Before I even start to talk about AltSchool's educational program, let me express my admiration for their PR machine. In just 24 hours the Silicon Valley Wunderschool has been covered by Kevin Carey in the Pacific Standard, Natasha Singer in the New York Times, and Issie Lapowski at WIRED.com. And USAToday and techcrunch and Forbes.
The occasion seems to be a $100 million payday courtesy of Mark Zuckerberg, news that might be tempered by noting that the last time Zuckerberg decided to change the face of education, he was snookered into throwing money at reformster efforts in Newark, an effort that has gone from "it's complicated" to "I'm going to pretend that I never even met you."
The NYT piece is brief. The WIRED piece is by a business beat reporter. Kevin Carey works for the New American Foundation, members of the US Public Schools Suck club. Most other coverage is along the lines of "OMGZ!! Zuckerberg haz give the moneys!!"
But the central thread is that AltSchool is revolutionary and Fixes Everything! So, is it all that and a bag of baked organic sliced potatoes?
I have to say that some of this idea is actually pretty cool. School founder Max Ventilla, former Google guy (he worked as head of personalization and is somehow connect to Google Now), calls the school Montessori 2.0 (so you know we're working with the usual level of Silicon Valley humility).
If you remember the sixties, you remember open schools, which were little resource-rich environments in which children were supposed to pursue learning and knowledge as the mood struck them. My Aunt Evie actually opened one in Connecticut, and eventually closed it because, as many fans learned, small children can be content not learning much of anything for a really long time-- a much longer time than even their most laid-back parents can withstand.
The problem with public schools, these folks conclude, is the need to standardize students. We decide to shove 25 kids in a room and now, just to get things done, stay sane, and keep order in the school, we have to start imposing order and regimentation, changing classes at the bell, doing the same tasks so the clerically-challenged teacher can complete her tasks.
AltSchool, however, hopes to harness the power of technology and personalization. To their credit, they don't mean personalization in the same way that most tech-based programs (you can personally move along the exact same path as everyone else at a personally determined speed). Their teachers create individualized programs composed of "cards," little mini-lesson-modules that can be deployed in any sort of order and configuration. A playlist (that's what they call it) of pedagogy for each child, to work on with teacher guidance on a schedule that fits to address the strengths and weaknesses of that particular student.
Meanwhile, the tech and software is being developed to track all of this learning, all of these diverse students, and all the strengths and weaknesses at play. Again, I like some of how they do this-- not just dropping the tech on teachers and saying "Make it work" or "Hope it works" or "This will totally be useful if you just change your whole purpose and direction to fit the software." Instead, as journalists describe it, the tech team is in the next room, watching the school, watching how their software works, watching how students react, and taking feedback and tech tickets from the teachers. One compelling example was the tech team watching how much time teachers were wasting waiting for software to boot up and deciding they needed to do better.
Imagine-- a school with an IT department that thought of themselves as support for the teachers, and the support is so good that you literally don't do anything all day but teach, because other folks are taking care of all the clerical work. Sit back so you don't drool on your keyboard.
So there are plenty of things to love about AltSchool. But is it scaleable? Can the rest of us learn anything from it? From the WIRED article, quoting Ventilla (who is quoted in all of these pieces-- he must have been a very busy press-accessible guy):
“If you told us that we’re only ever going to impact wealthy private school students, I don’t think any of us would be doing what we’re doing,” he explains. “But we do believe this is the right place to start.”
Well, maybe. It certainly seems that the lesson to be learned here is, "Be rich. Very, very rich."
This is what school looks like when people with a lot of money relocate that money to their place where their mouth is located. One picture shows a beaming teacher and indicates in the caption that he teaches twelve kids. Twelve kids.
So we've got a dreamworld teacher-student ratio, with a full tech team in the next room with nothing to do all day except make sure the school is running well. Plus teachers with the time and resources to make all those cards (very time intensive at first, but once they're in the library and making schools work well and --hey, wait-- this is a for-profit school! are those teachers creating entire curricula for free so someone else can make money from them?) No gym; that and other extras are pulled in from the community (note: build school close to safe, clean, rich person's park). Nobody here has read the research that "proves" that money doesn't make any difference. Nor does anybody here think that a standardized test is the best measure of learning.
There is a creepy massive-data-gathering aspect to the school which has that software tracking pretty much every detail of the child's existence. Ventilla envisions assessing language acquisition through video monitoring student behavior. On the one hand, it's a sensible idea-- tell how the student uses language by watching the student use language. On the other hand, it is A) big brothery and B) is someone going to watch all this video footage, or is it going to be assessed by software, in which case, see A.
Mostly the articles make me want to go visit the place. Because absolutely none of the writers who covered the story really know anything about education, we find them trying to put this in the context of individualized education (quoting, for instance, Larry Miller of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, reformstery thinky advocates, or, God help us, Joel Klein). This model has nothing to do with the single-track personalized pace model that reformsters have been pushing.
But mostly what the school is is expensive as hell. It is never going to be scaleable-- or rather it would be scaleable if we ever as a country decided that educating every single child was just as important as blowing up every square inch of Afghanistan. If we had the national will to invest this kind of money on every child's education, we would already be there.
Nor is it clear what happens to this model when you try to fold in students who aren't as highly motivated as AltSchool's current clientele. And how the heck to you coordinate a million micro-schools on a large urban scale?
It's possible that some of the software developed will be useful in the larger world, and that's not a bad thing, given the kind of crap that is routinely pushed at us. But it would appear that this brand of artisanal micro-schoolery will mostly be a great new private option for the well-to-do.
Tuesday, May 5, 2015
Corinthian Bought Many Good Friends
While Corinthian Colleges appear to finally be out of the Create Huge Student Debt in Exchange for No Marketable Skill business, the autopsy on this wreck of a for-profit edupreneurial ship is not yet complete. And yet, the post-mortem is already showing more signs of the advanced disease which not only afflicted Corinthian, but apparently infected some influential friends as well.
Lee Fang, at Unofficial Sources, scored a look at Corinthian's Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing forms, and they are illuminating. Corinthian was apparently spreading plenty of money around in the form of "secret payments to an array of political consultants, think tanks and political dark money groups."
Corinthian gave money to Crossroads G.P.S., a Karl Rove group which helps elect candidates with money from undisclosed donors. Corinthians creditors include a full range of consulting firms from a former Obama election staffer to a veteran of the Reagan administration. And while they registered some of the lobbyists they hired, it appears that there were some undeclared lobbyists in their pay as well.
Two high profile groups now linked to Corinthian include ALEC, everyone's favorite corporate-legislation match-making group, and the American Enterprise Institute. Both of those groups used up plenty of ink and bandwidth arguing that for-profit colleges should not have to prove that their graduates actually landed jobs.
Last October, Andrew Kelly, AEI’s resident scholar on higher education reform, specifically defended Corinthian and criticized the “Obama administration’s bloodlust for such schools.”
There are also payments made to members of the Corinthian board.
It's particularly swell to consider that since Corinthian depended almost exclusively on government-backed student loans to survive, they were paying to maintain powerful friendships mostly with our tax dollars. Click on over and read the full report.
Lee Fang, at Unofficial Sources, scored a look at Corinthian's Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing forms, and they are illuminating. Corinthian was apparently spreading plenty of money around in the form of "secret payments to an array of political consultants, think tanks and political dark money groups."
Corinthian gave money to Crossroads G.P.S., a Karl Rove group which helps elect candidates with money from undisclosed donors. Corinthians creditors include a full range of consulting firms from a former Obama election staffer to a veteran of the Reagan administration. And while they registered some of the lobbyists they hired, it appears that there were some undeclared lobbyists in their pay as well.
Two high profile groups now linked to Corinthian include ALEC, everyone's favorite corporate-legislation match-making group, and the American Enterprise Institute. Both of those groups used up plenty of ink and bandwidth arguing that for-profit colleges should not have to prove that their graduates actually landed jobs.
Last October, Andrew Kelly, AEI’s resident scholar on higher education reform, specifically defended Corinthian and criticized the “Obama administration’s bloodlust for such schools.”
There are also payments made to members of the Corinthian board.
It's particularly swell to consider that since Corinthian depended almost exclusively on government-backed student loans to survive, they were paying to maintain powerful friendships mostly with our tax dollars. Click on over and read the full report.
Fishman: Rural Doom and Gloom
At the NPE luncheon, I asked this room full of people how many worked in a small town school setting.
Only a few hands went up. Since then, I've been thinking about how to address the unique concerns of small town and rural schools in this space.
Then this morning an article from Dan Fishman popped up. Writing for Education Next (the more journally outlet for the Fordham-Harvard Kennedy School- Hoover Institution axis of reforminess), Fishman directly addressed "School Reform for Rural America." In some respects, he hit the nail on the head. In others, he didn't even hit the board.
Fishman starts by painting a picture of rural horror and despair. More meth abuse. Of the fifty counties with the highest child-poverty rates, forty-eight are rural. Rural people between 10 and 24 are twice as likely to kill themselves as their urban counterparts. And rural folks are more depressed. Fishman doesn't offer sources for these factoids, but he does have a chart for showing that the further you get from large population centers, the worse your NAEP scores look.
Such complex and socially entrenched ills require a proportionate educational response. Owing to a number of factors, such a response rarely occurs.
Well, yes. Fishman has a list, and it's partly correct. Let's check it out.
Paperwork
For every federal and state regulation, there is an equal and onerous report that has to be filed. Large urban districts can hire Assistant Administrative Assistant to the Director of Inane State Paperwork. In a small rural, these duties fall on administration desks. Just to meet the state requirements for full-on teacher evaluation process would take my building principal half of the school year. Meanwhile, he has a variety of other reports to file, meetings to attend, mandates to follow and, oh yeah, a couple of kids got in a fight on the bus this morning and it will take all day just to sort that out and head off any possible repercussions.
So yes-- this is a dead on thing. School rules and regulations are created by people with staffs who imagine the rules being implemented by people with staffs. A rural principal's staff is, if he's lucky, one secretary.
Teacher certification
Fishman asserts that rural schools have trouble hiring staff. But this is just another way of asserting that certification requirements should be dropped so that schools can hire anybody off the street.
Often, the most qualified community members are barred from educating students by certification rules. A seasoned musician or painter in the community may be kept from teaching art or music by licensure requirements, even if no “highly qualified” teacher can be found and classrooms lie fallow.
Pennsylvania addressed this years ago in response to crisis-level shortages of substitute teachers. "Come be a guest teacher," the state said. With less training than a TFA temp, anybody with a college degree can become a substitute, and perhaps, eventually, a full-on teacher. There was a wave of substitutes who thought this sounded like a great deal. They arrived. They tried it. They ran away.
I can't speak to the state-wide figures, but locally about 60% of the guest teachers bailed within the first year. Within two years it was closer to 95%. This included ex-corporate and ex-military who were shocked and dismayed that a roomful of fifteen year olds did not automatically follow orders.
Meanwhile, rural areas are being forced to downsize by financial strains created on the state level, so most districts in my neck of the woods have few-to-none first year teachers, let alone positions that they need to have filled. When Fishman tells me that the world is filled with empty classrooms and gifted non-teachers being barred by dreadful requirements that they be trained and certified, I am unconvinced.
Federal grants
Federal grants for rural education offer jack. This is not surprising. Whether you're talking about the legislature, the union, the association of school boards, or a state principal's organization, the majority of the people in the room are there with urban concerns. And so that's what programs address, and that's how programs are designed, and every once in a while somebody tosses some crumbs to the rural folks. And as Fishman correctly notes, competitive grants are non-starters for rural schools (when, exactly, would the principal be working on that).
Fishman thinks salvation lies in the same old reformy baloney.
Online resources strike him as a good fit for rural schools, and it's true that some online resources can be helpful (though they all require reliable, powerful internet access, which is yet another rural school problem). We are a one-to-one school, and have been one for several years, and while it has been helpful, it is more evolutionary than revolutionary. The limits of the tech, the expense, the requirement for school filters, the fact that so much of what's available (including large chunks of the beloved Khan Academy) is just crap-- all of these limit the transformative power of technology.
Fishman thinks non-tech reforminess like KIPP and TFA can be great, and I'm disappointed here because it's hard to believe that anyone can still expect me to take TFA seriously. Fishman blames the rural problems of such initiatives on the lack of major philanthropy, which leads me to wonder how any program can be useful anywhere when its sustainability depends entirely on the kindness of rich strangers.
Fishman offers some examples of rural charters that work, but he devotes a whole section of the article to rural school choice.
Rural school choice? Can that be a thing?
It makes little sense to create additional schools of choice, and thereby add to the supply of school seats, when the population of an area can barely sustain one academic program.
That's probably the smartest sentence in the whole article. He follows it up by observing that rural schools haven't embraced charters with gusto because they fear consolidation. And that's not false-- one characteristic of rural school districts is that there's a high degree of identification with the community school. In many rural PA areas, the three pillars of the community are the local church, the local firehall, and the local school.
Fishman dances around another part of the problem-- charters financially brutalize the schools that they draw from. In Pennsylvania, much of the death and consolidation of local schools can be linked directly to the money-sucking vampires that are PA cyber-charters. If a small community can barely support one school, adding a charter simply means that one school or the other must die.
And while Fishman is dancing, let's note another step he's quietly ignoring-- the kind of charters that he's talking about would be set up, developed and run by people from outside. The number one reason that local rural communities don't open charter schools is that nobody in that community can think of any reason that they need a charter school. What Fishman is obliquely discussing here is whether or not rural communities offer growth opportunities for charter operators.
Add all this together and the charter scenario in rural communities is some slicker from the city driving up and saying, "Howdy, folks. I'm here to kill your beloved local school."
Fishman says "it would be wise to reconsider the purpose of charter schools in rural areas" though by "purpose" I think he means "rationale" or "marketing angle." But he's got nothing here. Maybe "to escape the oppressive hand of state regulations"?
I can offer him an example here. Up the road (in Tidioutte, PA) the local community school fell victim to financial issues in a larger district. So the local folks figured out they could keep a local school going if they just started it up as a charter. But it was a local idea, mounted and run by local people, and I don't think any investors are making money from it.
College and rural communities
Fishman sort of half gets this as well. Those of us who teach in small town and rural settings have a fundamental question to wrestle with daily-- are we educating students to escape this area or to come back and improve it? The correct answer is, I believe, to help them do whichever they're inclined to do, but that doesn't make the larger question go away.
There are limited opportunities here for students who return, and many of those are blue collar jobs. We have a strong vocational-technical school in our county, and many my students end up with great jobs in fields they enjoy. College really isn't the solution for everyone, and it creates problems of a sort for us in that our college-educated students often can't come back here-- not and find work. The College for All push does add to a local degreed-person drain, but if you think Lack of Degrees equals Lack of Brains, you do not spend enough time talking to welders and farmers and machinists. There's an issue in here somewhere, but Fishman does not yet have a handle on it.
Doom and gloom
Fishman leads off his conclusion with a paragraph that captures most of what he gets wrong.
Large swatches of rural America are struggling to educate children effectively, develop strong economic engines, and preserve communities. An education system that is lackluster in urban America is perhaps even more so in rural areas. It fails both to educate students for college and to prepare them for post–high school careers that allow for individual flourishing without draining out a community’s highest achievers. Under the current education system, it is not surprising that so many ambitious, talented individuals leave their hometowns in order to seek more engaging and remunerative job opportunities. This need not continue to be the case. Political, philanthropic, and education leaders should focus on creating the policy conditions, supporting the entrepreneurs, and more fully integrating the industry opportunities that can best address rural education improvement.
Let's check off the embedded mistakes
* public education is terrible
* "high achievers" are the same as "college-educated" entrepreneurs
* talent and ambition can't be fulfilled in rural areas
* leader types from outside must swoop in to fix this
And the usual huge omission-- there's no suggestion here that these philanthropic political entrepreneury education thought leaders need to involve, consult with, or amplify the voices of the people who actual live and work and lead and pursue lives that they find full, rich and rewarding in these rural spaces.
Then this morning an article from Dan Fishman popped up. Writing for Education Next (the more journally outlet for the Fordham-Harvard Kennedy School- Hoover Institution axis of reforminess), Fishman directly addressed "School Reform for Rural America." In some respects, he hit the nail on the head. In others, he didn't even hit the board.
Fishman starts by painting a picture of rural horror and despair. More meth abuse. Of the fifty counties with the highest child-poverty rates, forty-eight are rural. Rural people between 10 and 24 are twice as likely to kill themselves as their urban counterparts. And rural folks are more depressed. Fishman doesn't offer sources for these factoids, but he does have a chart for showing that the further you get from large population centers, the worse your NAEP scores look.
Such complex and socially entrenched ills require a proportionate educational response. Owing to a number of factors, such a response rarely occurs.
Well, yes. Fishman has a list, and it's partly correct. Let's check it out.
Paperwork
For every federal and state regulation, there is an equal and onerous report that has to be filed. Large urban districts can hire Assistant Administrative Assistant to the Director of Inane State Paperwork. In a small rural, these duties fall on administration desks. Just to meet the state requirements for full-on teacher evaluation process would take my building principal half of the school year. Meanwhile, he has a variety of other reports to file, meetings to attend, mandates to follow and, oh yeah, a couple of kids got in a fight on the bus this morning and it will take all day just to sort that out and head off any possible repercussions.
So yes-- this is a dead on thing. School rules and regulations are created by people with staffs who imagine the rules being implemented by people with staffs. A rural principal's staff is, if he's lucky, one secretary.
Teacher certification
Fishman asserts that rural schools have trouble hiring staff. But this is just another way of asserting that certification requirements should be dropped so that schools can hire anybody off the street.
Often, the most qualified community members are barred from educating students by certification rules. A seasoned musician or painter in the community may be kept from teaching art or music by licensure requirements, even if no “highly qualified” teacher can be found and classrooms lie fallow.
Pennsylvania addressed this years ago in response to crisis-level shortages of substitute teachers. "Come be a guest teacher," the state said. With less training than a TFA temp, anybody with a college degree can become a substitute, and perhaps, eventually, a full-on teacher. There was a wave of substitutes who thought this sounded like a great deal. They arrived. They tried it. They ran away.
I can't speak to the state-wide figures, but locally about 60% of the guest teachers bailed within the first year. Within two years it was closer to 95%. This included ex-corporate and ex-military who were shocked and dismayed that a roomful of fifteen year olds did not automatically follow orders.
Meanwhile, rural areas are being forced to downsize by financial strains created on the state level, so most districts in my neck of the woods have few-to-none first year teachers, let alone positions that they need to have filled. When Fishman tells me that the world is filled with empty classrooms and gifted non-teachers being barred by dreadful requirements that they be trained and certified, I am unconvinced.
Federal grants
Federal grants for rural education offer jack. This is not surprising. Whether you're talking about the legislature, the union, the association of school boards, or a state principal's organization, the majority of the people in the room are there with urban concerns. And so that's what programs address, and that's how programs are designed, and every once in a while somebody tosses some crumbs to the rural folks. And as Fishman correctly notes, competitive grants are non-starters for rural schools (when, exactly, would the principal be working on that).
Fishman thinks salvation lies in the same old reformy baloney.
Online resources strike him as a good fit for rural schools, and it's true that some online resources can be helpful (though they all require reliable, powerful internet access, which is yet another rural school problem). We are a one-to-one school, and have been one for several years, and while it has been helpful, it is more evolutionary than revolutionary. The limits of the tech, the expense, the requirement for school filters, the fact that so much of what's available (including large chunks of the beloved Khan Academy) is just crap-- all of these limit the transformative power of technology.
Fishman thinks non-tech reforminess like KIPP and TFA can be great, and I'm disappointed here because it's hard to believe that anyone can still expect me to take TFA seriously. Fishman blames the rural problems of such initiatives on the lack of major philanthropy, which leads me to wonder how any program can be useful anywhere when its sustainability depends entirely on the kindness of rich strangers.
Fishman offers some examples of rural charters that work, but he devotes a whole section of the article to rural school choice.
Rural school choice? Can that be a thing?
It makes little sense to create additional schools of choice, and thereby add to the supply of school seats, when the population of an area can barely sustain one academic program.
That's probably the smartest sentence in the whole article. He follows it up by observing that rural schools haven't embraced charters with gusto because they fear consolidation. And that's not false-- one characteristic of rural school districts is that there's a high degree of identification with the community school. In many rural PA areas, the three pillars of the community are the local church, the local firehall, and the local school.
Fishman dances around another part of the problem-- charters financially brutalize the schools that they draw from. In Pennsylvania, much of the death and consolidation of local schools can be linked directly to the money-sucking vampires that are PA cyber-charters. If a small community can barely support one school, adding a charter simply means that one school or the other must die.
And while Fishman is dancing, let's note another step he's quietly ignoring-- the kind of charters that he's talking about would be set up, developed and run by people from outside. The number one reason that local rural communities don't open charter schools is that nobody in that community can think of any reason that they need a charter school. What Fishman is obliquely discussing here is whether or not rural communities offer growth opportunities for charter operators.
Add all this together and the charter scenario in rural communities is some slicker from the city driving up and saying, "Howdy, folks. I'm here to kill your beloved local school."
Fishman says "it would be wise to reconsider the purpose of charter schools in rural areas" though by "purpose" I think he means "rationale" or "marketing angle." But he's got nothing here. Maybe "to escape the oppressive hand of state regulations"?
I can offer him an example here. Up the road (in Tidioutte, PA) the local community school fell victim to financial issues in a larger district. So the local folks figured out they could keep a local school going if they just started it up as a charter. But it was a local idea, mounted and run by local people, and I don't think any investors are making money from it.
College and rural communities
Fishman sort of half gets this as well. Those of us who teach in small town and rural settings have a fundamental question to wrestle with daily-- are we educating students to escape this area or to come back and improve it? The correct answer is, I believe, to help them do whichever they're inclined to do, but that doesn't make the larger question go away.
There are limited opportunities here for students who return, and many of those are blue collar jobs. We have a strong vocational-technical school in our county, and many my students end up with great jobs in fields they enjoy. College really isn't the solution for everyone, and it creates problems of a sort for us in that our college-educated students often can't come back here-- not and find work. The College for All push does add to a local degreed-person drain, but if you think Lack of Degrees equals Lack of Brains, you do not spend enough time talking to welders and farmers and machinists. There's an issue in here somewhere, but Fishman does not yet have a handle on it.
Doom and gloom
Fishman leads off his conclusion with a paragraph that captures most of what he gets wrong.
Large swatches of rural America are struggling to educate children effectively, develop strong economic engines, and preserve communities. An education system that is lackluster in urban America is perhaps even more so in rural areas. It fails both to educate students for college and to prepare them for post–high school careers that allow for individual flourishing without draining out a community’s highest achievers. Under the current education system, it is not surprising that so many ambitious, talented individuals leave their hometowns in order to seek more engaging and remunerative job opportunities. This need not continue to be the case. Political, philanthropic, and education leaders should focus on creating the policy conditions, supporting the entrepreneurs, and more fully integrating the industry opportunities that can best address rural education improvement.
Let's check off the embedded mistakes
* public education is terrible
* "high achievers" are the same as "college-educated" entrepreneurs
* talent and ambition can't be fulfilled in rural areas
* leader types from outside must swoop in to fix this
And the usual huge omission-- there's no suggestion here that these philanthropic political entrepreneury education thought leaders need to involve, consult with, or amplify the voices of the people who actual live and work and lead and pursue lives that they find full, rich and rewarding in these rural spaces.
Charter Assumptions
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??"
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??"
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."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)