When reflecting on the new laws gutting the teaching profession in NY, I mused that Campbell Brown must be bummed that Andrew Cuomo had done an end run around her. But apparently teaching has not been sufficiently eviscerated to suit the Browninator.
Per Politico's morning education grab-bag, Brown is rolling on ahead with her lawsuit to strip tenure protections from all teachers in New York.
It's an interesting stance. After all, the new NY rules subordinate tenure to testing-- Carol Burris has the clearest breakdown on the new rules at Washington Post today, and it's clear that NY now will give teachers a couple of strikes, and then they're out. Two bad years of test results (which trump any observations by human life forms) seem like enough to end the career of any NY teachers, or keep those careers from ever starting in the first place. So why would Brown still want to tie tenure to the legal whipping post?
Here's the quote from Politico
While the budget reforms have promise, Brown said it’s still way too
hard for districts to lay off bad teachers, especially those with
seniority. “We are glad that Albany appears to have finally woken up to
the crisis in our public schools. But make no mistake, they have a long
way to go and there is much work ahead,” Brown told Morning Education.
“This will have no bearing on the legal case moving forward.”
This can only mean one of two things:
1) Brown agrees that Cuomo's proposed evaluation method (one part test scores, one part evaluations mostly by strangers) is a lousy way of identifying whether teachers are any good or not. If this is the case, I look forward to hearing her articulate what she thinks needs to be tweaked. If this is not "far enough," what does she think an evaluation should look like? 100% test driven? 100% drive-by evaluation by strangers? Please, Ms. Brown-- spill!
2) Brown wants to be able to fire teachers for reasons other than poor job performance. If the state is going to measure how well teachers do their job (not measure it well, I know, but stay with me here) and fire them if they do their job poorly, and that's not good enough for Brown, then she must want to be able to fire them (especially the senior ones) for other reasons. Could we be on the cusp of hearing a reformsters finally say out loud and in public, "We want to be able to save money by firing the teachers who get paid the most!" Will Brown articulate why being able to fire a tenured teacher for being a bad teacher is somehow not enough for her?
Of course, there's a third possibility, which is that Brown's lawsuit is not about making changes in NY tenure law, but about having a platform from which to reduce the political clout of teachers and their union (although, again, moot point--why bother trying to reduce the clout of the ineffectual NY teachers union at this point). When Brown hired Incite and former Dem political operatives, it was not to build the case, but to mount a PR offensive against teachers. And she made damn sure that hers was the only such lawsuit being filed.
So what more does Campbell Brown want? Does she want teachers to be fireable for any reason at all, from bad hairs to wrong politics to costing too much money? Does she want them to be discredited in the public eye? Does she just want them to be sadder? I guess we'll see in the months ahead. I hope somebody in the court or press has the balls to ask her exactly why her lawsuit needs to go forward.
Friday, April 3, 2015
The Atlanta Cheaters
As most know by now, the verdict was handed down in the Atlanta cheating trial and eleven former educators (it seems safe to say that they'll never work in education again) were hauled off instantly and none-too-gently to a bizarrely extreme sentence of jail.
You can get a pretty full picture of the story from these two articles-- the New Yorker in depth piece from 2014 and the Atlantic article that accompanied the verdict.
Much of the ground has been covered. The teachers did a Very Bad Thing and their punishment is earned. The teachers' crime is also an indictment of the system we're currently operating under. There are just a few more thoughts that occur to me.
First, I'm stuck by how hard the teachers at Parks Middle School were trying. This was not teachers trying to game the test scores so that they could back to napping in the lounge and showing videos all day. This was a school where, by all accounts, they were trying everything they could think of in the face of serious challenges, and they were moving forward and creating success-- just not enough of the right kind of success.
In a world without No Child Left Behind, Parks Middle School would have been called a success, a school that was slowly turning around not just its students, but its neighborhood. The cheaters were not trying to save their cushy paychecks or no-stress sinecures-- they were trying to defend the little success that they had managed to create.
Nothing I've read really addresses this, but I would bet that nobody at Parks thought they would have to manage the charade for years. Remember-- from 2007 on we all lived in hope that Congress would rewrite ESEA any day now and the ridiculous imperatives for unattainable test scores would go away. When a new administration was chosen in 2008, that hope became even stronger. In my school, as in many schools, the mantra became, "Let's just figure out how to get through this year, and maybe by next year things will be different." I get a sinking hollow in my gut just imagining the growing horror at Parks as each passing year dug them deeper into the growing pit of lies they were digging for themselves.
I can't condone a thing they did. But it would be cheap of me to condemn them for failing a test I've never had to take. That's why I particularly value the insights of someone like Adell Cothorne, a whistleblower who used to work in DC in the heart of the big Cheating Scandal That Never Happened and who wrote a full response to the convictions for Mercedes Schneider in which she said this:
Do I condone what they did in reference to manipulating students’ tests? No I do not – in any way, shape, or form.
Do I understand why they participated in these egregious acts? I do!
By 2010, it was clear to anybody who was paying attention that there were increasingly only two types of schools in America-- schools that were failing and schools that were cheating.
The fate of the Atlanta cheaters stands in stark contrast to the fate of teachers and administrators cheating across the US. Can I pull up a list and name them? No, nor would I. But I don't doubt for a fraction of a second that hundreds upon hundreds of schools in this country survived the insanely unattainable politically-set requirements of federal reform by cheating in ways big and small. This can't be a surprise-- school reform's first big exemplar was the Texas Miracle, which turned out to be nothing more than creative accounting and magic tracking. The federal government literally paraded a big fat lie in front of schools as if it were a model and then said, "Okay, now YOU do that, too!"
We've heard whisperings of cheating from across the country since then, with reports of questionable test erasures to results that just raise your eyebrows right off your face. The biggest marquee Cheating Scandal That Never Was didn't occur in DC under the watchful eye of She Who Will Not Be Named, but as with the Texas miracle of Rod Paige, too many important people had bet too heavily on the success of She to allow any such scandal to gain traction.
But somehow, in a whole nation of cheats, the folks in Atlanta were the ones who were caught and slapped, an entire library thrown at them.
There's a whole conversation to be had about the ethics of following bad, damaging destructive laws. If you are in Nazi Germany, is it okay to lie about the Jewish family hiding in your attic? If a gunman asks if there are a bunch of five year olds in the classroom behind you, is it okay to lie? If somebody wants to destroy a school that you have built into a haven of peace and positive growth for the community, is it okay to lie to hold them off?
These can be hard questions, but here's one other thing I know-- when a system pressures people to lie in order to survive, bad things happen when they don't lie, and worse things happen when they do.
If you want a stunning example of a lie-fueled reporting system in action, take a look at the Great Chinese Famine of the fifties and sixties, a story all the more remarkable because it's still not widely known outside of China or widely acknowledged within it.
The simple outline is this. Mao decided that he would remake the Chinese economy in the Great Leap Forward (1958) by simply dragging farmers off the farm, taking every scrap of metal that could be rounded up, and building an industrial economy in the cities. He would do this without hurting the food supply by setting quotas for the districts, requiring farmers to make their numbers, or else. The district's farms, stripped of resources and manpower, could not make their numbers, but in Mao's China, nobody wanted to face the "or else." Some tried to broach the subject, but were told that was defeatist thinking-- did they not believe in the mighty power of China's farms? And so everyone made their numbers by lying.
On paper, China in the sixties was doing just fine. In reality, the country was in the grip of man-made famine. The Chinese government now admits to a death toll of 20 million; some writers estimate as many as 36 million. Officials commandeered more grain in some district than existed. Peoples' deaths went unreported so that survivors could keep collecting food rations.
So much weight was put on the measure of food production that to this day, there's no accurate measure of the reality in existence.
When you create a machine that is so badly engineered that it can only work when heavily lubricated by lies, that machine will never do any of the work it was supposedly built for. It will just chew things up and make a destructive mess. What is the moral response to an immoral system?
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if nobody anywhere had lied about test results, if the feds had been forced to confront a nationwide epidemic of "failing" schools, more than could have been milked for profits by charter profiteers and corporate raiders. Would someone have said, "Well, that can't be right" or would we be looking at millions of unemployed educators and a public ed system completely gutted.
The Atlanta cheaters were wrong. What they did was wrong. So were the people who created the system that put those educators in a no-win situation. The Atlanta teachers were in trouble from the moment they were given numbers to make that could not be made; they were doomed to be either failures or cheats. There are no heroes in the Atlanta story, but when counting up the wrong-doers, it would be a grievous error to stop with the eleven people who just went to jail.
You can get a pretty full picture of the story from these two articles-- the New Yorker in depth piece from 2014 and the Atlantic article that accompanied the verdict.
Much of the ground has been covered. The teachers did a Very Bad Thing and their punishment is earned. The teachers' crime is also an indictment of the system we're currently operating under. There are just a few more thoughts that occur to me.
First, I'm stuck by how hard the teachers at Parks Middle School were trying. This was not teachers trying to game the test scores so that they could back to napping in the lounge and showing videos all day. This was a school where, by all accounts, they were trying everything they could think of in the face of serious challenges, and they were moving forward and creating success-- just not enough of the right kind of success.
In a world without No Child Left Behind, Parks Middle School would have been called a success, a school that was slowly turning around not just its students, but its neighborhood. The cheaters were not trying to save their cushy paychecks or no-stress sinecures-- they were trying to defend the little success that they had managed to create.
Nothing I've read really addresses this, but I would bet that nobody at Parks thought they would have to manage the charade for years. Remember-- from 2007 on we all lived in hope that Congress would rewrite ESEA any day now and the ridiculous imperatives for unattainable test scores would go away. When a new administration was chosen in 2008, that hope became even stronger. In my school, as in many schools, the mantra became, "Let's just figure out how to get through this year, and maybe by next year things will be different." I get a sinking hollow in my gut just imagining the growing horror at Parks as each passing year dug them deeper into the growing pit of lies they were digging for themselves.
I can't condone a thing they did. But it would be cheap of me to condemn them for failing a test I've never had to take. That's why I particularly value the insights of someone like Adell Cothorne, a whistleblower who used to work in DC in the heart of the big Cheating Scandal That Never Happened and who wrote a full response to the convictions for Mercedes Schneider in which she said this:
Do I condone what they did in reference to manipulating students’ tests? No I do not – in any way, shape, or form.
Do I understand why they participated in these egregious acts? I do!
By 2010, it was clear to anybody who was paying attention that there were increasingly only two types of schools in America-- schools that were failing and schools that were cheating.
The fate of the Atlanta cheaters stands in stark contrast to the fate of teachers and administrators cheating across the US. Can I pull up a list and name them? No, nor would I. But I don't doubt for a fraction of a second that hundreds upon hundreds of schools in this country survived the insanely unattainable politically-set requirements of federal reform by cheating in ways big and small. This can't be a surprise-- school reform's first big exemplar was the Texas Miracle, which turned out to be nothing more than creative accounting and magic tracking. The federal government literally paraded a big fat lie in front of schools as if it were a model and then said, "Okay, now YOU do that, too!"
We've heard whisperings of cheating from across the country since then, with reports of questionable test erasures to results that just raise your eyebrows right off your face. The biggest marquee Cheating Scandal That Never Was didn't occur in DC under the watchful eye of She Who Will Not Be Named, but as with the Texas miracle of Rod Paige, too many important people had bet too heavily on the success of She to allow any such scandal to gain traction.
But somehow, in a whole nation of cheats, the folks in Atlanta were the ones who were caught and slapped, an entire library thrown at them.
There's a whole conversation to be had about the ethics of following bad, damaging destructive laws. If you are in Nazi Germany, is it okay to lie about the Jewish family hiding in your attic? If a gunman asks if there are a bunch of five year olds in the classroom behind you, is it okay to lie? If somebody wants to destroy a school that you have built into a haven of peace and positive growth for the community, is it okay to lie to hold them off?
These can be hard questions, but here's one other thing I know-- when a system pressures people to lie in order to survive, bad things happen when they don't lie, and worse things happen when they do.
If you want a stunning example of a lie-fueled reporting system in action, take a look at the Great Chinese Famine of the fifties and sixties, a story all the more remarkable because it's still not widely known outside of China or widely acknowledged within it.
The simple outline is this. Mao decided that he would remake the Chinese economy in the Great Leap Forward (1958) by simply dragging farmers off the farm, taking every scrap of metal that could be rounded up, and building an industrial economy in the cities. He would do this without hurting the food supply by setting quotas for the districts, requiring farmers to make their numbers, or else. The district's farms, stripped of resources and manpower, could not make their numbers, but in Mao's China, nobody wanted to face the "or else." Some tried to broach the subject, but were told that was defeatist thinking-- did they not believe in the mighty power of China's farms? And so everyone made their numbers by lying.
On paper, China in the sixties was doing just fine. In reality, the country was in the grip of man-made famine. The Chinese government now admits to a death toll of 20 million; some writers estimate as many as 36 million. Officials commandeered more grain in some district than existed. Peoples' deaths went unreported so that survivors could keep collecting food rations.
So much weight was put on the measure of food production that to this day, there's no accurate measure of the reality in existence.
When you create a machine that is so badly engineered that it can only work when heavily lubricated by lies, that machine will never do any of the work it was supposedly built for. It will just chew things up and make a destructive mess. What is the moral response to an immoral system?
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if nobody anywhere had lied about test results, if the feds had been forced to confront a nationwide epidemic of "failing" schools, more than could have been milked for profits by charter profiteers and corporate raiders. Would someone have said, "Well, that can't be right" or would we be looking at millions of unemployed educators and a public ed system completely gutted.
The Atlanta cheaters were wrong. What they did was wrong. So were the people who created the system that put those educators in a no-win situation. The Atlanta teachers were in trouble from the moment they were given numbers to make that could not be made; they were doomed to be either failures or cheats. There are no heroes in the Atlanta story, but when counting up the wrong-doers, it would be a grievous error to stop with the eleven people who just went to jail.
Hess: Helping Policymakers Make Policy
As part of the ongoing online conversation tied to the upcoming (or already-ongoing) launch of his Cage Busting Teachers, Rick Hess yesterday offered four pieces of advice for "how public employees can thrive in public bureaucracies." That is not a bad way to look at the problem, but I believe some of his specific advice needs tweaking. Here are his four tips.
First, believe it or not, teachers have a sympathetic audience.
I think that's true. I've said before that one of the lessons real teachers can learn from Teach for America is that there are a whole bunch of folks out there who think that supporting teachers is a Noble and Good. There is still plenty of public support for teachers and the teaching profession.
But Hess is being disingenuous when he quotes a Teaching Ambassador who says, "What fascinated me was this perception that folks at [the U.S. Department of Education] would look at us and think, 'They're just teachers.'" This is on par with Arne Duncan saying, "I just don't understand why states are putting so much emphasis on standardized testing."
There are sympathetic folks among policymakers, but there are also policymakers like Andrew Cuomo who have been quite explicit in explaining that teachers are what's wrong with the education system and they have to be rooted out and brought to heel. And the USED does in fact enlist teacher ambassadors, who are carefully screened and vetted and allowed to visit the table from time to time. But a teacher would have to have lived under a rock not to have noticed that our last decade of school reform has been implemented without any attempt to include teachers in the design of policy, and also implemented with the foundational assumption (sometimes implicit and sometimes explicit) that teachers are a problem to be fixed and not experts and collaborators to be included.
So teachers do have some sympathetic folks in the policymaker audience, but we also have some folks who have already declared us public education enemy number one. Hess's advice is useful up to a point-- teachers should not assume that just because someone is a bureaucrat or reformster that he must also hate or disrespect teachers-- but it's pretty clear at this stage of the game that many policymakers are not at all interested in what teachers have to say.
Second, keep in mind that policymakers can make people do things, but they can't make them do them well.
This is one of Hess's more useful insights, and he has offered it more than a few times as an explanation of why some aspects of education reform are such a clusterfinagle. And his explanation of the idea here is illuminating.
Worse, policymakers know that their good ideas often go south once they're implemented, which makes them hesitant to trust those on the ground. That's why they're eager to find sympathetic professionals who can help figure out how to ensure that policies actually do what they're supposed to do. Policymakers aren't writing laws for people they know and trust; they're writing them for strangers who they're entrusting with the public's kids.
He quotes Randy Dorn, who has worked on every side of the ed-and-legislation biz. Dorn points out that politics are about relationships. This points to what I've always considered the huge disadvantage of teachers (and many other professionals)-- we have jobs, and we work all day. The power of a lobbyist is not just that he can promise money and toys and assistance-- it's that he doesn't have to be anywhere else during the day. The lobbyist is free to hang around capitals and create personal relationships with legislators all day every day, while working Americans are busy doing their actual jobs, thereby remaining strangers to the policymakers.
Hess's point is that since policy is a blunt instrument, legislators are looking for partners to help them make the policy work. I frankly don't have an answer for this. I have a job. I work for a living. I can't hop in the car and make the four hour drive to Harrisburg to let legislators get to know my face and understand where I'm coming from, and while I'd like to put the burden of connecting with constituents on them, they've got a job to do, too. And often that reach comes too late. If, as Hess writes, they're looking for professionals to help make the policy work as it should, they've already skipped the part where they should have asked the professionals advice about creating the policy in the first place.
Third, keep in mind that rules are written heavy-handedly . . . on purpose, with an eye to stopping obvious stupidity.
Nope. Don't buy this one. This is, in fact, why many rules don't work. When you try to strap everyone into the same constricting straightjacket, two things happen. First, your good actors, the people who were doing a good job and were a positive force-- those folks are diminished and made less effective because you've got them all wrapped up in this regulatory straightjacket. Second, the obvious stupidity that you set out to stop goes on anyway, or reappears in a different form.
Oh, and a third thing-- your rule is so obviously dumb and heavy-handed that you reduce everyone's respect for and adherence with your rules, so that over time you think you have to be even more heavy-handed which hampers your good people even more and creates brand new forms of bad stupidity and makes it hard to get anybody to pay attention to you even when you do have a good rule to implement.
How do I know this? Because it's Basic Classroom Management 101. It is bad policy for running my classroom, and it is bad policy for running a state or country. If this is how rules are written, then we've located one of policymakers basic huge mistakes.
Fourth, when educators do get the chance to speak to policymakers or in public hearings, they often do so in ways that don't help their cause.
Yeah, I'd like to deny this one, but I can't. Too many folks have this mental image of standing up before Power and speaking out in Righteous Indignation a Truth of such blinding, burning strength that their opponents cower and say, sadly, "Yes, I see now that I am a terrible person who has been terribly wrong, and now I will do what you ask and beg forgiveness for being such an ass." The internet has not helped. And yet, this scenario plays out in real life exactly none times.
That is not to say that the old objection of, "Well, we just can't listen to you when you're so rude and strident" holds up. People keep raising their voices till they the believe they've been heard. , and a lot of people in education have been feeling ignored for a while now. The rule here is simple: if you don't want people to scream at you, listen to them when they talk to you. But Hess is correct-- when you get the chance to be heard, you have to consider your audience.
Now, I don't agree with all of Hess's specific examples of this. For instance, his number one is "Don't ask for money." This must not apply to everyone, because the charter school lobby keeps asking for money, and they keep getting it. For that matter, public education is not always asking for more money so much as it's asking to at least keep them money that it has previously received. One of the mottos of ed reform continues to be, "Throwing money at public schools is wasteful, but throwing money at charters and ed-related corporations is awesome."
But he is absolutely correct that in dealing with policymakers, or any other carbon-based life forms, it is most effective to frame your own requests in terms of how they will address your audience's concerns. Any presentation to anybody must, at some point, address the question of Why You Should Care. The blunt force answer in politics is "You should care because if you don't at least act like you agree with me, I will make your re-election very hard," and that has its place. But policymakers do have concerns of their own, and they are worth factoring into any attempt to influence them.
Of course, what Hess doesn't address is that in the current ed reform landscape, there are some influential figures whose interests have no overlap at all with the interests of teachers. More importantly, the basic requisite for these kinds of conversations is for all parties to be honest about their concerns, and the reformster landscape is littered with people who show no signs of being remotely honest about what they want and what their goals are. To have these kinds of conversation, we have to have trust, and to have trust, we have to have honesty, and many policymakers and the influential figures who are trying to call shots haven't brought that quality to the table yet.
First, believe it or not, teachers have a sympathetic audience.
I think that's true. I've said before that one of the lessons real teachers can learn from Teach for America is that there are a whole bunch of folks out there who think that supporting teachers is a Noble and Good. There is still plenty of public support for teachers and the teaching profession.
But Hess is being disingenuous when he quotes a Teaching Ambassador who says, "What fascinated me was this perception that folks at [the U.S. Department of Education] would look at us and think, 'They're just teachers.'" This is on par with Arne Duncan saying, "I just don't understand why states are putting so much emphasis on standardized testing."
There are sympathetic folks among policymakers, but there are also policymakers like Andrew Cuomo who have been quite explicit in explaining that teachers are what's wrong with the education system and they have to be rooted out and brought to heel. And the USED does in fact enlist teacher ambassadors, who are carefully screened and vetted and allowed to visit the table from time to time. But a teacher would have to have lived under a rock not to have noticed that our last decade of school reform has been implemented without any attempt to include teachers in the design of policy, and also implemented with the foundational assumption (sometimes implicit and sometimes explicit) that teachers are a problem to be fixed and not experts and collaborators to be included.
So teachers do have some sympathetic folks in the policymaker audience, but we also have some folks who have already declared us public education enemy number one. Hess's advice is useful up to a point-- teachers should not assume that just because someone is a bureaucrat or reformster that he must also hate or disrespect teachers-- but it's pretty clear at this stage of the game that many policymakers are not at all interested in what teachers have to say.
Second, keep in mind that policymakers can make people do things, but they can't make them do them well.
This is one of Hess's more useful insights, and he has offered it more than a few times as an explanation of why some aspects of education reform are such a clusterfinagle. And his explanation of the idea here is illuminating.
Worse, policymakers know that their good ideas often go south once they're implemented, which makes them hesitant to trust those on the ground. That's why they're eager to find sympathetic professionals who can help figure out how to ensure that policies actually do what they're supposed to do. Policymakers aren't writing laws for people they know and trust; they're writing them for strangers who they're entrusting with the public's kids.
He quotes Randy Dorn, who has worked on every side of the ed-and-legislation biz. Dorn points out that politics are about relationships. This points to what I've always considered the huge disadvantage of teachers (and many other professionals)-- we have jobs, and we work all day. The power of a lobbyist is not just that he can promise money and toys and assistance-- it's that he doesn't have to be anywhere else during the day. The lobbyist is free to hang around capitals and create personal relationships with legislators all day every day, while working Americans are busy doing their actual jobs, thereby remaining strangers to the policymakers.
Hess's point is that since policy is a blunt instrument, legislators are looking for partners to help them make the policy work. I frankly don't have an answer for this. I have a job. I work for a living. I can't hop in the car and make the four hour drive to Harrisburg to let legislators get to know my face and understand where I'm coming from, and while I'd like to put the burden of connecting with constituents on them, they've got a job to do, too. And often that reach comes too late. If, as Hess writes, they're looking for professionals to help make the policy work as it should, they've already skipped the part where they should have asked the professionals advice about creating the policy in the first place.
Third, keep in mind that rules are written heavy-handedly . . . on purpose, with an eye to stopping obvious stupidity.
Nope. Don't buy this one. This is, in fact, why many rules don't work. When you try to strap everyone into the same constricting straightjacket, two things happen. First, your good actors, the people who were doing a good job and were a positive force-- those folks are diminished and made less effective because you've got them all wrapped up in this regulatory straightjacket. Second, the obvious stupidity that you set out to stop goes on anyway, or reappears in a different form.
Oh, and a third thing-- your rule is so obviously dumb and heavy-handed that you reduce everyone's respect for and adherence with your rules, so that over time you think you have to be even more heavy-handed which hampers your good people even more and creates brand new forms of bad stupidity and makes it hard to get anybody to pay attention to you even when you do have a good rule to implement.
How do I know this? Because it's Basic Classroom Management 101. It is bad policy for running my classroom, and it is bad policy for running a state or country. If this is how rules are written, then we've located one of policymakers basic huge mistakes.
Fourth, when educators do get the chance to speak to policymakers or in public hearings, they often do so in ways that don't help their cause.
Yeah, I'd like to deny this one, but I can't. Too many folks have this mental image of standing up before Power and speaking out in Righteous Indignation a Truth of such blinding, burning strength that their opponents cower and say, sadly, "Yes, I see now that I am a terrible person who has been terribly wrong, and now I will do what you ask and beg forgiveness for being such an ass." The internet has not helped. And yet, this scenario plays out in real life exactly none times.
That is not to say that the old objection of, "Well, we just can't listen to you when you're so rude and strident" holds up. People keep raising their voices till they the believe they've been heard. , and a lot of people in education have been feeling ignored for a while now. The rule here is simple: if you don't want people to scream at you, listen to them when they talk to you. But Hess is correct-- when you get the chance to be heard, you have to consider your audience.
Now, I don't agree with all of Hess's specific examples of this. For instance, his number one is "Don't ask for money." This must not apply to everyone, because the charter school lobby keeps asking for money, and they keep getting it. For that matter, public education is not always asking for more money so much as it's asking to at least keep them money that it has previously received. One of the mottos of ed reform continues to be, "Throwing money at public schools is wasteful, but throwing money at charters and ed-related corporations is awesome."
But he is absolutely correct that in dealing with policymakers, or any other carbon-based life forms, it is most effective to frame your own requests in terms of how they will address your audience's concerns. Any presentation to anybody must, at some point, address the question of Why You Should Care. The blunt force answer in politics is "You should care because if you don't at least act like you agree with me, I will make your re-election very hard," and that has its place. But policymakers do have concerns of their own, and they are worth factoring into any attempt to influence them.
Of course, what Hess doesn't address is that in the current ed reform landscape, there are some influential figures whose interests have no overlap at all with the interests of teachers. More importantly, the basic requisite for these kinds of conversations is for all parties to be honest about their concerns, and the reformster landscape is littered with people who show no signs of being remotely honest about what they want and what their goals are. To have these kinds of conversation, we have to have trust, and to have trust, we have to have honesty, and many policymakers and the influential figures who are trying to call shots haven't brought that quality to the table yet.
Thursday, April 2, 2015
What Education Won't Fix
A newly released quicky study from the Hamilton Project reaches some conclusions about what education can-- and can't-- do for the economic situation in our country.
The study, by Brad Hershbein, Melissa S. Kearney, and Lawrence Summers, tries to take a look at what effects would actually follow an increase in the number of college grads. Folks keep saying that if we got everyone a college degree, flowers would bloom, riches would flow, and the economy would be fixed. The study says, not exactly.
It's an interesting team-up. Hershbein and Kearney are from the school of thought that to get widespread economic prosperity, "it will be imperative to increase the skill level of many in the population." But Summers recently noted in a Washington Post interview “to suggest that improving education is the solution to inequality is, I think, an evasion.” So this is not exactly Thomas Piketty trying to once again prove that all we need is more college-educated people and the world will be perfect.
The premise for this "empirical simulation" was waving a magic wand so that 10% of the men who don't have a bachelor's degree suddenly did (they assure us that focusing on men was not a sexist oversight, but a recognition that these un-degreed men are the ones who took the biggest hit in recent decades). They also allow, toward the end, that increasing educational attainment could also mean making K-12 better, not just sending everyone to college.
Then they ran a bunch of magical econoformulas to see how earnings distribution would change. I'll tell the truth-- I can't quite follow all the economist gobbledeegook in this paper (and it's only five pages long, so I'm going to go ahead and blame me). But I'm pretty sure that the exercise involves redistributing the earnings that are already out there and not, as some proponents do, imagining that college degrees automatically make more money appear in the system.
The study offers three bottom lines:
1) Increasing the educational attainment of men without a college degree will increase their average earnings and their likelihood of being employed.
I am not sure what part of the magic formulae supports this conclusion. It seems as if so many imponderables have been lumped together-- will a guy with a BA in Art History be better employed than a high school grad who's a certified welder? One thing the researchers don't seem to have considered at all-- the degree to which college attainment, employment, and earnings are all a function of the economic status of their family of origin (consider the depressing research suggesting that poor college grads don't do substantially better than rich high school dropouts, or the John Hopkins Baltimore study that suggests family and neighborhood trump everything).
All that said, I'm willing to accept that in general, a college degree is more helpful than not.
2) Increasing educational attainment will not significantly change overall earnings inequality.
Simple explanation here. A college degree does not get you any closer to being in the 1%, and the gulf between the 1% and everybody else is so large, that shuffling everybody else around just doesn't matter. Put another way, if I have seven out of eight pieces of pie, it really doesn't matter how the rest of you slice up the remaining piece, because I still have seven pieces.
3) Increasing educational attainment will, however, reduce inequality in the bottom half of the earnings distribution, largely by pulling up the earnings of those near the 25th percentile.
In other words, if these folks are correct (see above for my argument about why they might not be), increasing educational attainment will not affect the rich, the pretty rich, or the middle, but will make some of the poor less poor. This dovetails with the notion that much of ed reform is not so much about fixing education as it is about "fixing" poor kids (because if we fix them with education stuff, then we don't have to take responsibility for any other causes or effects of poverty).
As with much education researchy stuff, I'm not sure if we've actually proven anything here. But the observation that educational attainment will not affect the largest chunk of income inequality in this country is worth mulling over.
The study, by Brad Hershbein, Melissa S. Kearney, and Lawrence Summers, tries to take a look at what effects would actually follow an increase in the number of college grads. Folks keep saying that if we got everyone a college degree, flowers would bloom, riches would flow, and the economy would be fixed. The study says, not exactly.
It's an interesting team-up. Hershbein and Kearney are from the school of thought that to get widespread economic prosperity, "it will be imperative to increase the skill level of many in the population." But Summers recently noted in a Washington Post interview “to suggest that improving education is the solution to inequality is, I think, an evasion.” So this is not exactly Thomas Piketty trying to once again prove that all we need is more college-educated people and the world will be perfect.
The premise for this "empirical simulation" was waving a magic wand so that 10% of the men who don't have a bachelor's degree suddenly did (they assure us that focusing on men was not a sexist oversight, but a recognition that these un-degreed men are the ones who took the biggest hit in recent decades). They also allow, toward the end, that increasing educational attainment could also mean making K-12 better, not just sending everyone to college.
Then they ran a bunch of magical econoformulas to see how earnings distribution would change. I'll tell the truth-- I can't quite follow all the economist gobbledeegook in this paper (and it's only five pages long, so I'm going to go ahead and blame me). But I'm pretty sure that the exercise involves redistributing the earnings that are already out there and not, as some proponents do, imagining that college degrees automatically make more money appear in the system.
The study offers three bottom lines:
1) Increasing the educational attainment of men without a college degree will increase their average earnings and their likelihood of being employed.
I am not sure what part of the magic formulae supports this conclusion. It seems as if so many imponderables have been lumped together-- will a guy with a BA in Art History be better employed than a high school grad who's a certified welder? One thing the researchers don't seem to have considered at all-- the degree to which college attainment, employment, and earnings are all a function of the economic status of their family of origin (consider the depressing research suggesting that poor college grads don't do substantially better than rich high school dropouts, or the John Hopkins Baltimore study that suggests family and neighborhood trump everything).
All that said, I'm willing to accept that in general, a college degree is more helpful than not.
2) Increasing educational attainment will not significantly change overall earnings inequality.
Simple explanation here. A college degree does not get you any closer to being in the 1%, and the gulf between the 1% and everybody else is so large, that shuffling everybody else around just doesn't matter. Put another way, if I have seven out of eight pieces of pie, it really doesn't matter how the rest of you slice up the remaining piece, because I still have seven pieces.
3) Increasing educational attainment will, however, reduce inequality in the bottom half of the earnings distribution, largely by pulling up the earnings of those near the 25th percentile.
In other words, if these folks are correct (see above for my argument about why they might not be), increasing educational attainment will not affect the rich, the pretty rich, or the middle, but will make some of the poor less poor. This dovetails with the notion that much of ed reform is not so much about fixing education as it is about "fixing" poor kids (because if we fix them with education stuff, then we don't have to take responsibility for any other causes or effects of poverty).
As with much education researchy stuff, I'm not sure if we've actually proven anything here. But the observation that educational attainment will not affect the largest chunk of income inequality in this country is worth mulling over.
Wednesday, April 1, 2015
NY: Teachers Can Go To Hell, With a Heavy Heart
This has truly been the most bizarre thing I have ever seen. An unpopular proposal that guts teaching as a profession and kicks public education in the teeth, sails through the NY legislature.
Yes, "sails through." There's nothing else to call a budget that is approved 92-54.
NY Democrats tried to make it look like less of a total victory-in-a-walk for public education opponent Andrew Cuomo by making sad pouty faces and issuing various meaningless mouth noises while going ahead and voting for the damn thing. "Ohh, woes and sadderations," they cried as they took turns walking to the podium to give Cuomo exactly the tools he wanted for helping to put an end to teaching as a profession in New York state.
I am not sure what Democrats hoped to accomplish by taking to the podium and twitter to say how deeply, tragically burdened they were. I mean, I guess you'd like to know that people who club baby seals feel a little bit bad about it, but it really doesn't make a lot of difference to the baby seal, who is in fact still dead.
Maybe the lesson here is that the craziest person in the room controls the conversation. The person who's willing to ram the car right into the sheer rock face gets to navigate the trip, and Cuomo has displayed repeatedly that he really doesn't care what has to be smashed up. If the world isn't going to go on his way, it doesn't need to go on for anybody.
But if teachers needed reason #2,416 to understand that Democrats simply aren't friends to public education, there it was, biting its quivering lip and sniffling, "I feel really bad about this" as it tied up education and fired it out of a canon so that it could land directly under a bus that had been dropped off the Empire State Building.
Hell, even Campbell Brown must be a little gobsmacked, as Cuomo's budgetary bludgeoning of tenure and job security rules has made her lawsuit unnecessary. The Big Standardized Tests results will continue their reign of teacher evaluation, dropping random and baseless scores onto the heads of New York educators like the feces of so many flying pigs. And all new teachers need to do to get their (soon-to-be-meaningless) tenure is get the random VAM dice to throw up snake-eyes four times in a row. Meanwhile, school districts can go out back to the magic money trees to find the financing for hiring the "outside evaluators" who will provide the cherry on top of the VAM sauce.
If I were a New York teacher, I don't know who I'd aim my rage and frustration at first? Cuomo? Good luck with that, since he is apparently surrounded by a magic force field. The useless Democrats who voted for this mess? Yeah, I'd certainly fire off some tweets, emails and phone calls there, but I'm not sure what sort of central nervous system an organism with no spine has. I'm sure I'd have some words for all the fine union leaders who helped Cuomo hold onto his office and have displayed either hapless ineptness or craven support for Cuomo's teacher crushing agenda.
My brothers and sisters of the classroom in New York, my heart goes out to you. You did not deserve this, and to have it delivered with a chorus of, "I really oppose this. Just not enough to, you know, actually oppose this when it counts" is even more galling. This just sucks. Don't let anybody with a magic spin machine in their hand tell you otherwise.
UPDATE NOTE: I am reminded by some readers that while Assembly Dems folded like a cheap tent and joined in with Assembly GOP, the Senate Dems showed some actual spine.
Yes, "sails through." There's nothing else to call a budget that is approved 92-54.
NY Democrats tried to make it look like less of a total victory-in-a-walk for public education opponent Andrew Cuomo by making sad pouty faces and issuing various meaningless mouth noises while going ahead and voting for the damn thing. "Ohh, woes and sadderations," they cried as they took turns walking to the podium to give Cuomo exactly the tools he wanted for helping to put an end to teaching as a profession in New York state.
I am not sure what Democrats hoped to accomplish by taking to the podium and twitter to say how deeply, tragically burdened they were. I mean, I guess you'd like to know that people who club baby seals feel a little bit bad about it, but it really doesn't make a lot of difference to the baby seal, who is in fact still dead.
Maybe the lesson here is that the craziest person in the room controls the conversation. The person who's willing to ram the car right into the sheer rock face gets to navigate the trip, and Cuomo has displayed repeatedly that he really doesn't care what has to be smashed up. If the world isn't going to go on his way, it doesn't need to go on for anybody.
But if teachers needed reason #2,416 to understand that Democrats simply aren't friends to public education, there it was, biting its quivering lip and sniffling, "I feel really bad about this" as it tied up education and fired it out of a canon so that it could land directly under a bus that had been dropped off the Empire State Building.
Hell, even Campbell Brown must be a little gobsmacked, as Cuomo's budgetary bludgeoning of tenure and job security rules has made her lawsuit unnecessary. The Big Standardized Tests results will continue their reign of teacher evaluation, dropping random and baseless scores onto the heads of New York educators like the feces of so many flying pigs. And all new teachers need to do to get their (soon-to-be-meaningless) tenure is get the random VAM dice to throw up snake-eyes four times in a row. Meanwhile, school districts can go out back to the magic money trees to find the financing for hiring the "outside evaluators" who will provide the cherry on top of the VAM sauce.
If I were a New York teacher, I don't know who I'd aim my rage and frustration at first? Cuomo? Good luck with that, since he is apparently surrounded by a magic force field. The useless Democrats who voted for this mess? Yeah, I'd certainly fire off some tweets, emails and phone calls there, but I'm not sure what sort of central nervous system an organism with no spine has. I'm sure I'd have some words for all the fine union leaders who helped Cuomo hold onto his office and have displayed either hapless ineptness or craven support for Cuomo's teacher crushing agenda.
My brothers and sisters of the classroom in New York, my heart goes out to you. You did not deserve this, and to have it delivered with a chorus of, "I really oppose this. Just not enough to, you know, actually oppose this when it counts" is even more galling. This just sucks. Don't let anybody with a magic spin machine in their hand tell you otherwise.
UPDATE NOTE: I am reminded by some readers that while Assembly Dems folded like a cheap tent and joined in with Assembly GOP, the Senate Dems showed some actual spine.
LSU Botches Its Own CCSS Data
Another Common Core poll has been conducted, this one by the Reilly Center for Media and Public Affairs Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University, and while some of the results are interesting, various media outlets are already blowing the lead.
LSU would like the big takeaway to be that people support the Common Core if you don't call it the Common Core, thereby suggesting that the poor standards simply suffer from a branding problem. If you ask people about adopting standards, they think it's swell, but if you ask them about adopting Common Core, the rejection and mouthfrothing begins. LSU (and the outlets jumping on this story) have thereby concluded that it's just the name that people have been trained to hate.
Let's see if I can illustrate the gaping hole in their argument with a little play:
Harry: Honey, do you think men should wear hats?
Chris: Yes, I think hats make men look rather dashing.
Harry: (Exits, returns wearing neon blue possum poop hat) So shall I wear this to your folks?
Chris: For the love of God, no!!
It is a leap of Knevelian proportions to suggest that if one likes the idea of educational standards, one must therefor love the Common Core Standards. It is possible to think standards are, in principle, rather dashing and desirable and yet to also conclude that Common Core is the blue neon possum poop of standards.
And my theory is further buttressed by the LSU finding that far more people consider themselves well-versed in CCSS since the last time LSU asked. They have seen the hat. They have tried the hat on. They have decided. That is some bad hat, Harry.
LSU offered a series of True-False questions. If you want your poll to yield particular results or push a particular idea, TF questions are great, because one need not offer an actual true answer at all!
For instance, LSU asks if CCSS was developed by the Obama administration or state leaders. Oops! No correct answers here, although both of those groups financed and supported the development, one more openly than the other.
Or would you say that the federal government required their adoption, or was it voluntary? Again, we left the correct answer off. Adoption of the standards was voluntary in the same way your mortgage payments are voluntary-- not required by law, exactly, but certainly a good idea if you'd like to avoid punishing financial penalties.
Do you think state and local government chooses materials, or the feds? Brrrzzzpt! None of the above, again.
Do the standards set higher or lower expectations? Well, this is just deep philosophy that assumes that educational expectations can be measured along a single axis, like height or heat or number of angels dancing on head of pin. I've always been bemused by the high expectations thing-- we kind of all know what it means, but it's also super-complex, particularly if we mix all the various aspects of education together. But that's a conversation for another day.
Methodology? They called 980 adults on the phone-- some landlines and some cells, including some cells only (I am curious-- how did they get those numbers?). The response rate was 7% for landline and 6% for cells, making a grand total of 64 persons who completed the survey. Those 64 people were weighted "using an iterative process that matches race and ethnicity, education, household income, gender and age to known profiles for Louisiana found in the Census Bureaus American Community Survey." The authors do acknowledge weighting cannot fully compensate for non-response bias (IOW the 916 adults who DIDN'T finish the survey).
I could get into the results, but really, why bother. Sixty-four residents of Louisiana were asked badly-constructed questions about the Common Core. What else do we need to know?
LSU would like the big takeaway to be that people support the Common Core if you don't call it the Common Core, thereby suggesting that the poor standards simply suffer from a branding problem. If you ask people about adopting standards, they think it's swell, but if you ask them about adopting Common Core, the rejection and mouthfrothing begins. LSU (and the outlets jumping on this story) have thereby concluded that it's just the name that people have been trained to hate.
Let's see if I can illustrate the gaping hole in their argument with a little play:
Harry: Honey, do you think men should wear hats?
Chris: Yes, I think hats make men look rather dashing.
Harry: (Exits, returns wearing neon blue possum poop hat) So shall I wear this to your folks?
Chris: For the love of God, no!!
It is a leap of Knevelian proportions to suggest that if one likes the idea of educational standards, one must therefor love the Common Core Standards. It is possible to think standards are, in principle, rather dashing and desirable and yet to also conclude that Common Core is the blue neon possum poop of standards.
And my theory is further buttressed by the LSU finding that far more people consider themselves well-versed in CCSS since the last time LSU asked. They have seen the hat. They have tried the hat on. They have decided. That is some bad hat, Harry.
LSU offered a series of True-False questions. If you want your poll to yield particular results or push a particular idea, TF questions are great, because one need not offer an actual true answer at all!
For instance, LSU asks if CCSS was developed by the Obama administration or state leaders. Oops! No correct answers here, although both of those groups financed and supported the development, one more openly than the other.
Or would you say that the federal government required their adoption, or was it voluntary? Again, we left the correct answer off. Adoption of the standards was voluntary in the same way your mortgage payments are voluntary-- not required by law, exactly, but certainly a good idea if you'd like to avoid punishing financial penalties.
Do you think state and local government chooses materials, or the feds? Brrrzzzpt! None of the above, again.
Do the standards set higher or lower expectations? Well, this is just deep philosophy that assumes that educational expectations can be measured along a single axis, like height or heat or number of angels dancing on head of pin. I've always been bemused by the high expectations thing-- we kind of all know what it means, but it's also super-complex, particularly if we mix all the various aspects of education together. But that's a conversation for another day.
Methodology? They called 980 adults on the phone-- some landlines and some cells, including some cells only (I am curious-- how did they get those numbers?). The response rate was 7% for landline and 6% for cells, making a grand total of 64 persons who completed the survey. Those 64 people were weighted "using an iterative process that matches race and ethnicity, education, household income, gender and age to known profiles for Louisiana found in the Census Bureaus American Community Survey." The authors do acknowledge weighting cannot fully compensate for non-response bias (IOW the 916 adults who DIDN'T finish the survey).
I could get into the results, but really, why bother. Sixty-four residents of Louisiana were asked badly-constructed questions about the Common Core. What else do we need to know?
Equity for Some
Can we have equity for some, or are we in danger of making the perfect the enemy of the good? How big a lifeboat should we build?
Andy Smarick has been slowly unspooling a series of Fordham blogs in which he considers the areas of tension between conservative thought and modern ed reform. His latest considers the issues of equity and reform, and while he accurately identifies some issues, he misses a pair of critical ones.
One of the reformster guiding ideals is "that every child have access to great schools." On the face of it, that's a noble goal. But it's not the same as the goal that every child attend a great school.
Mike Petrilli has famously defined the role of charters, saying essentially that their mission is to save some students, the students deemed worthy by charter operators. While charters exist who are willing (like actual public schools) to take all comers, many charters argue loudly for school's choice-- their right to select only the students that they want in their building. Arguments against backfilling, true random student assignment, and mandatory acceptance of more special needs students all boil down to the same thing-- most modern charters want to accept the students they want to accept under the conditions they want to accept them, and that's it. This is unsurprising; many (if not most) modern charter operators came to education from the world of business, and part of the baggage they brought with them is that nobody should be able to tell them how to run their business.
Charters do not want to take over the whole public education business-- just the parts they think they can make profitable.
Well, so what? If they can actually improve education in America in a cost-effective manner, who cares if they make money in the process?
And that's our problem. They can't make money and improve education and keep the total cost down-- not without redefining the mission of public education. And unfortunately, their redefinition is problematic.
We have an equity problem in education in this country, and I'm not sure it's all that complicated-- we don't want to spend enough money to get the job done. If education is a really good pair of shoes, we've said, "The government will kick in part of the costs. You'll have to make up the difference locally. If you can't, your kids will just have to wear cheap, ill-fitting shoes." Charter operators are the guys who say, "Give me that money. I've got a supplier who could get perfectly okay shoes-- as long as I only have to shoe the kids with regular-sized feet. The kids with flat feet or high arches or odd sizes-- they will cost us too much to get shoes for, so you just keep those."
Smarick asks a legitimate question-- is it okay to save the very, very needy if that means leaving the very, very, very needy behind? Unfortunately, that's not the choice we're facing.The piece includes this paragraph that backhandedly highlights the problems with charters and equity:
Newark's charters are extraordinary. But superintendent Cami Anderson is concerned these "speedboats" save only some passengers from "the Titanic" and might make the liner sink faster.
Problem 1: Newarks charters aren't extraordinary at all. Solid research shows that they serve a different population than Newark public schools (what is extraordinary is how they tried to use the courts to silence those researchers).
Problem 2: Those speedboats do make the liner sink faster.
One of the basic assumptions of a blended public and charter system is that we can operate two or more separate schools for the cost of one. We can't. Nobody can. (Auditors in Tennessee just certified that Nashville can't do it.) Smarick quotes Mother Teresa-- "If you can't feed a hundred people, then just feed one." I don't think that applies. First, why can't we feed 100 people? We're one of the richest nations on earth. Second, why are we taking food away from ninety people so that ten people can eat better?
Smarick pulls out an old article in which Rick Hess suggests that fans of an equity-driven approach to schools "refused to confront its costs and unintended consequences." But so do the fans of the charter inequity approach. Opening charters in a city is an absolute guarantee that some schools in that city will not be fully funded.
This is what I find infuriatingly frustrating about the charter approach to "fixing" a school sysem. We walk up to a building where 100 students live, and we say, "This building is falling down, poorly maintained, and slowly crumbling. Let's take half the money being spent on it now, build a nice new building for ten of these students, and leave the other ninety in this now-even-more-undersupported crumbing mess." Why not fix the building with all 100 students inside? Because it would cost money.
If we push ahead as-is, some of these costs will be forced upon--in the short term at least--affluent families.
Well, yes. That's the problem, isn't it? Despite protestations to the contrary, we can't provide educational equity without at the very least changing how we spread around the money on the table for education, and likely not without coughing up more money, period. But we don't like that answer. Instead, we keep looking for ways to cut and resew a blanket that's too small to cover the bed instead of coughing up the funds to buy a full sized blanket that can cover everybody.
Financing public education is the very definition of a zero-sum game. Too many charter proponents have decided to abandon public education and the expensive-to-educate children who go to school there. Too many charter proponents are arguing that equity for some should be our goal. Smarick says that we don't discuss tradeoffs enough, but like most charter fans, he does not discuss the tradeoff of robbing Peter to pay for Paul's charter school. I understand the nobility of the impulse to rescue just one starfish, but the metaphor does not apply here unless we're talking about some bizarre deal where for every starfish that's thrown into the sea, ten must be stuffed in a bucket.
I believe that on the road to equity for all, we have to travel through the valley of equity for some. As long as we seem to be traveling in the right direction, I'm okay with that. But reformsters don't seem to have a plan beyond "Use charters to rescue some students by re-distributing the resources earmarked for all students." I understand that "Get unlimited money from a magic money tree" is also not an option. But equity for some is good enough. We need a better answer.
Originally posted in View from the Cheap Seats
Andy Smarick has been slowly unspooling a series of Fordham blogs in which he considers the areas of tension between conservative thought and modern ed reform. His latest considers the issues of equity and reform, and while he accurately identifies some issues, he misses a pair of critical ones.
One of the reformster guiding ideals is "that every child have access to great schools." On the face of it, that's a noble goal. But it's not the same as the goal that every child attend a great school.
Mike Petrilli has famously defined the role of charters, saying essentially that their mission is to save some students, the students deemed worthy by charter operators. While charters exist who are willing (like actual public schools) to take all comers, many charters argue loudly for school's choice-- their right to select only the students that they want in their building. Arguments against backfilling, true random student assignment, and mandatory acceptance of more special needs students all boil down to the same thing-- most modern charters want to accept the students they want to accept under the conditions they want to accept them, and that's it. This is unsurprising; many (if not most) modern charter operators came to education from the world of business, and part of the baggage they brought with them is that nobody should be able to tell them how to run their business.
Charters do not want to take over the whole public education business-- just the parts they think they can make profitable.
Well, so what? If they can actually improve education in America in a cost-effective manner, who cares if they make money in the process?
And that's our problem. They can't make money and improve education and keep the total cost down-- not without redefining the mission of public education. And unfortunately, their redefinition is problematic.
We have an equity problem in education in this country, and I'm not sure it's all that complicated-- we don't want to spend enough money to get the job done. If education is a really good pair of shoes, we've said, "The government will kick in part of the costs. You'll have to make up the difference locally. If you can't, your kids will just have to wear cheap, ill-fitting shoes." Charter operators are the guys who say, "Give me that money. I've got a supplier who could get perfectly okay shoes-- as long as I only have to shoe the kids with regular-sized feet. The kids with flat feet or high arches or odd sizes-- they will cost us too much to get shoes for, so you just keep those."
Smarick asks a legitimate question-- is it okay to save the very, very needy if that means leaving the very, very, very needy behind? Unfortunately, that's not the choice we're facing.The piece includes this paragraph that backhandedly highlights the problems with charters and equity:
Newark's charters are extraordinary. But superintendent Cami Anderson is concerned these "speedboats" save only some passengers from "the Titanic" and might make the liner sink faster.
Problem 1: Newarks charters aren't extraordinary at all. Solid research shows that they serve a different population than Newark public schools (what is extraordinary is how they tried to use the courts to silence those researchers).
Problem 2: Those speedboats do make the liner sink faster.
One of the basic assumptions of a blended public and charter system is that we can operate two or more separate schools for the cost of one. We can't. Nobody can. (Auditors in Tennessee just certified that Nashville can't do it.) Smarick quotes Mother Teresa-- "If you can't feed a hundred people, then just feed one." I don't think that applies. First, why can't we feed 100 people? We're one of the richest nations on earth. Second, why are we taking food away from ninety people so that ten people can eat better?
Smarick pulls out an old article in which Rick Hess suggests that fans of an equity-driven approach to schools "refused to confront its costs and unintended consequences." But so do the fans of the charter inequity approach. Opening charters in a city is an absolute guarantee that some schools in that city will not be fully funded.
This is what I find infuriatingly frustrating about the charter approach to "fixing" a school sysem. We walk up to a building where 100 students live, and we say, "This building is falling down, poorly maintained, and slowly crumbling. Let's take half the money being spent on it now, build a nice new building for ten of these students, and leave the other ninety in this now-even-more-undersupported crumbing mess." Why not fix the building with all 100 students inside? Because it would cost money.
If we push ahead as-is, some of these costs will be forced upon--in the short term at least--affluent families.
Well, yes. That's the problem, isn't it? Despite protestations to the contrary, we can't provide educational equity without at the very least changing how we spread around the money on the table for education, and likely not without coughing up more money, period. But we don't like that answer. Instead, we keep looking for ways to cut and resew a blanket that's too small to cover the bed instead of coughing up the funds to buy a full sized blanket that can cover everybody.
Financing public education is the very definition of a zero-sum game. Too many charter proponents have decided to abandon public education and the expensive-to-educate children who go to school there. Too many charter proponents are arguing that equity for some should be our goal. Smarick says that we don't discuss tradeoffs enough, but like most charter fans, he does not discuss the tradeoff of robbing Peter to pay for Paul's charter school. I understand the nobility of the impulse to rescue just one starfish, but the metaphor does not apply here unless we're talking about some bizarre deal where for every starfish that's thrown into the sea, ten must be stuffed in a bucket.
I believe that on the road to equity for all, we have to travel through the valley of equity for some. As long as we seem to be traveling in the right direction, I'm okay with that. But reformsters don't seem to have a plan beyond "Use charters to rescue some students by re-distributing the resources earmarked for all students." I understand that "Get unlimited money from a magic money tree" is also not an option. But equity for some is good enough. We need a better answer.
Originally posted in View from the Cheap Seats
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