Many folks think that charters are a super duper idea. But as I talk to many of these folks, I discover that their love of charters is based on a belief that charter schools are just like traditional public schools with just a whole extra layer of awesome piled on top. Like. Pony, only with a really nice saddle blanket and bows in its hair and maybe a party hat, too. What they don't realize is that in order to get the blanket and the bows, somebody decided to sell some of the pony's mane and some of its internal organs. In fact, some charter operators figured that the blanket would fit better if we replaced the pony with a large dog, or maybe an ungreased pig.
The public assumes that the pony is still there under the charter blanket, assuming that charters do certain things because of course that's what schools do. But you know what happens when you assume-- you make a bunch of charter operators rich.
The Unopen Door
Folks assume that, since charters repeatedly and loudly call themselves public schools, they must do what all public schools do-- accept any student who shows up at the door. You remember that place, the place that, when you go there, they have to take you in? In America that's home, but it's also public school.
Charters are more selective. From the day they aim marketing at Certain Types of Students, to the day that they deliver certain subtle messages (now that we've suspended you for the twelfth time, do you still want to stay here?) or not-so-subtle messages (you don't really fit our school culture), charters push and pull their way to the kind of student body that they want.
Accountability
Charters have fought hard to keep secret their books, their inner workings, their salaries, and whatever bother dark hole they pour their money down. Eva Moskowitz famously took the state of New York to court to keep its grubby eyeballs off her charter chain's financial records. Some charter champions will argue vigorously that the money belongs to the students, and then to the charter, and so the taxpayers and their representatives have no business asking what rock the Benjamin are now stashed under.
It's really quite extraordinary-- try to think of any other enterprise in which taxpayers or their duly-elected representatives are not allowed to inquire what became of their tax dollars.
Real Teachers
If you walk into a hospital, you assume that you are meeting doctors and nurses who are professionally trained and officially certified. When you walk into a school, you assume that it is filled with teachers who are professionally trained and officially certified. A building that is not filled with teachers is not a school.
It's true that sometimes public schools fail in this area, but the absence of a certified teacher in a classroom is usually cause for surprise, underlining the usual expectation.
Taking Care of the Kids
Parents and the public assume that there are certain universal standards for how children can be treated in school. There are rules, folks think, that nobody can break. Yet many charters feel free to impose whatever sorts of discipline and punishment they wish.
Getting Rich
People think of schools as places of public service. Teachers learn this again every time they have to negotiate a contract, and the public lets them know that people expect teachers to do the work out of a sense of nobility and altruism. Folks would consider it shocking to offer teachers hugely lucrative contracts paid with tax dollars. Many charters add onto that idea by calling themselves "non-profit." But many, many, many folks in the charter biz are getting rich. Not that any charter operator is going to look a parent in the eye and say, "Don't forget-- every dollar I spend educating your kid is one less dollar I can put in my pocket."
Long Term Commitment
Public schools also carry an expectation of stability, history, long-term commitment. Schools anchor their communities in the same way that parks and public figures and buildings that have been on that corner there for half of forever. Public schools may close, but when they do it is a public, agonizing, contentious, gut-wrenching thing precisely because people have the expectation that Their School will always be there.
That stability covers what's inside the walls as well. Because it's the teachers that make it a school, people expect Their Teachers to be there a while, and the turnover from year to year is expected to be tiny. Certainly nobody expects to hear that Mr. McTeachalot was fired because he was too expensive, or stuck up for the wrong kid.
Every single story of some charter that goes belly up or whose operator shuffles off in the dark of night is accompanied by astonished parents uttering some version of, "They can't just do that. They're a school!" Public schools commit to stay open as long as they can serve the interests of the community, but charters commit to serving students for as long as it serves the interests of the charter operators. Even if they sign a contract, they may ask to be released sooner if things just aren't working out.
Parents assume that they are enrolling their child in a school for the length of the child's school career. Charters assume no such thing.
Un-Assuming
Charter marketers take advantage of the fact that when a parent hears the word "school," she makes certain assumptions about what will happen in that building. But the whole idea behind charters is that they can be free to throw the public school rulebook out the window. Hire and fire whoever for whatever reason. Impose whatever rules suit the operators.
Many of the pages of that school rulebook deserve discussion and consideration. It would not hurt us as a culture to have a conversation about what we think "school" should be, in part because charter operators find it advantageous to let their customer base assume that the charter meets the expectations for a school. So that's not a conversation we're having. Instead, charters become their own worst enemies every time they move someone to say, "Can they really do that? How can they do that??"
Tuesday, May 5, 2015
Monday, May 4, 2015
Brown: A Reason To Believe
I'm trying not to turn the blog into a linkfest, but I have to pass on one more.
The recent Network for Public Education conference in Chicago started off with a powerful keynote. The leadoff was Tanaisa Brown, one of the leaders of the Newark Students Union, the kind of student that every teacher wants to work with. It was amazing to watch that group stand up for public schools in Newark, and it was exciting to see her up in front of the NPE.
She was followed by Jitu Brown who talked about a reason to fight and a reason to believe. It's a powerful reminder of what, exactly, the fight for public education is about.
The recent Network for Public Education conference in Chicago started off with a powerful keynote. The leadoff was Tanaisa Brown, one of the leaders of the Newark Students Union, the kind of student that every teacher wants to work with. It was amazing to watch that group stand up for public schools in Newark, and it was exciting to see her up in front of the NPE.
She was followed by Jitu Brown who talked about a reason to fight and a reason to believe. It's a powerful reminder of what, exactly, the fight for public education is about.
Tanaisa Brown and Jitu Brown from Schoolhouse Live on Vimeo.
John Oliver on Testing
I realize many folks are going to suggest that you watch this, but I'm not sure the suggestion can be made too often. Here's the testing industry in the mainstream media. One more great item to share with your non-education-following friends so they can see just how bad it is and why we're bothered.
Do Charters Create Pressure for Excellence
Charles Sahm and I have been in as low motion conversation about charters. After the New York Times ran a less-than-inspiring portrayal of Eva Moskowitz and Success Academy, Sahm replied with his own look at the charters to explain their success (such as it is). I suggested that he might have missed a few parts of the explanation. He offered some further observations via the internets, and I set them aside for thought-- well, the reason that our conversation is slow motion is because despite the amount of writing I do, I usually have a stack of things I want to respond to, and I'm usually behind.
I've raised one question several times in the last month-- if charters are supposed to be the laboratories of education, where is our scholastic hoverboard? After so many years of charter experimentation, where are the educational breakthroughs that are supposed to be revolutionizing the rest of us?
Sahm's response is one that is popular in choice circles. Charters are creating new choices, new ideas about what is possible, and most of all, a "sense of urgency" among public schools to be more responsive to the public.
Sahm is at the Manhattan Institute, a NYC thinky tank promoting conservative policy ideas, so he's a New York guy. I have an old friend who works within the NYC school system, and I'm not unsympathetic to the notion that any institution that is so huge, sprawling, mammoth and, well, institutional can come to seem rather unresponsive to its customer base. But is making the various little cilia of the beast compete for food and air healthy?
Regular readers know my answer: the free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing.
Sahm gave me a specific example-- many parents were choosing charters because charters kept their kids till 5:00 or 6:00 (presumably parents valued either extra instructional hours or not having their kids home alone in the late afternoon). Seeing that, some public schools began offering the longer day.
That seems like an okay thing. But my first question is-- what did the public school cut to do that?
See, here's one way in which the "free market" works differently for public vs charter schools. When a charter school sells more seats, it takes in more money. But the best a public school can hope to do is not lose money. A charter school, like any business, can make a costs-benefits analysis of its marketing- spending $10K to bring in an additional $100K is a win. But a public school will never bring in "additional" revenue, so any money spent on marketing is always 100% loss to the operating budget. Spending $10K so that charters siphon off only $100K is still a net loss of $110K. Money spent on fliers and advertising is money not spent on students and education.
So if a public school is spending money on marketing, either by buying ad space or changing programs, it has cut that money from something else.
That's not necessarily the end of the world, but it does mean that a public school has to be thoughtful about getting the best value for its money. And that means resisting the push to market in dumb ways.
K12 had an ad campaign in Pennsylvania (paid for with taxpayer money) with a simple message: put your kid in cyber school so that education doesn't have to interfere with his sports. They also had a campaign based on the selling point that their school would make the student happy. While neither of these are awful, toxic marketing approaches, they don't exactly work as anchors for the unrelenting pursuit of excellence.
Competition often turns into competing on the wrong things. NYC has charters that promise great test scores (check out Moskowitz from six years ago)-- but so what? Test scores get you what in life? High test scores do not equal educational excellence. But they are easy to use in marketing.
We can start to see how marketing affects education by looking at colleges and how they are marketed. Some colleges market themselves by being excellent. Many colleges market themselves by being excellent at only one thing (and sometimes it's a sport, not an academic area). Others market themselves by being mediocre but cheap. Some market themselves by being great places to spend four years drinking beer. And some for-profit schools marketed themselves by just lying through their teeth.
Now imagine two more things. Imagine that we required every single person to go to college-- whether they wanted to or not-- and that we had to build a system with full-nation capacity. And that we had to build it at taxpayer expense.
We would have a rush to marketing, but the pressure to achieve excellence would die a sad, lonely death.
Here's a thing that free-market competition fans often forget-- democracy allows us to harness all the power of the free market at a fraction of the cost. If a huge part of the community wants a school that offers basket-weaving class and grilled lizard for lunch, they round up some candidates, elect them to the school board, and get the baskets and lizards under way. Granted, having a ginormous district like NYC blunts the power of democracy considerably. But turning the power of the "free market" loose on education just wastes a ton of taxpayer money and doesn't particularly improve schools (Insert much-repeated CREDO director quote here).
All of this would be an academic exercise if charters were not sucking the life blood out of public schools. But in my neck of the woods, trying to "compete" with the cyber-charters would require an additional expense at a time when we taking cuts of millions of dollars each year. Part of that is PA's monumental pension fiasco, but a huge part of those yearly budget cuts are the result of tax dollars diverted to charters. In my county, almost half of the elementary schools have been closed because districts just don't have the money. The taxpayers thought they were paying for community schools, but instead they are paying so a handful of families can cyber-school their kids. Schools are not so much worrying about how to create new programs as they are debating which existing programs can still be maintained.
This is not pressure to be excellent. This is taking half of my kids' lunch and saying, "Now you're under pressure to eat more efficiently and creatively."
I've raised one question several times in the last month-- if charters are supposed to be the laboratories of education, where is our scholastic hoverboard? After so many years of charter experimentation, where are the educational breakthroughs that are supposed to be revolutionizing the rest of us?
Sahm's response is one that is popular in choice circles. Charters are creating new choices, new ideas about what is possible, and most of all, a "sense of urgency" among public schools to be more responsive to the public.
Sahm is at the Manhattan Institute, a NYC thinky tank promoting conservative policy ideas, so he's a New York guy. I have an old friend who works within the NYC school system, and I'm not unsympathetic to the notion that any institution that is so huge, sprawling, mammoth and, well, institutional can come to seem rather unresponsive to its customer base. But is making the various little cilia of the beast compete for food and air healthy?
Regular readers know my answer: the free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing.
Sahm gave me a specific example-- many parents were choosing charters because charters kept their kids till 5:00 or 6:00 (presumably parents valued either extra instructional hours or not having their kids home alone in the late afternoon). Seeing that, some public schools began offering the longer day.
That seems like an okay thing. But my first question is-- what did the public school cut to do that?
See, here's one way in which the "free market" works differently for public vs charter schools. When a charter school sells more seats, it takes in more money. But the best a public school can hope to do is not lose money. A charter school, like any business, can make a costs-benefits analysis of its marketing- spending $10K to bring in an additional $100K is a win. But a public school will never bring in "additional" revenue, so any money spent on marketing is always 100% loss to the operating budget. Spending $10K so that charters siphon off only $100K is still a net loss of $110K. Money spent on fliers and advertising is money not spent on students and education.
So if a public school is spending money on marketing, either by buying ad space or changing programs, it has cut that money from something else.
That's not necessarily the end of the world, but it does mean that a public school has to be thoughtful about getting the best value for its money. And that means resisting the push to market in dumb ways.
K12 had an ad campaign in Pennsylvania (paid for with taxpayer money) with a simple message: put your kid in cyber school so that education doesn't have to interfere with his sports. They also had a campaign based on the selling point that their school would make the student happy. While neither of these are awful, toxic marketing approaches, they don't exactly work as anchors for the unrelenting pursuit of excellence.
Competition often turns into competing on the wrong things. NYC has charters that promise great test scores (check out Moskowitz from six years ago)-- but so what? Test scores get you what in life? High test scores do not equal educational excellence. But they are easy to use in marketing.
We can start to see how marketing affects education by looking at colleges and how they are marketed. Some colleges market themselves by being excellent. Many colleges market themselves by being excellent at only one thing (and sometimes it's a sport, not an academic area). Others market themselves by being mediocre but cheap. Some market themselves by being great places to spend four years drinking beer. And some for-profit schools marketed themselves by just lying through their teeth.
Now imagine two more things. Imagine that we required every single person to go to college-- whether they wanted to or not-- and that we had to build a system with full-nation capacity. And that we had to build it at taxpayer expense.
We would have a rush to marketing, but the pressure to achieve excellence would die a sad, lonely death.
Here's a thing that free-market competition fans often forget-- democracy allows us to harness all the power of the free market at a fraction of the cost. If a huge part of the community wants a school that offers basket-weaving class and grilled lizard for lunch, they round up some candidates, elect them to the school board, and get the baskets and lizards under way. Granted, having a ginormous district like NYC blunts the power of democracy considerably. But turning the power of the "free market" loose on education just wastes a ton of taxpayer money and doesn't particularly improve schools (Insert much-repeated CREDO director quote here).
All of this would be an academic exercise if charters were not sucking the life blood out of public schools. But in my neck of the woods, trying to "compete" with the cyber-charters would require an additional expense at a time when we taking cuts of millions of dollars each year. Part of that is PA's monumental pension fiasco, but a huge part of those yearly budget cuts are the result of tax dollars diverted to charters. In my county, almost half of the elementary schools have been closed because districts just don't have the money. The taxpayers thought they were paying for community schools, but instead they are paying so a handful of families can cyber-school their kids. Schools are not so much worrying about how to create new programs as they are debating which existing programs can still be maintained.
This is not pressure to be excellent. This is taking half of my kids' lunch and saying, "Now you're under pressure to eat more efficiently and creatively."
Sunday, May 3, 2015
TFA 5.0: Charters for Children
We have discussed the evolution of Teach for America before. Its ever-changing business plan mission has been a work in progress through several iterations:
TFA 1.0: The Best and the Brightest will help solve the teacher shortage, kind of like the Peace Corps.
TFA 2.0: Take a year or two off before grad school to beef up your resume with some non-court-ordered community service.
TFA 3.0: Traditional public school teachers pretty much suck. We are smarter and better.
TFA 4.0: We are here to bring diversity to the teaching force.
Teach for America has been having trouble with recruiting, though in all fairness, the entire teaching profession has been having trouble recruiting. It's almost as if young folks had heard nothing but how rotten the profession is, or had grown up seeing teachers reduced to automatons. Go figure.
But here comes a new pitch, a video and slogan that might signal TFA 5.0. The slogan "One Day, All Children" is a throwback to TFA founder Wendy Kopp's book by the same name (published, believe it or not, way back in 2001). The pitch-- well, the pitch will sound familiar.
"America's educational system should provide all children with opportunity," the clip begins. "Opportunity to succeed, to thrive." But the voice-over lady goes on to tell us that depending on where a child is born, these opportunities may not exist. Because of race and poverty, a child may be subject to the tyranny of a zip code. The dream falls through "the cracks in an unfair system. For too many children, their zip code becomes their destiny."
At this point we are watching a little animation child plummet through empty space-- but here comes the logo of Teach for America to rescue the child, to lift it up (as the music shifts into a more hopeful major key).
TFA has seen too much progress to believe that your education has to be determined by where you live. TFA mission (this month) is to make sure "that every child has access to the same opportunities and choices."
TFA recruits from a group of "diverse thinkers and leaders" (so, you know, none of those sucky regular teacher types) from all backgrounds (not in the script, but a graphic saying 50% of TFA recruits identify as people of color). TFA shows them how to teach and supports them (here three adult stick figures gather around the child-- first they fill up with color, then so does the child, and then the child grows up and puts on a cap and gown while the teachers stance proudly, though of course TFA temps would mostly never be around by the time a small child graduated from high school).
Now, here comes a cool new way to parse the temp part of TFA--
They understand that their schools are part of a larger system, "so after two years, our teachers have a choice." They can stay in education (cue weasel-statistic that counts every vaguely ed-related job as "staying in education") and "continue to have a profound impact," or they can move on to "another career path" and lead in ways that "help our kids and help our country." Those leady roles include "advocates, policymakers, innovators and entrepreneurs."
As their network grows (cue web all over the US), TFA builds a movement. New TFA factoid-- 84% of alumni are working full time in "roles impacting education or low-income communities" and boy, isn't "impacting" a nice, broad all-purpose word here. It doesn't even carry a value judgment; if you're busy chasing poor people out of a neighborhood as prelude to gentrification, you are totally impacting a low-income community. Hurray! As long as you're making a difference, right?
So back to the child (who I now see is disturbingly handless). "Good for kids. Good for everyone."
Final slogan as we shift to logo-- "Change and be changed. Teach for America."
Residual traces of old, beloved sales pitches are still visible, but we have upped our helping of For the Children and completely dropped public education from the pitch. With almost no tweaking, this could be an ad for a charter chain. It already includes many of the choice crowd's favorite pitches. Each child should have choices and opportunities (not a great community school). Each child should be freed from the tyranny of the zip code (and policymakers should be freed from the problem of trying to make that zip code less of a place one would want to escape). And, of course, this is not work you want to commit to for a lifetime; it's simply the first step in your larger career of creating a network of educationny stuff (because, you know, the US public school system is not already a network devoted to educating America's children).
TFA has never looked less like an organization interested in helping the public school system pursue its mission, and it has never pitched itself more clearly as an educational network/empire separate from US public education. And of course its central fallacy remains unaddressed-- that anybody can be a teacher, as long as she is the Right Sort of Person from the Right Sort of Background. It's unfortunate that well-meaning college grads continue to be sucked in by this snake oil. The clip is embedded below, just to keep me honest. Not sure you really need to watch it.
TFA 1.0: The Best and the Brightest will help solve the teacher shortage, kind of like the Peace Corps.
TFA 2.0: Take a year or two off before grad school to beef up your resume with some non-court-ordered community service.
TFA 3.0: Traditional public school teachers pretty much suck. We are smarter and better.
TFA 4.0: We are here to bring diversity to the teaching force.
Teach for America has been having trouble with recruiting, though in all fairness, the entire teaching profession has been having trouble recruiting. It's almost as if young folks had heard nothing but how rotten the profession is, or had grown up seeing teachers reduced to automatons. Go figure.
But here comes a new pitch, a video and slogan that might signal TFA 5.0. The slogan "One Day, All Children" is a throwback to TFA founder Wendy Kopp's book by the same name (published, believe it or not, way back in 2001). The pitch-- well, the pitch will sound familiar.
"America's educational system should provide all children with opportunity," the clip begins. "Opportunity to succeed, to thrive." But the voice-over lady goes on to tell us that depending on where a child is born, these opportunities may not exist. Because of race and poverty, a child may be subject to the tyranny of a zip code. The dream falls through "the cracks in an unfair system. For too many children, their zip code becomes their destiny."
At this point we are watching a little animation child plummet through empty space-- but here comes the logo of Teach for America to rescue the child, to lift it up (as the music shifts into a more hopeful major key).
TFA has seen too much progress to believe that your education has to be determined by where you live. TFA mission (this month) is to make sure "that every child has access to the same opportunities and choices."
TFA recruits from a group of "diverse thinkers and leaders" (so, you know, none of those sucky regular teacher types) from all backgrounds (not in the script, but a graphic saying 50% of TFA recruits identify as people of color). TFA shows them how to teach and supports them (here three adult stick figures gather around the child-- first they fill up with color, then so does the child, and then the child grows up and puts on a cap and gown while the teachers stance proudly, though of course TFA temps would mostly never be around by the time a small child graduated from high school).
Now, here comes a cool new way to parse the temp part of TFA--
They understand that their schools are part of a larger system, "so after two years, our teachers have a choice." They can stay in education (cue weasel-statistic that counts every vaguely ed-related job as "staying in education") and "continue to have a profound impact," or they can move on to "another career path" and lead in ways that "help our kids and help our country." Those leady roles include "advocates, policymakers, innovators and entrepreneurs."
As their network grows (cue web all over the US), TFA builds a movement. New TFA factoid-- 84% of alumni are working full time in "roles impacting education or low-income communities" and boy, isn't "impacting" a nice, broad all-purpose word here. It doesn't even carry a value judgment; if you're busy chasing poor people out of a neighborhood as prelude to gentrification, you are totally impacting a low-income community. Hurray! As long as you're making a difference, right?
So back to the child (who I now see is disturbingly handless). "Good for kids. Good for everyone."
Final slogan as we shift to logo-- "Change and be changed. Teach for America."
Residual traces of old, beloved sales pitches are still visible, but we have upped our helping of For the Children and completely dropped public education from the pitch. With almost no tweaking, this could be an ad for a charter chain. It already includes many of the choice crowd's favorite pitches. Each child should have choices and opportunities (not a great community school). Each child should be freed from the tyranny of the zip code (and policymakers should be freed from the problem of trying to make that zip code less of a place one would want to escape). And, of course, this is not work you want to commit to for a lifetime; it's simply the first step in your larger career of creating a network of educationny stuff (because, you know, the US public school system is not already a network devoted to educating America's children).
TFA has never looked less like an organization interested in helping the public school system pursue its mission, and it has never pitched itself more clearly as an educational network/empire separate from US public education. And of course its central fallacy remains unaddressed-- that anybody can be a teacher, as long as she is the Right Sort of Person from the Right Sort of Background. It's unfortunate that well-meaning college grads continue to be sucked in by this snake oil. The clip is embedded below, just to keep me honest. Not sure you really need to watch it.
Saturday, May 2, 2015
NY: Eval Overhaul In Scary Hands
The expert names for the New York teacher evaluation high speed overhaul panel are in, and it is, at best, a mixed bag.
* Thomas Kane, an economist from Harvard. Kane thinks that evaluation should be directly linked to the Common Core via high stakes testing; he likes to compare this to using a bathroom scale when dieting. He thinks too few NY teachers were evaluated as sucky last year, and he imagines that maybe video-based observation would be swell. And he was an expert witness for the Vergara trial (can you guess on which side?) He headed up the Gates Measures of Effective Teaching study, and he thinks Cuomo is pretty much on the right track.
* Catherine Brown, vice-president of the Center for American Progress, a thinky tank invariably billed as "left-leaning" despite their general on-boardedness with assaults on the teaching profession. CAP has issued any number of sloppy and ill-supported attempts to push Common Core and VAM.
* Sandi Jacobs, vice-president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a group that has taken the position that US teachers are low-quality hacks. These are the guys who help US News and World rate college teacher programs (including programs that don't actually exist) and who cobbled together a report on the rigor of college teacher prep programs by sitting in their offices and looking through a stack of commencement programs.
* Leslie Guggenheim of TNTP (The New Teacher Project), a group that really wants to see more personnel decisions, including pay, based on test results. They'd kind of like to get rid of tenure, too. Their big claim to fame is a paper called "The Widget Effect," that argues that teachers are not interchangeable widgets, but are in fact interchangeable widgets of varying degrees of quality.
I will go out on a limb and predict right now, today, that these four will declare that Cuomo's evaluation plan is okee dokee. But in the interests of not-entirely-kangaroo courtage (and perhaps additional entertainment value), the group also includes:
* Jesse Rothstein is a professor at Berkeley who has spent some time shooting holes in the research of both Kane and Raj Chetty. Starting with the same data, he found far less to love about VAM.
* Stephen Caldas is a professor at Manhattanville College who tagged the NY evaluation system with the delightful term "psychometrically indefensible."
* Aaron Pallas of Teachers College. He's been busily pointing out the problems with VAMmy systems for a few years now.
Those of you who have scored proficient in counting will notice that the majority of the committee seats are occupied by fans of reformy nonsense. But wait-- there's more.
Cuomo's insanely accelerated timeline (why get things right when you can get them done quickly) means that the usual 45-day post-draft comment period on proposed regulations is being waived because, well, if you had it, people might comment. Hey, it's not like anything else about supposed ed reform has suffered from being rammed through too quickly.
So NYSUT (which you may or may not love-- honestly, you New Yorkers and your intra-union alliances and battles) is on point when they say that everybody had better start making comments and making them now. President Karen MaGee says that folks need to speak up.
"NYSUT is well aware of the unrealistic deadlines contained in the governor's convoluted and unworkable plan, and the pressure that puts on the Regents and SED to try and mitigate the worst of it. Still, those deadlines do not absolve them of their responsibility to listen carefully to parents and practitioners and make any necessary adjustments to the draft regulations they wind up writing," Magee said. "One month is plenty of time for SED and the Regents to hold public hearings and still meet their deadlines."
So if you're a New York teacher or parent, it's time (right now-- the committee meets May 7) to get word to a Regent or the State Education Department. Tell them you want hearings on the draft. Tell them what you want in the evaluation system. Tell them why the stuff the committee is about to okay is a bunch of hooey (I'd suggest a more professional word than "hooey")
You can find a guide to individual Board of Regents members right here, complete with email links. You can find some NYSED phone numbers here and a whole department index starting with the A's right here. The clock is ticking. Time to make some noise. You might want to let the non-junk-science portion of the group know you support them-- they may be feeling a bit lonely soon. Heck-- you can even send word to Andrew Cuomo himself. It looks like this whole mess isn't going to be pretty-- but it doesn't have to be ugly and quiet both.
* Thomas Kane, an economist from Harvard. Kane thinks that evaluation should be directly linked to the Common Core via high stakes testing; he likes to compare this to using a bathroom scale when dieting. He thinks too few NY teachers were evaluated as sucky last year, and he imagines that maybe video-based observation would be swell. And he was an expert witness for the Vergara trial (can you guess on which side?) He headed up the Gates Measures of Effective Teaching study, and he thinks Cuomo is pretty much on the right track.
* Catherine Brown, vice-president of the Center for American Progress, a thinky tank invariably billed as "left-leaning" despite their general on-boardedness with assaults on the teaching profession. CAP has issued any number of sloppy and ill-supported attempts to push Common Core and VAM.
* Sandi Jacobs, vice-president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a group that has taken the position that US teachers are low-quality hacks. These are the guys who help US News and World rate college teacher programs (including programs that don't actually exist) and who cobbled together a report on the rigor of college teacher prep programs by sitting in their offices and looking through a stack of commencement programs.
* Leslie Guggenheim of TNTP (The New Teacher Project), a group that really wants to see more personnel decisions, including pay, based on test results. They'd kind of like to get rid of tenure, too. Their big claim to fame is a paper called "The Widget Effect," that argues that teachers are not interchangeable widgets, but are in fact interchangeable widgets of varying degrees of quality.
I will go out on a limb and predict right now, today, that these four will declare that Cuomo's evaluation plan is okee dokee. But in the interests of not-entirely-kangaroo courtage (and perhaps additional entertainment value), the group also includes:
* Jesse Rothstein is a professor at Berkeley who has spent some time shooting holes in the research of both Kane and Raj Chetty. Starting with the same data, he found far less to love about VAM.
* Stephen Caldas is a professor at Manhattanville College who tagged the NY evaluation system with the delightful term "psychometrically indefensible."
* Aaron Pallas of Teachers College. He's been busily pointing out the problems with VAMmy systems for a few years now.
Those of you who have scored proficient in counting will notice that the majority of the committee seats are occupied by fans of reformy nonsense. But wait-- there's more.
Cuomo's insanely accelerated timeline (why get things right when you can get them done quickly) means that the usual 45-day post-draft comment period on proposed regulations is being waived because, well, if you had it, people might comment. Hey, it's not like anything else about supposed ed reform has suffered from being rammed through too quickly.
So NYSUT (which you may or may not love-- honestly, you New Yorkers and your intra-union alliances and battles) is on point when they say that everybody had better start making comments and making them now. President Karen MaGee says that folks need to speak up.
"NYSUT is well aware of the unrealistic deadlines contained in the governor's convoluted and unworkable plan, and the pressure that puts on the Regents and SED to try and mitigate the worst of it. Still, those deadlines do not absolve them of their responsibility to listen carefully to parents and practitioners and make any necessary adjustments to the draft regulations they wind up writing," Magee said. "One month is plenty of time for SED and the Regents to hold public hearings and still meet their deadlines."
So if you're a New York teacher or parent, it's time (right now-- the committee meets May 7) to get word to a Regent or the State Education Department. Tell them you want hearings on the draft. Tell them what you want in the evaluation system. Tell them why the stuff the committee is about to okay is a bunch of hooey (I'd suggest a more professional word than "hooey")
You can find a guide to individual Board of Regents members right here, complete with email links. You can find some NYSED phone numbers here and a whole department index starting with the A's right here. The clock is ticking. Time to make some noise. You might want to let the non-junk-science portion of the group know you support them-- they may be feeling a bit lonely soon. Heck-- you can even send word to Andrew Cuomo himself. It looks like this whole mess isn't going to be pretty-- but it doesn't have to be ugly and quiet both.
Hidden Costs of Choice
I'm going to set aside my several issues with a charter school system (say, the pitting of student educational interests against the charter operator's business interests) and pretend that I have other beefs with charters so I can focus on just one concern-- the extra costs of a charter-choice system.
If you run a restaurant, offering a buffet can be tricky and costly. You have to be prepared to offer a full range of dishes, so that your Beloved Diner can have a full choice-- even though your beloved diner will leave some of those choices unused. Either you will have to absorb the cost of the extra food, or you will have to offer a buffet that doesn't really offer many choices.
A charter must have extra capacity built in. If I'm going to offer Chris a choice of three schools, each one of those schools must have a seat available for Chris-- and Chris will only occupy one of them. But every empty seat represents a cost to the system.
The plan will be that Happychoice Academy can offer fewer seats than would be needed to accommodate every single student who could conceivably choose to attend. Instead of three schools preparing three seats each for Chris, Pat and Taylor, each school will prepare just one seat and hope that Chris, Pat and Taylor distribute themselves evenly between the schools.
But that ideal is unlikely to happen, so charter-choice schools have to manage their excess capacity, which means taking control of how many of which students come to fill those seats. The only way to guarantee a full open free-choice system would be to have multiple schools which all have the capacity to handle all the students-- and that amount of excess capacity would be hugely expensive. The only way such a system can hope to be remotely economically viable is for choice to actually be limited. So, choice controlled by the schools.
Even if the schools become good at predicting the amount of capacity they need, or they use very tight controls, the no-backfill rule creates more unused capacity which creates more excess cost. Success Academies, the extreme example, jettison more than half of their students between 3rd and 8th grade which means either A) they plan to wash out that many students or B) somebody has to pay the overhead costs of all those empty seats. That sloughing off of students also means that somebody somewhere has to maintain the capacity that allows them to absorb the students who return from Happychoice Academy.
Of course, the part of the system that is obligated to maintain much of this excess capacity is the traditional public system, which must take every student that shows up at its doors.
Bottom line-- if we treat a charter-and-public school combo system as one school system, we arrive at one of two options.
A) A system that, for each 1,000 students, must maintain and finance a total 1,400 (ish-- I'm just spitballing here) seats. That is economic wastage of huge proportions.
B) A system that, for each 1,000 students, maintains say, 1,200 seats, with the full 1,000 in public school and the charter-choice capacity all tightly controlled and not really very choicey at all.
This is one of the mysteries of the conservative support of charter-choice systems for me-- the wastage is huge. A charter-choice-public hybrid system is like trying to operate four homes for the same amount of money you spent on having just one. It's wasteful and excessively costly, requiring you to pay for all sorts of capacity that you don't need. There's a reason that school districts strapped for cash are not saying, "Hey, let's save money by opening three more schools in the district."
If you run a restaurant, offering a buffet can be tricky and costly. You have to be prepared to offer a full range of dishes, so that your Beloved Diner can have a full choice-- even though your beloved diner will leave some of those choices unused. Either you will have to absorb the cost of the extra food, or you will have to offer a buffet that doesn't really offer many choices.
A charter must have extra capacity built in. If I'm going to offer Chris a choice of three schools, each one of those schools must have a seat available for Chris-- and Chris will only occupy one of them. But every empty seat represents a cost to the system.
The plan will be that Happychoice Academy can offer fewer seats than would be needed to accommodate every single student who could conceivably choose to attend. Instead of three schools preparing three seats each for Chris, Pat and Taylor, each school will prepare just one seat and hope that Chris, Pat and Taylor distribute themselves evenly between the schools.
But that ideal is unlikely to happen, so charter-choice schools have to manage their excess capacity, which means taking control of how many of which students come to fill those seats. The only way to guarantee a full open free-choice system would be to have multiple schools which all have the capacity to handle all the students-- and that amount of excess capacity would be hugely expensive. The only way such a system can hope to be remotely economically viable is for choice to actually be limited. So, choice controlled by the schools.
Even if the schools become good at predicting the amount of capacity they need, or they use very tight controls, the no-backfill rule creates more unused capacity which creates more excess cost. Success Academies, the extreme example, jettison more than half of their students between 3rd and 8th grade which means either A) they plan to wash out that many students or B) somebody has to pay the overhead costs of all those empty seats. That sloughing off of students also means that somebody somewhere has to maintain the capacity that allows them to absorb the students who return from Happychoice Academy.
Of course, the part of the system that is obligated to maintain much of this excess capacity is the traditional public system, which must take every student that shows up at its doors.
Bottom line-- if we treat a charter-and-public school combo system as one school system, we arrive at one of two options.
A) A system that, for each 1,000 students, must maintain and finance a total 1,400 (ish-- I'm just spitballing here) seats. That is economic wastage of huge proportions.
B) A system that, for each 1,000 students, maintains say, 1,200 seats, with the full 1,000 in public school and the charter-choice capacity all tightly controlled and not really very choicey at all.
This is one of the mysteries of the conservative support of charter-choice systems for me-- the wastage is huge. A charter-choice-public hybrid system is like trying to operate four homes for the same amount of money you spent on having just one. It's wasteful and excessively costly, requiring you to pay for all sorts of capacity that you don't need. There's a reason that school districts strapped for cash are not saying, "Hey, let's save money by opening three more schools in the district."
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