The Department of Education is pleased to announce that their program to preserve the school-to-debt pipeline is proceeding apace.
You may recall that the USED once declared they would crack down on predatory for-profit flim-flam artists masquerading as colleges. You may also recall that, when presented with an exceptional example of a chain of egregious sharks, the USED finally stepped in to preserve the interests of everyone except the students involved in the massive scame.
I've covered the story of the USED and Corinthian Colleges before; the more detailed version is here. Let's look at what today's cheery press release actually says.
Zenith Education Group has announced that they have finished glomming up fifty-some campuses from Corinthian College, in a deal that has been under construction since November.
Zenith is a subsidiary of Educational Credit Management Company. ECMC is a debt collection company, specializing in chasing down student loan repayment. Apparently they have pursued those debts a bit overzealously at times, but here they are, cutting out the middle man. Exactly what expertise the "newly created" Zenith has in operating colleges (other than chasing the debts that students run up paying tuition to them) is not clear. But the removal of the middle man allows Zenith to turn these for profit schools into non-profits. After all, I don't have to make money collecting tuition from you if I can make money from selling you the loan for the tuition money.
When they call Zenith "newly created," they aren't kidding. Bizapedia shows them forming in December of 2014. The company is filed in Florida, but it operates out of Oakdale, Minnesota (the six principals are Gary M. Cook, John F. Depodesta, Daniel S Fisher, David L. Hawn, James V. McKeon, and Gregory A. Van Guilder) at 1 Imation Place in the same building as the other ECMC offices reside, plus Premiere Credit of North America LLC. Cook was or is the director of ECMC Technology Services Corporation. DePodesta is the ECMC chairman of the board.
Zenith's interim president is Troy A. Stovall, who "comes to the position with eight years of leadership experience in nonprofit higher education administration and a distinguished background serving in various management consulting and advisory roles." So he totally knows about education. Most recently he was the Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer for Howard University, but he also runs his own consulting firm; his LinkedIn profile includes a plug for Time Driven Activity Based Costing, so apparently he speaks fluent consultantese. He's also a principal at something called Oak Forest Ventures, "a solutions firm dedicated to
substantially improving the profitability of its clients."
Are you getting the impression that this is way more about business and money than about education and a future for students?
Zenith has a chirpy new website. It touts the qualities of, but does not list by name, its "employees." So, not a faculty, I guess. And they have a whole tab devoted to their partners:
We intend to graduate high-performing, highly skilled students from our
schools, and our new partnership program will identify high-quality
employers in industries with clear local workforce needs that are
sufficiently equipped to support students as they work to embark upon
their new careers.
One can hope that will become a bit more concrete and nailed down, as one of Corinthian's many scam-related issues was its tendency to create fake employment for its students to hide its lousy job placement record. This is not great for schools specifically devoted to preparing students for a place in the workforce.
A look at the "our schools" tab confirms what news reports imply-- Zenith has no schools in its chain other than the ones it just grabbed from Corinthian.
That grabbage depended hugely on the USED's involvement. So when they said that they would drop the hammer on predatory colleges, apparently by "hammer" they meant "big fluffy hammer sculpted out of money." Truthout tells the story and makes the case that the USED is saving a chunk of its own bacon. If Corinthian had simply gone belly up or been shut down by the feds, some students would have had the option of a get-out-of-loans free cards, which could have cost the USED a few hundred million bucks. The USED has reportedly been making big bucks from student loans, so anti-shark measures may not be in their business interests.
As part of the deal, "the parties agreed to pay the Department $12 million in an up-front
payment, and up to an additional $17.25 million earn-out over the next
seven years that will be used to benefit Corinthian students." The Department is announcing a $480 million loan forgiveness plan for borrowers who paid their way to Corinthian with high-cost private loans. Who this covers is not clear from the USED press release, but in any version, it's not much help. If the $480 mill is split over the 30,000 students who just became assets traded from Corinthian to Zenith, that's about $16K. If we add in current Corinthian students as well, it's closer to $7K. The press release says this money will also help past Corinthian students get a fresh start, so that $480 mill is looking tinier and tinier.
The USED also cheerfully reports that Zenith has agreed to all manner of swell things, like voluntarily hiring an independent monitor, which is right up there with politicians setting up ethics committee to oversee their own behavior, under their own direction. I'm not impressed.
Also, "in the months since the announcement of the sale" (which would be December and January) "Zenith has agreed to implement a series of improvements to improve
outcomes, strengthen career training, and ensure accountability and
transparency." Yes, boys and girls, in just two months (with, presumably, time off for to celebrate Christmas and the big fat present Santa Duncan was delivering) Zenith managed to retool an entire college system that was previously designed to fraudulently use students as straws through which to suck up delicious loan money. Given an organization run by guys who have no actual college-running experience, that is a managerial feat of amazing skill and bullshittery.
Here's the big finish to the federal PR notice:
Throughout, the Department has sought a wind down of Corinthian
Colleges that protects students, protects the investment taxpayers have
made in their success, and creates opportunities for students to finish
what they started. The Department has also sought a resolution that,
where possible, establishes a strong and ongoing platform for high
quality career education in the future. Today’s announcement by Zenith
and Corinthian is a major and positive step in these directions.
And here's how I described this story the last time I covered it
Short version: feds threatened to shut down predatory loan-sucking
for-profit scam schools, but decided to bail them out instead. Kind of
like finding people in a burning building and saying, "You guys just
stay there inside. We're going to hire someone to paint the place."
Once again, we see that zealous federal oversight is for public schools. For privately operated school-flavored businesses, the feds are there to make sure that nothing interrupts the sweet. sweet stream of money flowing to private pockets. It is always possible that Zenith will turn out to be awesome stewards of education, I suppose. But for students, it's a caveat emptor world. For businesses, don't worry-- the government will always watch your back. And don't forget-- this deal was only for a portion of the Corinthian chain-- the rest is still out there, still in business, still preying away. Caveat emptor, indeed.
Tuesday, February 3, 2015
Monday, February 2, 2015
CAP Scolds Lamar Alexander
CAP has rushed to the defense of the reformy status quo and takes a moment to try to school Lamar Alexander with the pearl-clutching headline, "5 Reasons Why Sen. Alexander's Draft Education Bill Fails Parents." Let's take a look at their five compelling slices of baloney.
1) Lowers academic standards.
Today, all states have academic standards that are aligned to career and college readiness.
Man, if you're going to lie, be big and bold. Their is not a shred of evidence anywhere that the Common Core (which oddly enough CAP does not mention by name once in this article-- oh, where has the love gone) or any of the versions of it actually align to college and career readiness. In fact, I'd be delighted for CAP to show us all where any such "college and career readiness" exists to be aligned to.
Nor is there a shred of evidence that Common Core standards are high standards. None.
2) Prevents parents from making informed decisions about where to send their children to school.
Yes, an ESEA rewrite could undercut the marketing programs for privatizers and takeover artists, and will create a major revenue gap for the corporations that are hoovering up billions of tax dollars on the backs of federal testing requirements. Of course, the premise here once again is that parents are dopes, completely unable to judge how well a school is doing without helpful government documents to straighten them out.
Then again, given the number of parents who find themselves being shafted, snowed, and just generally abandoned by various charter operators, perhaps some sort of consumer protection is in order. Given the number of charter schools that can't manage to keep a simple sales promise like "we'll stay open till your child finishes," maybe ESEA does need some beefing up in this department.
But the assertion that parents have no idea how their child is doing without a federally-mandated standardized test-- that's both patronizing and stupid.
3. Allows low-performing schools to languish.
The other recurring theme? States are terrible and stupid and can't be trusted. I've always found this argument in favor of federal centralism odd-- didn't most of the people working in DC get their political starts in states? Were they shiftless, untrustworthy, and dopey when they worked on the state level, but when they breathed in the air of DC they were suddenly imbued with wisdom?
But the argument here is that "states could design and implement almost any system they want with no federal checks or guardrails." And that would be bad because....? Yes, I know that states have not always exercised superior judgment in the past, but neither have the feds, and when the feds screw it up, they screw it up for a whole country-- not just one state. If you are really concerned about this, set a low bar that you won't let a state sink below. If they sink below it, then the feds can step in. Otherwise, the feds can leave them alone.
Here's the thing-- the feds have been taking steps to not allow low-performing schools to languish for over a decade, and how has that worked? Name me ten schools that used to suck and are now doing great because of federal intervention. Name me five. You can name me lots of schools and districts where federal intervention allowed some charter chains and educorporations to make a bundle, but that's it, and it's certainly not enough.
4. Eliminates federal funding for before- and after-school programs.
Well, it eliminates one funding stream for them. This is small potatoes, easily fixed by legislators if it's an actual issue across the nation.
5. Fails to provide parents with protection from substantial school budget cuts.
The concern here is about a stream of Title I funding, which is an intriguing concern coming from reformsters who have happily held Title I funds hostage in order to arm-twist states into accepting federal control of state-level education.
Without this provision, states would have free rein to cut their education budgets. As a result, children would face larger class sizes and under-resourced schools.
Because states don't have the ability to cut education budgets now? Because I'm in Pennsylvania and over the past few years we sliced off a few billion budget bucks without any trouble at all. I'm not seeing how this provision mysteriously ties state budgetary hands.
But if such cuts become a problem, you know what might help balance it out? Not having to spend billions of dollars on federally mandated tests or billions of dollars on federally mandated new curricular materials or billions of dollars on computers and infrastructure just to take federally mandated tests. If you are really deeply concerned about states having enough money, there are all sort of revenue-leeching bloodsuckers attached to the public education teats-- lend a hand and scrape them off.
Bottom line?
CAP's tale is a story of nefarious states and hapless parents, tragic situation that can only be fixed by federal mandates and bureaucrats (and their dear, close friends at Pearson et al who make a convenient bundle from the one-stop-shopping opportunity that is federally-controlled public education).
Lamar Alexander may well manage to fail parents before he's over, but it sure won't be because he failed to listen to the compassionate humanitarians at CAP. Of all the criticisms of the new draft version of ESEA out there, these are five of the lamest and least valid.
1) Lowers academic standards.
Today, all states have academic standards that are aligned to career and college readiness.
Man, if you're going to lie, be big and bold. Their is not a shred of evidence anywhere that the Common Core (which oddly enough CAP does not mention by name once in this article-- oh, where has the love gone) or any of the versions of it actually align to college and career readiness. In fact, I'd be delighted for CAP to show us all where any such "college and career readiness" exists to be aligned to.
Nor is there a shred of evidence that Common Core standards are high standards. None.
2) Prevents parents from making informed decisions about where to send their children to school.
Yes, an ESEA rewrite could undercut the marketing programs for privatizers and takeover artists, and will create a major revenue gap for the corporations that are hoovering up billions of tax dollars on the backs of federal testing requirements. Of course, the premise here once again is that parents are dopes, completely unable to judge how well a school is doing without helpful government documents to straighten them out.
Then again, given the number of parents who find themselves being shafted, snowed, and just generally abandoned by various charter operators, perhaps some sort of consumer protection is in order. Given the number of charter schools that can't manage to keep a simple sales promise like "we'll stay open till your child finishes," maybe ESEA does need some beefing up in this department.
But the assertion that parents have no idea how their child is doing without a federally-mandated standardized test-- that's both patronizing and stupid.
3. Allows low-performing schools to languish.
The other recurring theme? States are terrible and stupid and can't be trusted. I've always found this argument in favor of federal centralism odd-- didn't most of the people working in DC get their political starts in states? Were they shiftless, untrustworthy, and dopey when they worked on the state level, but when they breathed in the air of DC they were suddenly imbued with wisdom?
But the argument here is that "states could design and implement almost any system they want with no federal checks or guardrails." And that would be bad because....? Yes, I know that states have not always exercised superior judgment in the past, but neither have the feds, and when the feds screw it up, they screw it up for a whole country-- not just one state. If you are really concerned about this, set a low bar that you won't let a state sink below. If they sink below it, then the feds can step in. Otherwise, the feds can leave them alone.
Here's the thing-- the feds have been taking steps to not allow low-performing schools to languish for over a decade, and how has that worked? Name me ten schools that used to suck and are now doing great because of federal intervention. Name me five. You can name me lots of schools and districts where federal intervention allowed some charter chains and educorporations to make a bundle, but that's it, and it's certainly not enough.
4. Eliminates federal funding for before- and after-school programs.
Well, it eliminates one funding stream for them. This is small potatoes, easily fixed by legislators if it's an actual issue across the nation.
5. Fails to provide parents with protection from substantial school budget cuts.
The concern here is about a stream of Title I funding, which is an intriguing concern coming from reformsters who have happily held Title I funds hostage in order to arm-twist states into accepting federal control of state-level education.
Without this provision, states would have free rein to cut their education budgets. As a result, children would face larger class sizes and under-resourced schools.
Because states don't have the ability to cut education budgets now? Because I'm in Pennsylvania and over the past few years we sliced off a few billion budget bucks without any trouble at all. I'm not seeing how this provision mysteriously ties state budgetary hands.
But if such cuts become a problem, you know what might help balance it out? Not having to spend billions of dollars on federally mandated tests or billions of dollars on federally mandated new curricular materials or billions of dollars on computers and infrastructure just to take federally mandated tests. If you are really deeply concerned about states having enough money, there are all sort of revenue-leeching bloodsuckers attached to the public education teats-- lend a hand and scrape them off.
Bottom line?
CAP's tale is a story of nefarious states and hapless parents, tragic situation that can only be fixed by federal mandates and bureaucrats (and their dear, close friends at Pearson et al who make a convenient bundle from the one-stop-shopping opportunity that is federally-controlled public education).
Lamar Alexander may well manage to fail parents before he's over, but it sure won't be because he failed to listen to the compassionate humanitarians at CAP. Of all the criticisms of the new draft version of ESEA out there, these are five of the lamest and least valid.
No Grad Exams for PA?
Pennsylvania, where I live and teach, has been steadily moving toward a full array of graduation exams.
Currently we have what we call the Keystone exams for math and reading. We are one of the last states to do our examing on paper; this may be related to an attempt a few years back to do our 4Sights (test prep tests for the old exam, known as the PSSA's, which we still give to elementary students because--) well , anyway, we tried to do the testing online and it was a massive clusterfinagle that wasted a week of school and resulted in zero actual scoreable tests. When it comes to online testing, we haven't been all the way around the block because we got in a ten-car pileup on the way.
The math and reading Keystones are exams that you would recognize even if you were from out of state. I attended a state-mounted training last year and the presenter used all PARCC materials, and the message was that it was perfectly comparable to the Keystones.
Our Class of 2017 has to passmath algebra, reading literature, and biology Keystones in order to graduate. Depending on who's talking, there are as many as seven more subject-specific tests coming, just as soon as Harrisburg can scrape together the money to get them made.
Students are already taking the Keystones every year, partly as a way of meeting federal testing requirements and partly as a way to warm up for 2017 (everyone just tries not to tell the students that the Keystones currently mean nothing at all to them). So our students have been taking the tests, and we can see how they're doing. And as 2017 gets closer and closer, one thing becomes increasingly clear-- many students are about to have huge problems getting out of high school.
Students get two tries, and then they move onto a project-based assessment, known to my students as The Binder (or, out of my earshot, that Bigass Stupid Binder) which is essentially an independent study course in looseleaf form. There are now adapted or modified forms for students with special needs. And things could be worse-- you should have been around for the first concept for the science test which was to test all science disciplines, forcing high schools to implement a bio-chem-physics-physiology sequence for ninth and tenth grade.
But it's going to be ugly, and lawmakers are starting to take note.
State Senator Andrew Dinneman (D-Chester County) has been trying to de-testify us for a while. But most recently a group of Republicans have gotten on the Get Off The Testing Bandwagon bandwagon.
Over at newsworks, Kevin McCorry reports about a new bill proposed by state Rep. Mike Tobash (R- Dauphin County) to flat-out repeal the state graduation test mandate.
"The children of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, they need to learn, they need to be assessed, but when we've gone so far that we end up handcuffing our educational system with really an overwhelming amount of standardized assessment, we need to stop and put the brakes on here, take a look at it," said Tobash.
Much of the conversation has centered on the tests as unfunded mandates-- schools are required to get the students through them, but have not been given the resources to meet the challenge. And that's not untrue, but it's beside the real problem.
The real problem is that the Keystone exams aren't very good.
As this discussion ramps up, many supporters of the testing are going to make an obvious comment-- if the students aren't doing well on the tests, can't teachers just fix that by doing their jobs better?
McCorry catches Tobash having close to the right thought in response.
Tobash, who testified on the matter at a hearing at Philadelphia City Hall in November, is skeptical that the tests are actually judging students on material that's applicable to modern workforce.
The Keystones are like every other standardized test-- what they measure best is the student's ability to take a standardized test.
So we play the test prep game-- how much can we do in order to get test results without sacrificing the students' actual education? In reading, the Keystones require a particular vocabulary so that we teach the words they want to have covered with the meanings they prefer. This is part of the standard technique of using tests to dictate local curriculum.
More problematic is the whole approach to reading required by the test. Every selection on the test can be read only one way; there's only one acceptable response to the work. The Keystone also has a keen interest in student's psychic powers, regularly asking them to reach conclusions about what the author intended. Some of the interpretive questions, like the author's intent questions, really are topics that are generally considered fair game in an English classroom-- but we have those discussions as open-ended inquiries, where many ideas can be proposed and supported, but no absolute truth can be known. The exam requires the reverse.
And so the exam requires one more reading skill-- the ability to read a standardized test question and figure out what the exam writer wants you to say. This has nothing to do with learning how to be an active, capable reader of literature, and everything to do with being a compliant tool who can take instructions.
So the biggest problem with the Keystones is not that there are too many of them or they take up too much time, though that's a huge problem. The biggest problem is not that they are unfunded mandates, though that's a problem, particularly in a state that as a matter of policy rips the guts out of public school budgets so that charter and cybercharter operators get rich.
No, the biggest problem is that the Keystones twist instruction and education all out of shape, foster educational malpractice, and ultimately don't provide any of the data that their supporters think they're supposed to provide. The Keystones don't tell Harrisburg how well we're doing. They are supposed to provide all sorts of information to teachers to help us address student needs, and that's baloney as well. There's only one thing we find out from test results-- which sorts of questions our students found most tricky. Keystone results are good for refining test prep, and nothing else.The Keystone exams tell one thing and one thing only-- how well students did on the Keystone exams.
McCorry offers this quote from a rep of our new governor:
Gov. Wolf knows we need tools to measure students' progress and ensure they are equipped the skills needed to flourish in the 21st century, but testing should not be the only measurement.
And there's our continuing problem. Not only should testing be the single measurement, but it shouldn't be any measurement.
Even if standardized testing didn't heap unnecessary stress on young students, even if it didn't require wasting time on test prep that has no educational value, even if it didn't put unfunded financial demands on already-strapped districts-- even if it didn't do any of those things, the Keystone exam would still be a bad idea because it simply doesn't tell anyone what they want to know. Repealing state requirements for a graduation exam is the right choice. We'll see if Harrisburg actually makes it.
Currently we have what we call the Keystone exams for math and reading. We are one of the last states to do our examing on paper; this may be related to an attempt a few years back to do our 4Sights (test prep tests for the old exam, known as the PSSA's, which we still give to elementary students because--) well , anyway, we tried to do the testing online and it was a massive clusterfinagle that wasted a week of school and resulted in zero actual scoreable tests. When it comes to online testing, we haven't been all the way around the block because we got in a ten-car pileup on the way.
The math and reading Keystones are exams that you would recognize even if you were from out of state. I attended a state-mounted training last year and the presenter used all PARCC materials, and the message was that it was perfectly comparable to the Keystones.
Our Class of 2017 has to pass
Students are already taking the Keystones every year, partly as a way of meeting federal testing requirements and partly as a way to warm up for 2017 (everyone just tries not to tell the students that the Keystones currently mean nothing at all to them). So our students have been taking the tests, and we can see how they're doing. And as 2017 gets closer and closer, one thing becomes increasingly clear-- many students are about to have huge problems getting out of high school.
Students get two tries, and then they move onto a project-based assessment, known to my students as The Binder (or, out of my earshot, that Bigass Stupid Binder) which is essentially an independent study course in looseleaf form. There are now adapted or modified forms for students with special needs. And things could be worse-- you should have been around for the first concept for the science test which was to test all science disciplines, forcing high schools to implement a bio-chem-physics-physiology sequence for ninth and tenth grade.
But it's going to be ugly, and lawmakers are starting to take note.
State Senator Andrew Dinneman (D-Chester County) has been trying to de-testify us for a while. But most recently a group of Republicans have gotten on the Get Off The Testing Bandwagon bandwagon.
Over at newsworks, Kevin McCorry reports about a new bill proposed by state Rep. Mike Tobash (R- Dauphin County) to flat-out repeal the state graduation test mandate.
"The children of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, they need to learn, they need to be assessed, but when we've gone so far that we end up handcuffing our educational system with really an overwhelming amount of standardized assessment, we need to stop and put the brakes on here, take a look at it," said Tobash.
Much of the conversation has centered on the tests as unfunded mandates-- schools are required to get the students through them, but have not been given the resources to meet the challenge. And that's not untrue, but it's beside the real problem.
The real problem is that the Keystone exams aren't very good.
As this discussion ramps up, many supporters of the testing are going to make an obvious comment-- if the students aren't doing well on the tests, can't teachers just fix that by doing their jobs better?
McCorry catches Tobash having close to the right thought in response.
Tobash, who testified on the matter at a hearing at Philadelphia City Hall in November, is skeptical that the tests are actually judging students on material that's applicable to modern workforce.
The Keystones are like every other standardized test-- what they measure best is the student's ability to take a standardized test.
So we play the test prep game-- how much can we do in order to get test results without sacrificing the students' actual education? In reading, the Keystones require a particular vocabulary so that we teach the words they want to have covered with the meanings they prefer. This is part of the standard technique of using tests to dictate local curriculum.
More problematic is the whole approach to reading required by the test. Every selection on the test can be read only one way; there's only one acceptable response to the work. The Keystone also has a keen interest in student's psychic powers, regularly asking them to reach conclusions about what the author intended. Some of the interpretive questions, like the author's intent questions, really are topics that are generally considered fair game in an English classroom-- but we have those discussions as open-ended inquiries, where many ideas can be proposed and supported, but no absolute truth can be known. The exam requires the reverse.
And so the exam requires one more reading skill-- the ability to read a standardized test question and figure out what the exam writer wants you to say. This has nothing to do with learning how to be an active, capable reader of literature, and everything to do with being a compliant tool who can take instructions.
So the biggest problem with the Keystones is not that there are too many of them or they take up too much time, though that's a huge problem. The biggest problem is not that they are unfunded mandates, though that's a problem, particularly in a state that as a matter of policy rips the guts out of public school budgets so that charter and cybercharter operators get rich.
No, the biggest problem is that the Keystones twist instruction and education all out of shape, foster educational malpractice, and ultimately don't provide any of the data that their supporters think they're supposed to provide. The Keystones don't tell Harrisburg how well we're doing. They are supposed to provide all sorts of information to teachers to help us address student needs, and that's baloney as well. There's only one thing we find out from test results-- which sorts of questions our students found most tricky. Keystone results are good for refining test prep, and nothing else.The Keystone exams tell one thing and one thing only-- how well students did on the Keystone exams.
McCorry offers this quote from a rep of our new governor:
Gov. Wolf knows we need tools to measure students' progress and ensure they are equipped the skills needed to flourish in the 21st century, but testing should not be the only measurement.
And there's our continuing problem. Not only should testing be the single measurement, but it shouldn't be any measurement.
Even if standardized testing didn't heap unnecessary stress on young students, even if it didn't require wasting time on test prep that has no educational value, even if it didn't put unfunded financial demands on already-strapped districts-- even if it didn't do any of those things, the Keystone exam would still be a bad idea because it simply doesn't tell anyone what they want to know. Repealing state requirements for a graduation exam is the right choice. We'll see if Harrisburg actually makes it.
Cuomo to Teachers: Get the Hell Out
I'll give Andrew Cuomo this-- when he makes threats to come after someone, they aren't just empty political promises. He said he would try to break the public schools, and he appears to be determined to make it happen.
Cuomo's assault has started with a lesson in how data can serve as a mirror to reflect the biases of whoever is gazing into it.
Mangling data
Cuomo's talking points and reformy agenda have started with a simple set of data. The proficiency rate for 3rd-8th graders is 35.8% for math and 31.4% for reading. Over 90% of New York teachers received effective ratings. There are three possible explanations for why these numbers don't fit together.
1) The teacher effectiveness ratings are wrong.
2) The student proficiency numbers are wrong.
3) There is no connection between student test results and teacher effectiveness.
#3 is by far the most likely. At the very least, there isn't a shred of documentation, study or much of anything else to support the notion that test results have anything to do with teacher effectiveness. Let's also remember that we're talking about math and reading scores for 3rd through 8th graders-- exactly what should tell us about, say, 11th grade history teachers?
#3 is also affected by #2-- if the student scores don't actually mean anything, they can hardly be connected to teacher scores. And since student cut scores weren't set by any particular supportable academic standard, it's highly unlikely that they are really telling us anything about how many students are "proficient" (a term that doesn't have any actual meaning in this context).
Cuomo has, like a student who fails to check all options on a standardized multiple-choice test, simply stopped at answer #1 because that's the one he likes. He has not even pretended to consider the other two options. It would certainly appear that he is less interested in figuring out what's actually going on and more interested in using test results to draw a target on New York's teachers.
And what a target.
Cuomo proposes that fifty percent of a teacher's evaluations be based on test scores. (This fun starts on page 229 of his Opportunity Agenda Book.) In the case of non-tested subjects or grades, "a student growth measure that measures one year of academic growth." Whatever that is supposed to mean and wherever those are supposed to come from (since the stated goal here is clear-- "We will eliminate the local measure."
Thirty-five percent of the teacher's evaluation must come from an "independent observer" who can be either 1) a principal from within or without the district, 2) an observer from the state-approved list of "entities" that can do that sort of thing or 3) a faculty member from an education program at a state university of New York (and I am imagining college ed professors across the state slapping their heads and saying, "Why, yes, thanks, that's exactly what I want to spend half my year doing!")
The remaining fifteen percent can come from a local administrator.
And that's it. Screw the whole "multiple measures" idea, and nerts to evaluations by people who know the territory, the teacher, the students, the local lay of the land.
But wait. There's more. Cuomo proposes that all cut-off scores be set at the state level. And if the teacher fails either portion of the evaluation, she fails the whole thing. In other words, if the live human says, "I watched her work and she is a great teacher" and the test scores come in low, the live human observer is over-ruled.
Can we make a teaching career less viable?
Tenure? Screw that, too. It was for 19th century college profs so they could resist political pressure, and of course there are no politics associated with teaching in New York public schools. I wonder how long it took the governor's typist to stop giggling before he could finish this part.
Now tenure requires five straight years of effective ratings. Until you hit those five straight years, you are probationary, and as long as you're probationary, you can be fired at any time for any reason.
Cuomo could not be more clear if he required every college education department to put a giant banner over its doors saying, in huge bold letters, "Get the hell out of New York."
What sane person would try to start a teaching career under these conditions. You must have five straight years of good test scores, which means that taking a job in a high-poverty school would simply be the kiss of death. In fact, if the cut scores are going to be kept the same so that almost seventy percent of New York students are failing The Big Test-- well, that means that most of the classrooms in New York will be the kiss of death to a teaching career. You would be better off betting the state of New York that you can roll snake eyes five times in a row.
Best and brightest
And yet Cuomo's plan blithers on, as if it's not obvious that he's telling future teachers to Get the Hell Out! The teacher beatdown section of the Opportunity Agenda starts with some noise about setting up a doctor-style interning program for training teachers, and I actually support that, having come from a similar residency program myself-- except that, with the stakes of testing so incredibly high, who in their right mind would let a teacher trainee into their school? The residency idea is probably necessary, because under the new, highly punitive evaluation system, what teacher would agree to host a student teacher? The residency idea begs all sorts of questions (how will the state possibly have enough capacity to handle the number of teachers they need to train) but it doesn't really matter, because given the impossible hurdles placed in the path of becoming a tenured teacher with anything remotely resembling job security, who is going to want to invest the time and effort to start on a path that can at any time, through random factors outside of your control, be yanked out from under you?
But after five sections of flipping the middle finger to every future teacher in New York, the Agenda starts its next section with this sentence:
Once we can attract and recognize the best teachers, we need to keep them in our schools.
First of all, this new system defines "best teacher" as "teacher who has class of good standardized test takers." This idea fails twice-- once by basing teacher evaluations on the results of bad invalid tests and again by removing all other considerations of quality from teaching. Nothing matters in this system but test prep. Nothing.
The Agenda goes on to say that we don't want to lose great teachers to other "more lucrative" professions. It does not say anything about losing future great teachers to other professions where they have greater work to do than spend all their days preparing children to take a pointless standardized tests. Or losing future great teachers to other professions where they are treated like professionals. Or losing future great teachers to other professions where job security is not based on a random roll of the dice.
Sigh. Cuomo proposes to set aside $2 million for incentive payments of up to $20K to encourage great teachers to stay in hard-to-staff schools. Do you know how many payments of $20K you can get out of $2 million? 100. What do you think, Andy? Will 100 teachers take care of all the hard-to-staff schools in New York?
I can answer that. No-- no they will not, because those hard to staff schools will become SUPER hard to staff once you implement a system under which teaching at high-poverty low-achievement schools is an excellent way to never get to start your teaching career.
But just in case, Cuomo also wants to streamline the firing process, and since all non-tenured teachers will be fireable at any time for any reason, I think he's got that covered. Also, no more trying to rehab incompetent teachers, because under this new system, New York will be up to their collective tuchus in eager new educators.
The kisses of death
What's next? Well, back in the first section, Cuomo allowed as how teacher traineess need less theory and more real-world classroom training and experience. However, in this next section, he wants to make sure the new teachers are Good Enough by giving them some standardized tests, which I was going to mock, but you know, since in Cuomo's New York a teacher's job is to prepare students to take a standardized test, it does make sense that taking a standardized test should be the basis of teacher training. So prospective teachers will have to pass some standardized tests, and if too many of them fail, their college program will be shut down. So congratulations, future New York teachers, and welcome to four college years of test prep. Wow. I bet that will attract even more of the best and the brightest to teaching.
I know this is running long, but I want you to get the full grandeur of Cuomo's public school-crushing plans.
We'll make it harder to get into grad school. We'll make your certificate dependent on getting continuing ed hours, but we'll put all of those programs under the direct control of the state education department.
This next one is genius. Cuomo wants to guarantee that not student will have an ineffective teacher two years in a row. Let's think this through. An ineffective teacher is one who is put in a room with the low-scoring students. Whatever teacher we send those students on to will likely also "become" ineffective. Some schools can look forward to small packs of teacher-crushing students, moving like kryptonite through the system. Depending on the VAM sauce that's being brewed, those packs could be composed of low-ability- high-poverty, or even highly gifted students. This schedule shuffling will also guarantee that teachers can't easily develop a specialty, and that administrators can't schedule based on what they know about teacher strengths and weaknesses. And those young teachers trying to get their five straight years of good test scores in? It just became even harder. What, I wonder, does Cuomo propose if a grade level or subject are in a school runs out of teachers who were rated effective this year?
Once again, the message is clear-- whatever you do, don't get a job in a high-poverty low-achievement school.
Finishing touches
Cuomo commits to the Bottom 5% model of school failure, guaranteeing that there are always failing schools. Lucky for them he has decided to scrap time-consuming turnaround plans and just implement receivership, a nifty technique for privatizing a school and handing it over to a specialist for carving up.
Carving up for whom? Well, the very next item is the abolition of caps on charter authorization, so that charters can bloom across the land like a thousand flowers. This comes attached to a meaningless provision that is hilariously called an "anti-creaming provision" because what fun are these long government documents if you can't slip some mildly obscene easter eggs in there? Cuomo also wants to establish educational tax credits, aka vouchers by another name.
Final touches? Let's expand the market for Pre-K providers by pumping more money into that, along with a rating system. The term "high-quality" let's you know that it's nothing but the best, spared no expense. It also lets you know that the state will require assessment so that presumably parents will know how well their four-year-olds are learning to take standardized tests. Oh, wait-- did I say four-year-olds? Let's up the ante and extend this to three-year-olds. Opening up new markets is always good for entrepreneurs, and those three year olds have all been slacking anyway.
So you see? When Andrew Cuomo says he wants to bust up the public ed monopoly, he's not just generating sound bites for the evening news-- he means it. The program is bold and audacious in the same way that pushing a carload of nuns and puppies into the East River is bold and audacious. In particular, it reduces teaching to a job that people would be less likely to want, and then makes it nearly impossible for them to hold onto it anyway. I try to stay away from reaching conclusions about character, but looking at this, I have to figure that Andrew Cuomo is an incredible dolt or a giant prick. I will leave it to my brothers and sister in New York to decide.
Cuomo's assault has started with a lesson in how data can serve as a mirror to reflect the biases of whoever is gazing into it.
Mangling data
Cuomo's talking points and reformy agenda have started with a simple set of data. The proficiency rate for 3rd-8th graders is 35.8% for math and 31.4% for reading. Over 90% of New York teachers received effective ratings. There are three possible explanations for why these numbers don't fit together.
1) The teacher effectiveness ratings are wrong.
2) The student proficiency numbers are wrong.
3) There is no connection between student test results and teacher effectiveness.
#3 is by far the most likely. At the very least, there isn't a shred of documentation, study or much of anything else to support the notion that test results have anything to do with teacher effectiveness. Let's also remember that we're talking about math and reading scores for 3rd through 8th graders-- exactly what should tell us about, say, 11th grade history teachers?
#3 is also affected by #2-- if the student scores don't actually mean anything, they can hardly be connected to teacher scores. And since student cut scores weren't set by any particular supportable academic standard, it's highly unlikely that they are really telling us anything about how many students are "proficient" (a term that doesn't have any actual meaning in this context).
Cuomo has, like a student who fails to check all options on a standardized multiple-choice test, simply stopped at answer #1 because that's the one he likes. He has not even pretended to consider the other two options. It would certainly appear that he is less interested in figuring out what's actually going on and more interested in using test results to draw a target on New York's teachers.
And what a target.
Cuomo proposes that fifty percent of a teacher's evaluations be based on test scores. (This fun starts on page 229 of his Opportunity Agenda Book.) In the case of non-tested subjects or grades, "a student growth measure that measures one year of academic growth." Whatever that is supposed to mean and wherever those are supposed to come from (since the stated goal here is clear-- "We will eliminate the local measure."
Thirty-five percent of the teacher's evaluation must come from an "independent observer" who can be either 1) a principal from within or without the district, 2) an observer from the state-approved list of "entities" that can do that sort of thing or 3) a faculty member from an education program at a state university of New York (and I am imagining college ed professors across the state slapping their heads and saying, "Why, yes, thanks, that's exactly what I want to spend half my year doing!")
The remaining fifteen percent can come from a local administrator.
And that's it. Screw the whole "multiple measures" idea, and nerts to evaluations by people who know the territory, the teacher, the students, the local lay of the land.
But wait. There's more. Cuomo proposes that all cut-off scores be set at the state level. And if the teacher fails either portion of the evaluation, she fails the whole thing. In other words, if the live human says, "I watched her work and she is a great teacher" and the test scores come in low, the live human observer is over-ruled.
Can we make a teaching career less viable?
Tenure? Screw that, too. It was for 19th century college profs so they could resist political pressure, and of course there are no politics associated with teaching in New York public schools. I wonder how long it took the governor's typist to stop giggling before he could finish this part.
Now tenure requires five straight years of effective ratings. Until you hit those five straight years, you are probationary, and as long as you're probationary, you can be fired at any time for any reason.
Cuomo could not be more clear if he required every college education department to put a giant banner over its doors saying, in huge bold letters, "Get the hell out of New York."
What sane person would try to start a teaching career under these conditions. You must have five straight years of good test scores, which means that taking a job in a high-poverty school would simply be the kiss of death. In fact, if the cut scores are going to be kept the same so that almost seventy percent of New York students are failing The Big Test-- well, that means that most of the classrooms in New York will be the kiss of death to a teaching career. You would be better off betting the state of New York that you can roll snake eyes five times in a row.
Best and brightest
And yet Cuomo's plan blithers on, as if it's not obvious that he's telling future teachers to Get the Hell Out! The teacher beatdown section of the Opportunity Agenda starts with some noise about setting up a doctor-style interning program for training teachers, and I actually support that, having come from a similar residency program myself-- except that, with the stakes of testing so incredibly high, who in their right mind would let a teacher trainee into their school? The residency idea is probably necessary, because under the new, highly punitive evaluation system, what teacher would agree to host a student teacher? The residency idea begs all sorts of questions (how will the state possibly have enough capacity to handle the number of teachers they need to train) but it doesn't really matter, because given the impossible hurdles placed in the path of becoming a tenured teacher with anything remotely resembling job security, who is going to want to invest the time and effort to start on a path that can at any time, through random factors outside of your control, be yanked out from under you?
But after five sections of flipping the middle finger to every future teacher in New York, the Agenda starts its next section with this sentence:
Once we can attract and recognize the best teachers, we need to keep them in our schools.
First of all, this new system defines "best teacher" as "teacher who has class of good standardized test takers." This idea fails twice-- once by basing teacher evaluations on the results of bad invalid tests and again by removing all other considerations of quality from teaching. Nothing matters in this system but test prep. Nothing.
The Agenda goes on to say that we don't want to lose great teachers to other "more lucrative" professions. It does not say anything about losing future great teachers to other professions where they have greater work to do than spend all their days preparing children to take a pointless standardized tests. Or losing future great teachers to other professions where they are treated like professionals. Or losing future great teachers to other professions where job security is not based on a random roll of the dice.
Sigh. Cuomo proposes to set aside $2 million for incentive payments of up to $20K to encourage great teachers to stay in hard-to-staff schools. Do you know how many payments of $20K you can get out of $2 million? 100. What do you think, Andy? Will 100 teachers take care of all the hard-to-staff schools in New York?
I can answer that. No-- no they will not, because those hard to staff schools will become SUPER hard to staff once you implement a system under which teaching at high-poverty low-achievement schools is an excellent way to never get to start your teaching career.
But just in case, Cuomo also wants to streamline the firing process, and since all non-tenured teachers will be fireable at any time for any reason, I think he's got that covered. Also, no more trying to rehab incompetent teachers, because under this new system, New York will be up to their collective tuchus in eager new educators.
The kisses of death
What's next? Well, back in the first section, Cuomo allowed as how teacher traineess need less theory and more real-world classroom training and experience. However, in this next section, he wants to make sure the new teachers are Good Enough by giving them some standardized tests, which I was going to mock, but you know, since in Cuomo's New York a teacher's job is to prepare students to take a standardized test, it does make sense that taking a standardized test should be the basis of teacher training. So prospective teachers will have to pass some standardized tests, and if too many of them fail, their college program will be shut down. So congratulations, future New York teachers, and welcome to four college years of test prep. Wow. I bet that will attract even more of the best and the brightest to teaching.
I know this is running long, but I want you to get the full grandeur of Cuomo's public school-crushing plans.
We'll make it harder to get into grad school. We'll make your certificate dependent on getting continuing ed hours, but we'll put all of those programs under the direct control of the state education department.
This next one is genius. Cuomo wants to guarantee that not student will have an ineffective teacher two years in a row. Let's think this through. An ineffective teacher is one who is put in a room with the low-scoring students. Whatever teacher we send those students on to will likely also "become" ineffective. Some schools can look forward to small packs of teacher-crushing students, moving like kryptonite through the system. Depending on the VAM sauce that's being brewed, those packs could be composed of low-ability- high-poverty, or even highly gifted students. This schedule shuffling will also guarantee that teachers can't easily develop a specialty, and that administrators can't schedule based on what they know about teacher strengths and weaknesses. And those young teachers trying to get their five straight years of good test scores in? It just became even harder. What, I wonder, does Cuomo propose if a grade level or subject are in a school runs out of teachers who were rated effective this year?
Once again, the message is clear-- whatever you do, don't get a job in a high-poverty low-achievement school.
Finishing touches
Cuomo commits to the Bottom 5% model of school failure, guaranteeing that there are always failing schools. Lucky for them he has decided to scrap time-consuming turnaround plans and just implement receivership, a nifty technique for privatizing a school and handing it over to a specialist for carving up.
Carving up for whom? Well, the very next item is the abolition of caps on charter authorization, so that charters can bloom across the land like a thousand flowers. This comes attached to a meaningless provision that is hilariously called an "anti-creaming provision" because what fun are these long government documents if you can't slip some mildly obscene easter eggs in there? Cuomo also wants to establish educational tax credits, aka vouchers by another name.
Final touches? Let's expand the market for Pre-K providers by pumping more money into that, along with a rating system. The term "high-quality" let's you know that it's nothing but the best, spared no expense. It also lets you know that the state will require assessment so that presumably parents will know how well their four-year-olds are learning to take standardized tests. Oh, wait-- did I say four-year-olds? Let's up the ante and extend this to three-year-olds. Opening up new markets is always good for entrepreneurs, and those three year olds have all been slacking anyway.
So you see? When Andrew Cuomo says he wants to bust up the public ed monopoly, he's not just generating sound bites for the evening news-- he means it. The program is bold and audacious in the same way that pushing a carload of nuns and puppies into the East River is bold and audacious. In particular, it reduces teaching to a job that people would be less likely to want, and then makes it nearly impossible for them to hold onto it anyway. I try to stay away from reaching conclusions about character, but looking at this, I have to figure that Andrew Cuomo is an incredible dolt or a giant prick. I will leave it to my brothers and sister in New York to decide.
Sunday, February 1, 2015
My ESEA Letter
(Well, one of them. I've sent several.)
I am concerned first of all with the speed with which this is being done. The pattern of the last decade's worth of education reform is to put new rules and regulations in place, to mandate standards and approaches before any real work has been done to determine whether the right choices are being made. It is true that we have been laboring under the bad choices of No Child Left Behind for too long. Replacing old bad choices with new bad choices is not really an improvement.
Let's take our time and get it right.
The reauthorization of ESEA represents a perfect opportunity to do what folks have declared cannot be done-- for the federal government to actually let go of some of the power that it has gathered to itself and send that power back to the states. It needs to be done, not because of some ideological or political stance, but because trying to control local education from DC simply does not work.
Controlling local education from DC is like trying to use a piece of gum and a ten foot pole to pick up a dime. DC is simply too far removed from the nation's classrooms to be able to effective aid the teachers who work there. Trying to set standards, establish a definition of success, and impose a vision of what every single child in the nation should want to be-- these are beyond the scope of any single body, federal or otherwise.
Give us financial support. Give us a list of do-nots (do not discriminate based on gender, race or anything else). Require us to function in a transparent manner so that folks can see how we're doing just by looking. And stop supporting the creation of means by which public schools can be undercut and stripped of resources.
We have been living with the ramped-up version of ESEA for over a decade. Has anybody gotten what they wanted? Have we closed the achievement gap or provided better educational opportunities for poor and minority children? Do legislators and bureaucrats believe that they now have a clearer picture of how well students are doing across the nation? Do teachers and local districts feel that they have better guidance or information to do their jobs?
The answer for everybody is no. Over a decade of more centralized control, accountability and oversight, and we have nothing to show for it.
This experiment has failed. It's time to end it.
I am concerned first of all with the speed with which this is being done. The pattern of the last decade's worth of education reform is to put new rules and regulations in place, to mandate standards and approaches before any real work has been done to determine whether the right choices are being made. It is true that we have been laboring under the bad choices of No Child Left Behind for too long. Replacing old bad choices with new bad choices is not really an improvement.
Let's take our time and get it right.
The reauthorization of ESEA represents a perfect opportunity to do what folks have declared cannot be done-- for the federal government to actually let go of some of the power that it has gathered to itself and send that power back to the states. It needs to be done, not because of some ideological or political stance, but because trying to control local education from DC simply does not work.
Controlling local education from DC is like trying to use a piece of gum and a ten foot pole to pick up a dime. DC is simply too far removed from the nation's classrooms to be able to effective aid the teachers who work there. Trying to set standards, establish a definition of success, and impose a vision of what every single child in the nation should want to be-- these are beyond the scope of any single body, federal or otherwise.
Give us financial support. Give us a list of do-nots (do not discriminate based on gender, race or anything else). Require us to function in a transparent manner so that folks can see how we're doing just by looking. And stop supporting the creation of means by which public schools can be undercut and stripped of resources.
We have been living with the ramped-up version of ESEA for over a decade. Has anybody gotten what they wanted? Have we closed the achievement gap or provided better educational opportunities for poor and minority children? Do legislators and bureaucrats believe that they now have a clearer picture of how well students are doing across the nation? Do teachers and local districts feel that they have better guidance or information to do their jobs?
The answer for everybody is no. Over a decade of more centralized control, accountability and oversight, and we have nothing to show for it.
This experiment has failed. It's time to end it.
Teachers Fired for Teaching Black History
How many hard lessons in charter operation can we have? As many as there are incompetent charter operators in the field.
Here's the meat of the story from DC's ABC affiliate:
Yes, so bizarre it's hard to believe, the principal at the middle school operated on the campus of one of America's historic African-American universities reportedly dropped the hammer on teachers who insisted on teaching African-American history.
The school was launched in 2005 as an attempt at innovation, and seemed to do good work for a while. More recently things have been rough at the school. Here's an anonymous review of the school from the Great Schools website:
I am a current student at Howard University Middle School (MS)2 and am happy this is my final year. The school has changed from my first year here. My 6th grade year was fun and I enjoyed it. 7th grade is when things started going downhill. We got a new principal and she left after about a month on the job. We went the rest of the year without a principal. This year we have a new principal and I don't think she knows what she's doing. So far this year we've lost at least 8 teachers and they were the ones that cared the most. They haven't filled the spots and it doesn't look like they are trying to. Now we have lost our 3 favorite teachers which makes 11 teachers gone. This has been a terrible year and once again, am glad that I am leaving. If you are a parent interested in sending your child here, I hope you find this helpful.
Focus of the story and reactions to it has been on the firing of the teachers, and it's hard to express just how totally bad and wrong and stupid it was to have police escort them out of the building in front of their students, as if they had just been arrested for some crime.
Principal Angelicque Blackmon's LinkdIn account is... well, confusing. She lists the principalship of Howard University Middle School of Mathematics and Science as a "previous" job and lists her current employment as the President and CEO of Innovative Learning Concepts, LLC. ILC is a "full service premier Georgia STEM education coaching, consulting, and tutorial." According to the profile, she lives in Georgia. Previous work experience includes a stint with the National Science Foundation and has done some work as a research chemist with Dow and the US Geological survey. After her science training, she also completed some post-grad work in cultural anthropology.
An essay that she posted on LinkedIn last summer includes this:
Therefore, we leave people who do not truly understand diversity with the perception that although they have the same skin tone as another in the room that they, in some way, are absolved from being diverse. This is not at all true. We should discontinue the practice of pretending that when people have the same skin color that they have so much more in common with that person than with someone of a different hue. This has never been the case and I am befuddled in trying to understand why in our 21 century context we still perpetuate such myths.
Nothing in her profile suggests that she has the background or experience to handle a leadership role at a middle school, and the exodus of teachers from the school doesn't speak well of her leadership skills. What strikes me most about the firing of the three social studies teachers is that they had already quit! If her goal was simply to stop them form teaching African-American studies in her school, she had already won. To fire them in such a public and demeaning manner, with no regard or concern for the students, suggests a grown-up tantrum.
And so the story leads to parents standing on the sidewalk outside the school, because what else can they do? If this were a public school, board members would be fielding a ton of phone calls and parents would be pressuring them to do something, and they would be facing the fallout. But because this is a charter, there's nobody to call, nobody to pressure, nobody to demand answers from. Instead, the charter will likely continue its apparent downward spiral, wasting critical years of the students and creating extra worry and mess for the parents. Would things be any better in the mess that is DC public schools? I don't know; it's a system with many, many problems. But this mess certainly doesn't deliver on a promise for a school that is responsive, sensitive, and permanent.
Here's the meat of the story from DC's ABC affiliate:
Yes, so bizarre it's hard to believe, the principal at the middle school operated on the campus of one of America's historic African-American universities reportedly dropped the hammer on teachers who insisted on teaching African-American history.
The school was launched in 2005 as an attempt at innovation, and seemed to do good work for a while. More recently things have been rough at the school. Here's an anonymous review of the school from the Great Schools website:
I am a current student at Howard University Middle School (MS)2 and am happy this is my final year. The school has changed from my first year here. My 6th grade year was fun and I enjoyed it. 7th grade is when things started going downhill. We got a new principal and she left after about a month on the job. We went the rest of the year without a principal. This year we have a new principal and I don't think she knows what she's doing. So far this year we've lost at least 8 teachers and they were the ones that cared the most. They haven't filled the spots and it doesn't look like they are trying to. Now we have lost our 3 favorite teachers which makes 11 teachers gone. This has been a terrible year and once again, am glad that I am leaving. If you are a parent interested in sending your child here, I hope you find this helpful.
Focus of the story and reactions to it has been on the firing of the teachers, and it's hard to express just how totally bad and wrong and stupid it was to have police escort them out of the building in front of their students, as if they had just been arrested for some crime.
Principal Angelicque Blackmon's LinkdIn account is... well, confusing. She lists the principalship of Howard University Middle School of Mathematics and Science as a "previous" job and lists her current employment as the President and CEO of Innovative Learning Concepts, LLC. ILC is a "full service premier Georgia STEM education coaching, consulting, and tutorial." According to the profile, she lives in Georgia. Previous work experience includes a stint with the National Science Foundation and has done some work as a research chemist with Dow and the US Geological survey. After her science training, she also completed some post-grad work in cultural anthropology.
An essay that she posted on LinkedIn last summer includes this:
Therefore, we leave people who do not truly understand diversity with the perception that although they have the same skin tone as another in the room that they, in some way, are absolved from being diverse. This is not at all true. We should discontinue the practice of pretending that when people have the same skin color that they have so much more in common with that person than with someone of a different hue. This has never been the case and I am befuddled in trying to understand why in our 21 century context we still perpetuate such myths.
Nothing in her profile suggests that she has the background or experience to handle a leadership role at a middle school, and the exodus of teachers from the school doesn't speak well of her leadership skills. What strikes me most about the firing of the three social studies teachers is that they had already quit! If her goal was simply to stop them form teaching African-American studies in her school, she had already won. To fire them in such a public and demeaning manner, with no regard or concern for the students, suggests a grown-up tantrum.
And so the story leads to parents standing on the sidewalk outside the school, because what else can they do? If this were a public school, board members would be fielding a ton of phone calls and parents would be pressuring them to do something, and they would be facing the fallout. But because this is a charter, there's nobody to call, nobody to pressure, nobody to demand answers from. Instead, the charter will likely continue its apparent downward spiral, wasting critical years of the students and creating extra worry and mess for the parents. Would things be any better in the mess that is DC public schools? I don't know; it's a system with many, many problems. But this mess certainly doesn't deliver on a promise for a school that is responsive, sensitive, and permanent.
Charter Sales
There's a great Steve Jobs clip I've used before. In it, Jobs offers his explanation of how the bean counters end up in charge of a company.
The basic principle is simple. Initially, a business prospers based on its ability to make stuff or provide a service, and the better they do stuff, the more money they make. And for a while, doing stuff better pays the bills and makes the profits.
But eventually doing the stuff doesn't increase the revenue stream, because you've pretty well hit all of the market you can hit. The product has attracted all the money it can-- on its own.
At that point it's up to the sales force and the bean counters. To keep the revenue stream thriving, you need people who can push sales in new markets and fiddle with the money. You need marketeers and accountants to run the company. The people who create the product are not so important, because making the product better will not make the business more profitable. Put another way, you can only drive so many sales by being good at your product. After that, you can only drive more sales by being good at selling.
It puts the sales people in charge, and that immediately starts to destroy the product, because the sales-oriented management turns to the people who actually create the product and says, "Never mind making products that work well-- I want a product that we can sell. Our market research says that people really want pink flying weasels as pets, so stop whining and get in there with that pink spray paint and staple some wings on those weasels. Of course it's bad for the weasels and the customers, but we have sales to make today. We'll worry about tomorrow the next time the sun rises."
It's a model worth understanding when considering charter schools. A company that makes computers or cheese-curlers or hamster shoes will take a while to get to sales-over-product stage, but a charter is bean counter ready from day one. From the moment it opens, the modern charter's main business is not education-- it's sales.
We've seen this repeatedly. The K12 cyber chain has been plagued by lawsuits that turn up former employees who complain of a company that is focused primarily on making sales any way it can. K12 has been particularly notorious for churn-- just trying to get new names on the roster faster than the old ones struggle and give up. At one point, K12 operations in Ohio were posting a staggering 51% rate of churn.
K12's mission creep was so great that even cyberschool supporters were bothered. Houston Tucker was the company's marketing director, and he left saying, "The K12 I joined isn't the one I left."
K12 is a striking example of the charter's need to market above all else, but they're hardly an anomaly. A public school without a marketing department is like a weasel without wings, but a modern charter without a marketing department is like a weasel without food
Just google "charter school marketing vp"-- Charter Schools USA, KIPP, Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools-- over a million hits come back and even if we assume that only 2% of those are actual charter school marketing jobs, that's still a huge number of people in charter school sales. And that's before we get to people like Eva Moskowitz-- would you say that Moskowitz is more about providing pedagogical leadership for Success Academy, or about fundraising and marketing for the chain. Certainly the budget for marketing at these schools is stunningly large. A similar quick-and-dirty search for public school marketing officers came up empty.
When modern charter and choice advocates extol the virtues of competition, they're really demanding that public schools meet them on the field of combat where marketing and advertising are the tools of battle. And if public schools go to meet them there, schools lose regardless of the outcome. It's the triumph of the sales department and bean counters over product people, the rise of an education system that thinks of itself as an industry and which is far more concerned about marketing than educating and which thinks nothing of stapling onto weasels.
The basic principle is simple. Initially, a business prospers based on its ability to make stuff or provide a service, and the better they do stuff, the more money they make. And for a while, doing stuff better pays the bills and makes the profits.
But eventually doing the stuff doesn't increase the revenue stream, because you've pretty well hit all of the market you can hit. The product has attracted all the money it can-- on its own.
At that point it's up to the sales force and the bean counters. To keep the revenue stream thriving, you need people who can push sales in new markets and fiddle with the money. You need marketeers and accountants to run the company. The people who create the product are not so important, because making the product better will not make the business more profitable. Put another way, you can only drive so many sales by being good at your product. After that, you can only drive more sales by being good at selling.
It puts the sales people in charge, and that immediately starts to destroy the product, because the sales-oriented management turns to the people who actually create the product and says, "Never mind making products that work well-- I want a product that we can sell. Our market research says that people really want pink flying weasels as pets, so stop whining and get in there with that pink spray paint and staple some wings on those weasels. Of course it's bad for the weasels and the customers, but we have sales to make today. We'll worry about tomorrow the next time the sun rises."
It's a model worth understanding when considering charter schools. A company that makes computers or cheese-curlers or hamster shoes will take a while to get to sales-over-product stage, but a charter is bean counter ready from day one. From the moment it opens, the modern charter's main business is not education-- it's sales.
We've seen this repeatedly. The K12 cyber chain has been plagued by lawsuits that turn up former employees who complain of a company that is focused primarily on making sales any way it can. K12 has been particularly notorious for churn-- just trying to get new names on the roster faster than the old ones struggle and give up. At one point, K12 operations in Ohio were posting a staggering 51% rate of churn.
K12's mission creep was so great that even cyberschool supporters were bothered. Houston Tucker was the company's marketing director, and he left saying, "The K12 I joined isn't the one I left."
K12 is a striking example of the charter's need to market above all else, but they're hardly an anomaly. A public school without a marketing department is like a weasel without wings, but a modern charter without a marketing department is like a weasel without food
Just google "charter school marketing vp"-- Charter Schools USA, KIPP, Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools-- over a million hits come back and even if we assume that only 2% of those are actual charter school marketing jobs, that's still a huge number of people in charter school sales. And that's before we get to people like Eva Moskowitz-- would you say that Moskowitz is more about providing pedagogical leadership for Success Academy, or about fundraising and marketing for the chain. Certainly the budget for marketing at these schools is stunningly large. A similar quick-and-dirty search for public school marketing officers came up empty.
When modern charter and choice advocates extol the virtues of competition, they're really demanding that public schools meet them on the field of combat where marketing and advertising are the tools of battle. And if public schools go to meet them there, schools lose regardless of the outcome. It's the triumph of the sales department and bean counters over product people, the rise of an education system that thinks of itself as an industry and which is far more concerned about marketing than educating and which thinks nothing of stapling onto weasels.
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