DAMMIT," are the words of the powerless, unheard, and frustrated.

There is a solution

I learned this ages ago. If you don't want people to scream at you, do not try to overpower them, shout them down, or force them to shut up.

Listen to them.

The formula is not, "If he calms down, I will listen to him." Or, as I used to tell my children, the only person you can control is yourself. So make yourself do the listening. Then the calm will come.

Am I saying that this dynamic resolves all individuals of responsibility for how they conduct themselves? No, it does not. In a perfect world, people should be polite and respectful most of the time. But in the immortal words of the philosopher Dr. Phil, you teach others how to treat you. And if you teach people that approaching you quietly and respectfully will get them ignored, you can't be surprised that they learn the lesson that being quiet and respectful and civil is a waste of their time. When it comes to these interactions, you can teach them whatever lesson you wish.

Look at Massachusetts. The fight over linking teacher licenses to evaluations was only going to get uglier and uglier. But then a funny thing happened-- the commissioner listened to what people were saying. Now, not so much ugliness.

Of course, Massachusetts highlights one of the tricky parts of Really Listening. Sometimes when you Really Listen, you discover that you really do need to really change your plan. At the very least, it may require you to explain yourself more clearly than you have.

You can have civil discourse and reasoned debate. But you have to go first. And you have to listen. And you also have to accept, if you're dealing with a horrific festering mess like Newark, that you are going to have to listen to huuuuuuge amounts of fairly angry stuff, because all the things that you've been refusing to listen to all this time have not gone away-- they've gone into a big escrow account and now they are going to come out with interest. You don't get to say, "Can't we start fresh? You forget all the times you didn't have a say, and I'll forget all the times I didn't let you have one, and we'll start even."

The only way to cut to the chase in a place like Newark is to fire Anderson and replace her with someone who spends her first weeks in office taking meetings, listening, and publicly disowning Anderson's work.

The first rule of civil discourse and debate and free speech is you have to extend the opportunity to everybody. What would have happened, I wonder, if AEI had said, "Tell you what. Let Cami speak, and then when she's done, we will give you the podium, and the only rules is that everybody has to let everybody else have their say" instead of "Security, get these hooligans out of here."

But in the US education landscape, we have far too many places where reformsters have decided that the route to success is to just stop listening to large chunks of the population. This is a recipe for disaster, and if wannabe leaders keep pursuing it, a few dozen cranky paid registrants at a thinky tank luncheon will be the very least of their problems.

Great News from MA

ICYMI, it's nice to report some good news--

You may recall that the commonwealth of Massachusetts was considering linking teachers' licensure to evaluations. They were going to up the eval ante by saying that a teacher who received two bad evaluations will be booted-- not just out of a job, but out of the profession.

Well-- that's not happening.

That news broke at the end of October, and the Massachusetts Teachers Association leapt immediately into action. They flooded the commissioner's office with a reported 45,000 emails, spoke at town hall meetings, and made plans for further vocal action.

Yesterday the commissioner announced that the department was "rescinding the draft options that link licensure to educator evaluation." Commissioner Mitchell Chester was remarkably not at all coy about it, either. In the letter and in interview, he's said basically, "Yeah, we got a shitstorm of feedback on this, all negative, so we're backing off." He also oddly noted that he agreed with the negative feedback, so someday we may have to delve into the mystery of how this proposal ever ended up on the table in the first place (did somebody do a cut and paste from their ALEC newsletter without reading carefully?)

When I originally wrote about this, I noted it was worth paying attention to nationally because, if successful, it could be a cancer that might spread.

But now, we can just hope that this kind of vocal, positive, powerful, definitive action by teachers in the face of anti-teacher and anti-education government action spread. The MTA and their leaders are to be applauded for taking an unequivocal stand and not just making a bad deal on this in return for a place at the table. 

Will Wolf's PA Love Charters?

I'm going to hold my breath just a bit longer.

Public education boosters were pretty happy to see Tom Corbett shown the door on election day. But it still remains to be seen whether Tom Wolf is a Fresh New Direction or simply the Lesser of Two Evils. Today, folks are examining his first appointments for his new administration to see if they can guess which way the wind is blowing.

Wolf has been a successful businessman, helming the company that his family has run for decades in York, PA. But for public education advocates, York is also the site of one more attempt by charter privateers to create a happy new NOLA-style playground. This is where it becomes difficult to determine exactly which players are connected.

It was Corbett who budget-slashed York schools into charter vulnerability, and Corbett who appointed a Takeover Tsar (Chief Recovery Officer). But Corbett's choice was David Meckley, and that's where things ultimately became sticky for Wolf.

There has not been a great deal of journalism covering these next parts-- most of what you find leads back to the work of Colleen Kennedy, who is either out there in a conspiracy crackpot way or an intrepid crusading journalist way. I lean toward the latter, but time is indeed going to tell whether she got this right or not.

Meckley and Wolf are, according to Kennedy, friends. Both are connected to the York County Community Foundation, whose vision is to be "a catalyst for strategic philanthropy and a driver of community improvement." In 2013, the group issued a report calling for the 100% charterization of York schools. They also take credit for having pushed Corbett to appoint Meckley as Tsar. Michael Newsome, the CFO of Wolf's company served on that board, as did Kim Bracey,  mayor of York and longtime Wolf booster. Wolf has been a member of the board, including serving as achirman, but nobody is saying that he served on the 2013 charter-plugging board.

By August, with his eye on the governor's mansion, Wolf was disavowing the charterization, and he said so right in York. Reported the York Daily Record--

"I don't think it delivers as well on the promise that we all make to say, 'Listen, we're not opting out here. We're actually going to try to make sure the kids in the city of York get a great education.' That's a responsibility we all share," Wolf said.

Whether Wolf was just revealing what he always had thought, having an epiphany, or engaging in some political rebranding is still not clear. And listen-- York is small city (about 43K population) and if you're from a small city or town, you know that everybody is connected to everybody one way or another. I have lived most of my life in my town of roughly 7,000 souls, and by charting my connections you can prove that I am tied into the Tea Party, crazy hippie liberals, angry libertarians, welfare bums, and corporate stooges (as well as all political parties). So I get that it's easy to play this connect-the-dots game and come up wrong. Wolf's Democratic primary opponents tried to tie him to a racist killer and to a scam artist and just ended up proving that Wolf was the kind of guy who stuck by old friends even when it was politically inexpedient to do so. You can read Kennedy's more thorough argument and decide for yourself if Wolf passes the smell test on education..

You may want to decide quickly. On Thursday, Wolf announced some of his transition team. It includes BFF Mayor Kim Bracey as a vice-chair, and John A. Frey as chair. Frey is the president of Drexel University, which has made its reformy mark with a program offering a MS in Education Improvement and Transformation. Their television program interviewed Diane Ravitch in 2007, but one of their adjuncts (Katharine Beals) reviewed Death and Life of the American School System and found Ravitch "unconvincing." And Drexel has been involved in some "partnerships" with the Philly Public [sic] School system; so they have some chartery smell on them. Thin connections, again, but the Drexel connection has set off alarm bells for some folks.

Wolf tapped some former aides from "Smilin' Ed" Rendell, former Democratic governor who was no friend to public education or the teachers who work there. Probably Wolf's most interesting choice so far is Kathleen McGinty, one of his opponents from the Democratic primary.

Will Wolf be good for education? Hard to say. Off the top of your head, can you think of any Democrats who ran as pro-public education and turned out to be mostly interested in tearing it down? Senators? Governors? A President? In Pennsylvania, we're a little ahead of this learning curve, thanks to the aforementioned Ed Rendell. 

So maybe Wolf will turn out to be great for public education, or maybe we're just going to see more charter shenanigans. It's still too early to call, and I'm not going to breathe easy just yet.

Ohio Schools: Cuts and Unfunding Mandates and Petitions

The Ohio State Board of Education has had quite the week. After quietly starting the process of slashing state requirements for elementary specials, they got a quick lesson in social media-- this post alone blew up to 12K views in just a few days.

For the most complete coverage of the actual cuts and changes, I recommend this post over at Plunderbund, a site that specializes in Ohio School Stuff. I think the analyses there of the larger problem is spot on as well.

The cutting or requirements for elementary schools to hire a full complement of arts, phys ed, counseling, nurse, librarian, support staff is not about some perverse desire to diminish education for Ohio's children. It's about trying to give local districts the tools to help manage the damaging funding cuts that the state has inflicted on them. This approach not coincidentally has the effect of forcing local school districts to be the bad guys, because they would be the ones to say, "We're getting rid of the art teacher."

The people of Ohio have a month to raise a fuss. They can send emails, letters, and sign petitions like this one at change.org, and they should. But they should also get on the phone to the state capital and make some noise about state funding of education.

Look at it this way. If local districts were fully funded, it would barely matter that the state BOE cut the requirement to hire certain elementary staff. Local districts would simply shrug and say, "Well, why the heck would we want to cut those things" and life would go on.

A. J. Wagner, the board member who led the walkout earlier this week, reportedly reached out to protestors by letter, saying essentially that he wanted to remove the pressure of unfunded mandates from local districts, an could anybody see a way to do that. Well, there are two ways to fix an unfunded mandate problem. You can either get rid the mandate (as the board proposes) or you can keep the mandate and actually fund it! That would be my message to pass along to Wagner (not that he can fix that, but it would be a message for him to pass on to the legislature).

The pressure is not coming from some burning urge to diminish the educational lives of children. The pressure is coming from an inability to pay for everything that the school district should be providing because the governor's administration has pursued a program of starving the beast. I can't pretend to know what is in Kasich's heart, but I do know that if you don't provide public schools with the money to do a good job, and they then start to crack and fail under the funding pressure, it's a lot easier to make your case that failing public schools need to be rescued by Noble Charter Operators.

So keeping the pressure on, the noise loud, and the fight going is worthwhile. But it's also worthwhile to keep an eye on the problem behind the problem.