Maryland Disappoints Charters

Maryland's Governor Larry Hogan had a dream, a dream of a state where charters could bloom more easily, more plentifully, and more profitably.

And so he was pushing a bill, a bill that would allow Maryland to catch up to other states in the chartery race for riches. The bill would let charters hire and fire staff at will (Maryland's charter teachers are actually employed by the local district). Teachers wouldn't have to be certified. Charters would have more ability to pick and choose students. Charters would get more money per student and also get a shot at construction funding. Perhaps most importantly, charters would finally have a recourse if mean old local school boards turned them down; they would be able to appeal to the State Board of Education to override the decision of local elected officials. So, democracy.

The Democrats are in control of the Maryland legislature, and they correctly identified the bill as union busting and bad for students. Compromise was sought.

The Senate committee later passed along a version of the bill that was either "watered down" or "improved" depending on your point of view.

That was late March. This week the legislature passed the bill. Sort of. Says the AP

Hogan initially tried to get more input for the state board of education on charter school operations. His expansion plan also waived certain teacher certifications and opened the possibility for new collective bargaining agreements.

But Senate and House committees made roughly a dozen amendments that largely reversed those proposals in Hogan’s measure.

You can tell the charteristas are Not Pleased, as witnessed by a statement released by Kara Kerwin, president of the Center for Education Reform, a group that is deeply committed to profitable entrepreneurship via the charter biz.

 “Late last night, The Maryland General Assembly took a step backwards in passing a dramatically revised charter school bill, making it less likely that parents and educators will be able to create and advance innovative public school opportunities for children.

Yes, because only charters can innovate. This would be the perfect moment to list off some of the innovations that have come out of charter schools. Kara? Kara???
 

“The bill removes the State Board’s check and balance authority to review school district actions on charter applications, which by extension removes a Governor’s authority to impact charter school decisions through his or her appointments to the board.

So, the governor won't be able to override the decisions of local elected officials. But if charters are awesometastic, won't local officials line up to have them?

“The bill requires an invasive study by the State Department of Education of all charter school operations, compliance of which will require additional staff and resources. This was clearly an effort by opponents to tie up small, underfunded charter schools with more bureaucracy, not less.

Oh nooosss!!!! Charters will have to be accountable! That is so unfair!! Comply with regulations!! Sooooo unfair!

“The bill further removes authority for charter schools by making every operational feature subject to agreement with school districts, which more often than not deny basic freedoms to charter operators to hire and train their own personnel. It also furthers funding inequality for public school students attending public charter schools.

"Basic freedoms" to hire and fire whoever, whenever!? They won't be able to unilaterally ignore the wishes of the local taxpayers and their elected officials. Lordy, that's awful!

“The bill makes changes in the ability of charter schools to make preferences on who they enroll, which is not a major accomplishment. Nor is the proclaimed victory of advocates over so-called flexibility, which validates authority that already exists for districts and the state to consider requested waivers from various rules and regulations.

>You're not going to let us cherry pick the students? How do you expect us to be awesomely successful?

“I’m appalled that this bill is considered progress when by definition it puts school districts and unions more fully in control of charter creation, operations and outcomes. Mr. Governor, I urge you to grab a cup of coffee - or a beer - and sit down to read this bill for yourself, and you too will be appalled at what the General Assembly has done to your well-intentioned proposal.

“While the Governor’s team has embraced this bill, I urge the Governor to veto this bill and start fresh with the next session.”

In case you missed it, she's appalled. Appalled!! Democracy and rules are stupid, and only stupid public schools should have to follow them. Charters in other states can do whatever they want to in order to generate profit-- why is Maryland being such a stick in the mud? Charter operators have a God-given right to make their own rules so that they can suck up some tax dollars.

Congratulations Maryland. Congrats on having a not-entirely-craven legislature, and for standing up for public in simple ways that apparently escape some of your neighbor states.

The biggest irony here is that many aspects of the Maryland law are actually contrary to what the US Senate is currently considering in the ESEA rewrite. We can only hope that they, and maybe some neighboring states, get a little inspiration from this small victory for public education.

Senate ESEA Rewrite: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Today the Alexander-Murray rewrite of ESEA goes out to the full Senate to-- well, God only knows. To be discussed by people who don't know what they're talking about. To have amendments attached about darter snails, e-mails from Benghazi, and naming Pearson Corporation of the Month. Honestly, I'm going to try not to watch too carefully as the sausage is being made.

But before ESEA goes to the sausage factory, let's take a quick look at what there is to love and what there is to not love. And let me recommend heartily the six-post series by Mercedes Schneider who basically underwent many nights of sleep deprivation so that the rest of us wouldn't have to read all 600 pages of this monstrosity. You can find her posts here, here, here, here, here, and here. You can also check out a handy table by Mike Petrilli right here.

So what is there to like about the ESEA rewrite? In a fairly clear and explicit manner, much of the power and control over state education departments out of the federal government's hand. If you think the USED should be abolished, well, here at least it's locked in a tiny little box. It has a whole section (see here) devoted to listing the things the Secretary of Education may not do, and those include very specific restrictions on giving states specific instructions. It bars the feds from tying funding to specific programming (explicitly barring such support for Common Core by name).

This general scaling back is clear from the new statement of purpose for the bill. From the both lofty and painfully specific purposes given a lengthy layout in NCLB, the new bill brings us down to this:

The purpose of this title is to ensure that all children have a fair, equitable, and significant opportunity to receive a high-quality education that prepares them for postsecondary education or the workforce, without the need for postsecondary remediation, and to close educational achievement gaps.

Unfortunately, that's just an amped-up version of "college and career ready," which is its own big fat slice of baloney. So we've gotten rid of federally-coerced Core standards, but we've put into the federal law the short, failed definition of educational success on which the foundation of those standards was built.

This is a recurring issue in the bill-- though it clearly wants to sell itself as a purging of Common Core from the national school system, the bill is haunted by the ghosts, both linguistic and programmatic, of NCLB. We get rid of AYP and mandatory sanctions for failing the Big Standardized Test, but we retain our commitment to test-driven accountability and interventions in failing schools. The feds cannot tell states how to manage teacher evaluation systems-- but those systems must be in place.

The new ESEA doesn't dismantle the machine that has been chewing up public ed so much as it forces the USED to hand the keys to the Leveller over to the states.

How much you like the new ESEA (or don't) will have a lot to do with how well you like your state department of education (or whoever bosses them around). Because those are the folks who are going to decide what tests will be given, what will be done with the results, who's failing, and what is going to be done to them.

Other reformster ideas are codified into law here. The new ESEA offers grant incentives for teacher merit pay systems (though the grants will only get things started-- sustaining funds will have to come from elsewhere). There are also competitive grants for teaching "traditional American" history and literacy education (this one is nearly incomprehensible). There are several specific pet projects that can look forward to an infusion of free federal money.

You will also love the new ESEA if you are Teach for America. Kudos to Schneider for spotting this item under Title II and the heading of Things Other Than Actual Teachers That States Can Spend Title II Money For:

(V) recent graduates of institutions of higher education with records of academic distinction who demonstrate the potential to become highly effective teachers, principals, or other school leaders. (pgs. 231-32).

Yes, that's TFA. "Other school leaders" is a particularly slick construction, neatly covering all those TFAers who are there to start their career as edubusinessmen or edubureaucrats.

If you are in the charter biz, you will love the new ESEA so much that you will want to marry it.

Granted, there is a downside for charters-- the law calls for them to serve the same population as public schools (a real cramp in many charters' business plan) and a call for transparency with financial monitoring and evaluation-- though this is only for the "public" charters, which fits nicely with a loophole written into the law which encourages charters to function as public-private hybrids. Since charters already like to argue that they have a private business's right to opacity, I'm betting that they will welcome further arguments to avoid oversight.

So the charter portion of the law balances "a high degree of autonomy" with "monitoring." States can go to the head of the line for Title V funding if

* they let an entity other than a local school district authorize charters
* they give charters equitable financing, compared to public schools (so we're done pretending that charters save taxpayers money)
* they help provide facilities through either funding or co-location
* they let charters handle budget and operations as they wish, including personnel decisions (so, hire, fire and pay at will)
* they use best practices from charters to improve pubic schools (a toughie, since so far this has happened exactly nowhere)

Charters get three years to show the USED what they can do, or, to put it another way, two years to cash checks and waste taxpayer money before anybody seriously checks up on them. Which strikes me as notably different from the mandate to keep testing those 3-8 graders in public school every single year. And the US secretary must use at least 50% of the Title V money to make at least three grants, and those grants can go to states, local outfits, a private non-profit entity, or any combo thereof. So more fake non-profit shell charter companies can set up to suck down those sweet, sweet tax dollars.


There's actually a whole section just about how to get money to charter schools. It's pretty wonky and rather makes one wonder what the Senate could have done if somebody had said, "There's a real problem with public school funding in this country, so let's build a solution for that into the new law." But no.

We'll see as the week unfolds what aspects of the ESEA rewrite attracted Senatorial attention. But if you want to write your Senator and make some suggestions-- well, I'll continue doing so, and I'll continue to say

* it's great to see the USED slapped down, but I watch with trepidation to see what my state government will do (while counting my blessings that I'm not in, say, New York).

* US education is never going to have a chance to thrive and grow and get back on track until we completely and totally drive a stake through the heart of test-driven accountability. That vehicle is a wreck that won't accomplish any of the things you want it to, and it doesn't matter whether it's driven by the feds, the state, or the circus-- it still won't get us where we want to go.

* if government gave half the thoughtful support to building up the public school system that it gives to privatizing education through charter investment opportunities, we'd all be better off.

In the meantime, I'll just keep watching for updates from the sausage factory.

College Ready, My Butt

There are some parts of the ed reform debates that have repeated so many times, we almost forget that they don't actually make sense.

For instance, the beloved mantra "college and career ready."

What the heck does that even mean?

David Conley, Ph.D, of the Education Policy Improvement Center, has presented on this many times-- he has a set of slides over at the CCSSO website-- and he offers this definition:

The level of preparation a student needs in order to enroll and succeed-- without remediation-- in a credit-bearing course at a postsecondary institution that offers a baccalaureate degree or transfer to a baccalaureate program, or in a high-quality certificate program that enables students to enter a career pathway with potential future advancement.

In case you're wondering, he goes on to define "succeed" as basically "pass the course well enough to continue to the next course or complete the program." So, the Peter Principle is not invoked, I guess.

Note that the "career" portion of readiness doesn't include anything that you can do with a high school diploma. He has also disqualified any job that doesn't allow for future advancement, which is unfortunate since that rules out teaching as an actual career. Go figure.

But even as a measure of college readiness, this is an unhelpful mess. "Enroll and succeed in a credit-bearing course." Any course? As long as I can pass any one entry level course, I'm college ready? If I'm ready to take a music theory course, am I college-ready? And if so, why isn't any instrument in place to mark me college ready? And if not, then why not? Because it would seem that a student is only college ready if she scores well on a math and ELA test, but lots of people go on to college for other things. Is a brilliant young musician or scientist or historian or welder who can't pass a Big Standardized Math test not ready for college, even if they won't take a single math class once they get there?

And really-- which college? Because I'm pretty sure that college ready for the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople looks a great deal different from college ready for Harvard. For that matter, I'm pretty sure that college ready for Harvard looks a lot different from college ready for the Tulsa Welding School.

The whole complex of questions is further confused by frequent conflation of "college ready," "on grade level," and "scoring proficient." These three ideas are often discussed as if they are interchangeable, but they are not.

We're also ignoring all the non-academic issues. Every year, students slink home from college carrying failing grades that are not the result of any academic, intellectual, or skill issues, but instead resulting from a failure to master their own Hey I'm At College independence. There is no standardized test for self-discipline and responsibility.

We especially have no clue what college readiness looks like on the elementary level. You can see where we're headed-- we'll find a correlation between third grade reading scores and college success, but we'll call it causation rather than look for the common cause of both (spoiler alert: it's wealth).

We'll continue to pretend that out of the hundreds of factors that prepare a student for college, the only one that counts is the test score. There are a hundred things to check before you go skydiving, but the reformster way is to say, "Well, you've got a handle thing to pull and shoes on your feet, so everything's great" without ever checking to see if there's even a parachute on your back before they shove you out of the plane.

In fact, we have no clear, complete, scientifically supported picture of what a college ready student looks like, nor any proven way to measure the complex of qualities (that we still can't name and quantify). Standardized test scores are not a proxy, not even a bad one. "Sorry, honey. I couldn't find any ingredients to make you a birthday cake, so I pan fried some pillow stuffing in some engine oil, instead."

Colleges, who have more incentive than anyone to figure out the magic secret of what college ready looks like, still have only moderate success. After all-- all those not-ready students who supposedly need super-remediation?-- the college accepted those students in the first place! Every student who flunks out is a student that the college accepted in the first place! How can that be? Don't we know exactly how to tell that a student is ready for college??

The answer, of course, is no, no, we don't. So instead we demand that teachers coach students to run faster, even though we can't find the track and aren't sure exactly where the finish line is. But run faster anyway. And we'll check how well your shoes are tied regularly, because that's how we'll know whether you're on track to win or not.

Yes, at the root of Common Core and all this other reforminess is a quality we can't identify and don't know how to measure. Is it any wonder that the mansion built on this foundation of dust bunnies and dreams is not safe to live in.

Am I Ready for Hillary?

So now it has officially begun, again. Hillary Rodham Clinton is running for President. Let the questions begin. But the questions I'm interested in are not the stupid ones (Was she behind a nazi commie plot to blow up Benghazi?) or the horse racey ones (Will Hillary become inauthentic in a more authentic way?) Clinton, for a variety of reasons, receives a lot of stupid animosity for a lot of stupid reasons, and there are chapters of her career that could stand to see a little sunlight. I am not interested in any of that.

My question is, will she be good for public education?

I think we can all agree at this point that it's no longer possible to assume that anybody running under the Democrat standard is a supporter of public schools. Andrew Cuomo and the Obama administration have painfully proven that sad current reality. So it would be useful to know what kind of Democrat Clinton II proposes to be.

There's not much of a record to search through. Clinton's track record hasn't brought her into education issues very often. But there is one huge honking squealing flashing siren wrapped in a fluorescent red flag atop a high-powered blinking crimson light.

It's the Center for American Progress.

CAP bills itself as a progressive thinky tank, but it could also be called a holding tank for Clintonian administration members-in-waiting. Among the folks already attached to the HRC are John Podesta, who rose through a career of political aiding to become Chief of Staff for the second Clinton term. After that he formed CAP and  has run it since. Podesta protege Jennifer Palmieri has also bounced between government jobs and CAP. They are both major players in the HRC campaign.

CAP has hosted many folks related to the campaign, including Clinton herself.  In fact, if you start looking through Clinton's various appearances intended to help stave off controversy, they often turn out to be at CAP. When close Clinton advisor Huma Abedin came under fire, CAP CEO Neera Tanden was one of her staunch defenders.

CAP does an excellent job of hoovering up contributions from wealthy money-wielding folks, and it's a measure of CAP's closeness to Clinton that this money shoveling is seen in some quarters as a means of getting access to what may be the next DC administration.

All in all, it does not seem like a huge leap to think that CAP's positions on education could hew closely to the Clinton II positions. And that takes us back to the sirens and flags and blinkers.

I've looked at some CAP stuff over the past year. Here's some of what we've turned up.

CAP offered a "paper" (because that's what thinky tanks do) providing a roadmap to implementing Common Core. The paper pushes high stakes testing, test-based accountability, computer-based testing, aligned curriculum, VAM, and the fantasy that the new tests will be test-prep free.

When Senator Alexander floated his first ESEA rewrite, CAP was there to call it a failure, primarily because it didn't love high stakes testing enough. Minorities and students with disabilities need the opportunity to take many tests, because that's how they'll achieve more. Also, parents need the feedback in order to know what the kids are doing, and also to make selections from the various school choices available. Any bad idea you've ever hated in the Obama/Duncan administration, CAP has been praising right along.

CAP is not above floating new talking points with a whacky disregard for reality, including a bizarre article that tried to argue that CCSS really helps the female girls, even though the data it cited doesn't support the claims they made. CAP also occasionally turns to TNTP for research back-up, which is like hiring Daffy Duck to work on your dignity and etiquette practice for the Royal Ball.

And CAP was sloppy enough to illustrate an article about how teachers now stick around for more years by slapping up a picture of a TFA teacher who quit after two years to get a corporate job. Fun fact: after being called on it by bloggers near and far, they've left the picture on the article.

In short, there is no reason yet to think that Clinton would change a single, solitary piece of Obama/Duncan education policy. Heck, maybe she could just keep Arne around for another four years. He already knows where the office is, already has furniture he likes.

If Hillary wants my support (and while I may be representative of nobody but myself, maybe there are a few other teachers who are kind of tired of the current administration ed policies-- just two or three of us), then she had better explain exactly what she's going to do differently. I could also say we'd like to know who we're going to get for USED secretary, but hey, we thought we knew last time that we were getting Linda Darling-Hammond and look how that turned out.

But I can tell you this. I have never been a single-issue voter, but my profession has never been so attacked, besieged and crushed under policymakers' boots. So I will not, not under any circumstances, vote for any candidate who gives me the slightest inkling that she (or he) is planning to give me four more years like the last fifteen. I don't care if you're promising me a pony and your opponent is threatening to send locusts to my home town-- if you aren't going to change the destructive, educationally abusive, mandatory malpractice policies of the previous two administrations, I will not vote for you, period, full stop.

That is what I'm ready for.

NY: How Charters Game the System

Democracy Builders is a New York group whose goal is "to increase quality public school choice by recruiting, engaging and activating authentic parent voices." Their big motto is "Choice + Voice" and they are also the group that confirms several of my expectations about the charter sector.

1) As competition increases in hot charter markets, and charters have to compete with each other and not just the public system, the knives will come out.

2) People who want to run charters the right way for the right reasons will eventually become openly upset with the profiteers who have invaded the charter biz.

Democracy Builders chief Princess Lyles and Dan Clark wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal back in February calling out the practice of not back-filling seats. Their position is the position that would, to me, make sense if you were a charter operator who really believed that you had something valuable to offer-- "One seat left open is one seat to many" and every "precious seat" that opens up in a charter should be filled immediately.

Refusing to backfill seats works two ways. It can mean leaving a seat open if a student leaves during the year, but it can also mean refusing to fill an empty seat in a cohort-- if you don't get on the charter bus in grade three, then you can never get on it.

Democracy Builders has collected the data and make the charts to show how these practices let charters fake success. (Note: I couldn't get these to display properly on anything except a tablet).

The principle is simple-- as you push more and more students out the door, the number of proficient individuals you need to get your percentage up decreases. So, for instance, KIPP New York tested  around 88 third graders, 41 of whom were proficient. By eighth grade, KIPP is testing 61 students, of whom 45 are proficient. That's a growth of 47% up to 74%-- based on only four more students testing well.

Democracy Builders' independent charter category shows schools that are trying to keep seats filled and are paying the price for it in their numbers. Achievement First seems to do a better job of keeping empty seats filled.

But per the data here, the absolute queen of using empty seats to make herself look good is (surprise) Eva Moskowitz. Success Academy posts awesome numbers by percent, growing from 91% proficiency in third grade and growing to whopping 97% in eighth grade. But in raw numbers, that represents an astonishing drop from an average number of students who were actually proficient-- 88 in third grade and 31 in eighth grade. The grades in between show an steady and consistent drop. No other NY charter has enrollment that simply drops off a cliff like SA.

Lyles point is pretty clear. If charters want to call themselves public schools, they can start by following a basic rule of public schools and take in every student who shows up at their doors.

Why don't they? Because they don't want to hurt their numbers, because for charter profiteers students exist only to generate the kinds of numbers that keep the dollars flowing.

The interactive charts are rich and deep and well worth your time and examination. They are also an excellent reminder that public schools are not the only system suffering under the test-and-punish theory of education. The charter system, which really could be a rich and worthwhile addition to the public education scene, is also completely bent out of shape by an accountability system that holds schools accountable for all the wrong things and none of the right things.

Look. Success Academy is a charter system that should be closed down for fraud. It is a system based on doing absolutely everything wrong, from oppressive rules to manic focus on test scores instead of actual education, on top of pushing students out the door if they won't toe the line and help the shcool make the numbers that is uses to keep the money flowing.

But under our completely upside down and inside out accountability system, Success Academies look good. And they don't just suck the money and resources out of the public school system-- they make it that much less likely that a decent and worthwhile charter school could spring up in New York.

Go look at this data-- keeping in mind that it was all put together by charter school advocates, not opponents-- and let it sink in just how screwed up the system has become, to the point that the only path to "success" is to lie, cook books, and abandon the true mission of public education.

Arne's New History of CCSS on MSNBC

Arne Duncan sat down with Chris Hayes on MSNBC to explain why folks are just so all-fired fire-up about Common Core. Let's see what the current story is.

Hayes starts by saying that CCSS has trouble because it has been conflated with high stakes testing which was linked to all sorts of stuff because of NCLB. This skips past the Obama/Duncan administration's role in bolting high stakes testing to everything from school evaluation to teacher evaluation, but okay. We're only seven seconds in.

Hayes leads with a fun question-- what, if anything, has been achieved in the years since NCLB was signed by Bush?

Duncan: Fixing achievement gaps is the big achievement, but NCLB "has been broken for a while" (which raises the question-- was it ever not broken) and Congress also sucks. So the administration "partnered with states" to provide waivers which allowed them to part ways with the most onerous parts of the law. Which begs a huge question-- outside of the absurd 100% above average test scores requirement, was there any part of NCLB that wasn't given a huge shot of steroids under waivers? Sadly, Hayes is not going to ask that question.

Hayes: My reading of the data (and one of the problems is that there's so much data you can read anything) is that the testing gap (and I love him just a little for calling it a testing gap and not an achievement gap) hasn't really narrowed at all, "certainly not the narrowing that we were promised back in 2001."

Duncan: We have a long way to go. (Which is true in the same way that I have a long way to go to get to Chicago because I'm still sitting in my office at home.) Anyway, we've seen gains over the past twenty-thirty years, but it's not fast enough. So this law has to be about equity. So put politics aside (says the guy who's got no political juice left in his thermos). This law also has to be about early childhood education, because that will level the playing field. Also, we have to bring more dollars to disadvantaged communities. The children who need the most get the least, says the man whose administration likes to frame all aid and grant proposals as competitions. But he thinks maybe Congress can fix inequity.

Hayes: I want to talk about Common Core for a second. (And he smiles a little smile, like "let's do this silly thing, I'm going to ask a question, you're going to sling baloney, it'll be fun"). Are you surprised by how controversial Common Core (which he characterizes as "kind of an obscure issue in certain ways") has become?

Duncan: "It's actually very simple. The goal's to have high standards." So, kids, the whole national consistency issue, the whole being able to compare kids in Idaho and Maine, the whole keeping everyone on the same page so mobile students will never get lost-- that's no longer the point.

Duncan goes on to display how much he doesn't understand about how this works. He talks about how, under NCLB, too many states dummied down standards. He says this was "to make politicians look good." I'd be more inclined to say "to avoid punitive consequences for their schools." If Arne had reached my conclusion (and really, given that he was in charge of a large school district at the time, it's kind of amazing that he didn't reach my conclusion) then perhaps he wouldn't have figured that the solution was to make the consequences of high stakes testing even more punitive than before.

Insert story here of how schools lied to students about how ready they were for college. So brave governors decided to stop lying to children. "Let's have true college and career ready standards for every single child." As always I wonder why reaching that conclusion leads to a next step where one says, "Let's hire a couple of guys who have no real education experience, either pedagogical or developmental, and have them whip something up."

Hayes: When you say it like that, it sounds swell. But instead this is very polarizing. Arne looks dumbfounded like "I know, right, dude? What is up with these crazy people?" and Hayes continues to point out that Jeb Bush is going to have to spend a bunch of time in Iowa confronting people (unless his huge ad buy actually helps and....nahh).

Duncan: It's only polarizing to politicians. If you talk to parents, to real parents--

And Hayes cuts him off to say "I disagree. I strongly disagree" which is an appropriate response to Arne's deep-fried fluffernuttery. It's ironic. Duncan is all "let's keep politics out of this" and yet the whole "this is polticians raising a stink and real parents just love it" is, of course, pure political spin.

Duncan soldiers on. If you ask parents if they want their children to really be college and career ready, do you want them to be able to write well, think critically, have a real chance at life, parents think that's just swell.

Hayes: That's right. But if you go in and say Common Core-- and he cuts to specific examples all across the country of kids coming home with dumb crap or taking a terrible test and the source of their kid's anxiety is Common Core. Common Core has become the name for all testing related stress.

And I'm going to interrupt to say, yes, that's right, because at this point "Common Core" is a deeply meaningless term. Duncan's point is also deeply dumb, because it assumes the sale. Sure parents want all those things-- but there is not an iota of evidence that Common Core is linked to any of them.

Look. If I say right now that I'm hungry and ready for supper, and you bring me out a plate of steaming hot liver covered in peppermint ice cream and pickles, when I say "Get this out of here," you would be an idiot to be puzzled and ask, "But I thought you wanted supper." Common Core is steaming hot liver covered in peppermint ice cream and pickles, with sauerkraut on the side.

Anyway.

Duncan: People are just confused and misinformed. The higher standards are different degrees of higherness in different places. We need to communicate with parents and students-- which is just a great insight to have five years into this mess. I suppose it's an improvement that he didn't just call white suburban moms big babies. Again.

Now he's going to trot out Tennessee as an example-- he looks really excited, like he just thought of the correct answer for a tough test-- which is brave given the mess that Tennessee has become, including the slinking away of reformster Kevin Huffman last fall. But the state was brave enough to tell their students that they all sucked, and now they are rapidly improving by some measure that we're not going to discuss.

Hayes: Softball round. Here's the Ted Cruz quote about repealing every word of Common Core and get the feds out of curriculum. Ted is of course wrong twice-- Common Core isn't in any federal law and it's already illegal for the feds to mess with curriculum. Let's see if Arne can handle this high lob.

And he gets it. And he looks so happy. Duncan always looks so pleased and surprised when he really nails something.

In the next over-talking portion, Arne says that we never claimed that the standards were universal. Which is...wellllll. It's true the administration has been pretty careful about not saying things that could be construed as, say, illegal federal directing of state education. But if you look at, say, Duncan's 2010 speech about the Big Vision, there's an awful lot of talk about how this will bring the whole nation up to equal excellence and scary stuff like this:

The North Star guiding the alignment of our cradle-to-career education agenda is President Obama’s goal that America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.
That goal can only be achieved by creating a strong cradle-to-career continuum that starts with early childhood learning and extends all the way to college and careers.

This would probably be the time to note that the original draft of Race to the Top allegedly mentions CCSS by name. [Can't find a link-- if you've got it, leave it in the comments.]

Duncan plows on. States should do their own thing, but their universities should be saying that freshmen don't need remedial classes, which-- you do remember that CCSS only covers math and language, right, Arne?

Hayes: There is a question of who makes those standards. The fear is "that some nefarious actor somewhere..." and he doesn't really need to finish the sentence because "nefarious actor" sufficiently conveys that some critics be crazy.

Duncan: Nobody nefarious here. This has been led on the local level by governors from both parties (in some cases, "led" so much that they signed up for the standards before they were completed). This has also been led by educators, fantastic teachers-- and I'll give him a pass on what exactly "led" means in this context because I just know he's not silly enough to trot out the old canard about teachers helping to create the Core.

Hayes: Finally, a higher ed question. The for-profit Corinthian chain comes up, and that is not Arne's happy face. Corinthian, disaster, and federal government all make it into the same sentence, but Hayes fumbles this one, saying that the chain was essentially cut off from federal loans, and no, not so much. The feds were remarkably reluctant to kick Corinthian off the federal teat. Either way, there are now students with lots of debt and not so much education. Nine attorney generals are calling for the USED to forgive the loans. Are you going to do that?

Duncan: We're looking at this very closely. Duncan takes credit for the gainful employment measure and Hayes interrupts to call it one of the best things this department has ever done. Anyway, Duncan is watching the hell out of this, and even talked to some of the students.

Hayes: That's a non-answer (I love Hayes a little bit more).

Duncan tries to rally by adding a very (We are looking at this very very closely) and how it's about bad actors (cousins to the nefarious actors) who were allowed to just do whatever, which is swell, but does not address why the USED, which is already making obscene amounts of profit from student loans, can't just tear these loans up. But, boy, he's not going to tolerate any more of this bad acting, even though the department has been tolerating the heck out of it for over a year. There's no excuse at all for this weaselly response unless he's just afraid to say out loud that the department is deeply committed to looking out for the interests of the investors in Corinthian, which might be reflected by the association of Undersecretary of Education Ted Mitchell, whose qualifications for his job were his long history in the for-profit school industry. Duncan finishes with some noise about how he's not afraid of political pushback on the thing that he might do some day after he's done looking very very closely at the situation.

And we're done.

Kudos to Chris Hayes for pressing Duncan a tad harder than anybody else at MSNBC is ever inclined to, thereby adding to our gallery of ever-changing Common Core narratives. But this was still largely a baloney-delivering conduit for Arne, who should be limited to only so many stretchers per tv appearance, and he was once again over his limit.

Poor People Don't Have Money

Poor people don't have money, and that's a problem for the free market. That's a problem, because, well-- don't think of money as a way to buy stuff. Think of money as a way to attract people's attention so they will come give you things or do things for you.

For people with money, the dance is a simple pas de deux between the person with the money and the person with the goods or service. "I see you have money. Let me convince you to give it to me," says the person with the goods. "Make it worth my while to give you my money," says the person with the money.

It can be a complicated dance at times, but it's relatively straightforward. But the four-cornered dance of the poor is different.

"Make it worth my while to provide this for you," says the person with the goods.

"I can't," says the poor person.

At this point the dance could be over, but in some cases, the government steps in. "To have a smoothly functioning country," says government, "we need to make sure everyone has access to this service." Like food, healthcare, clean water, mail delivery, roads, a standing army.

Sometimes government and corporations do a dance of their own. "I'm going to take the people over here, the ones with money, the ones who can make this worth my while," says the corporation. "You can keep those people over there. The poor ones. The ones we can't make money from." Our mail delivery right now is very much this model. UPS and FedEx and the rest only sort of compete with the United States Postal Service. In fact, when you hire one of the non-USPS companies to deliver a package to East Bumswoggle, Nowherevania, a place so far out that nobody wants to drive on over in search of tiny money, you know who actually delivers it? The USPS, working as a subcontractor for the private corporation. (Fun fact: the USPS has financial problems largely from a Congressional requirement that they pre-fund the retirement of people who don't even work there yet.)


Imagine that a free maket economy consists of taxis, passengers and a government. Passengers attract taxis by standing curbside, waving piles of money. But poor people don't have anything to wave. So the government, either out of altruistic reasons or because they want to get all those poor people off the curb, gets their own batch of taxis to carry the poor home.

Eventually, corporations notice that the government taxis are carrying around big piles of money of their own. And TaxiCorp HQ, somebody says, "That big pile of money has attracted my attention. I wonder how we can get them to give it to us."

Money's a funny thing. When you have a bunch of it, people see you. They acknowledge you. They want to make you happy. But remember-- poor people don't have money. The government has the money.

So the people with the goods and services enter the dance-- but they don't come to dance with the poor folks. They come to dance with the government. This dance can take many forms. (We can make it worth your while to let us do that for you. We can do that better than you.) Or they can bring a fourth party into the dance-- the taxpayers whose money the government collects to pay for things. Look at what those guys are spending your money on! It's wasteful! Go give them hell!

Now there's a weird variation of the dance, because the corporations can mostly only sense money, and poor people don't have any. The machinery needs a way to detect this new kind of resource, a resource that has no money, but which attracts the government's money. If only there were something, some instrument that would both detect the "customers" ripe for plucking and which simultaneously helped make the case that the government needs help.

Voila. Big Standardized Tests.

BS Tests fulfill the function of identifying the market opportunity. BS Test scores tell edupreneurs when a school is ripe for takeover, turnaround, or charter replacement. That is why someone like Merryl Tisch can say, "Never mind testing the high score schools." Because those schools are filled with people who have money, and corporations can find them just fine, thank you.

When people claim that BS Tests make the poor visible, that's true. But they're visible like the people who moved were visible to T Rex in the first Jurassic Park. The poor do not have money. They are not the customers. They do not have leverage. And corporations and government are back to the same old dance. "We'll take those customers, the ones over there, the ones we can make a profit with," say the corporations. "You keep the rest."

When you're trying to make sense of some of the privatizing reformy nonsense loose in the world, just remember this-- poor people don't have money. To get rich, nobody needs to make them happy. You need only pay attention to the people who have money, and that's the government, and those guys are already dancing happily with the corporations like a couple that's had a lot to drink and has already rented a room for the night.

There are many, many well-meaning people who have the best interests of poor people at heart, but to the kinds of economic systems and engines that have been set loose, the poor do not matter-- they are at best tools to be used to move money around, but they have no money. A free market system can move around them and over them, but it can't really respond to them unless they find a way to make it worth someone's while. But they have no money, and at the free market ball, that's the only way to pay the dj.