Summer Opportunity

It's time for the beginning of summer break. That means a time of opportunity for teachers, ranging from the personal to the professional. But the greater availability of teachers also means that summer is a time of opportunity for policy makers and education deep thinkers.

Even policymakers and edubiz advocates who want to involve teachers in the Ed Conversation (yes, I think there are such people) can find it challenging to do so during the school year, because those of us who teach are busy doing our jobs. Simple ways of connecting and conversing that work in the private and government sectors ("I'll just pop in to your office for an hour or so tomorrow afternoon to go over the details") do not translate at all to the teaching world ("I think I can take five minutes out of lunch to run those forms up to the office"). Lobbyists and thinky tank types take long working lunches while first grade teachers go seven hours without peeing because they don't have the time. Legislators hold hearings about education, but no teachers are there because they are working (and if they do take a personal day to be there, they may wait in vain an entire day to speak).

Much has been made of the Media Matter study showing that only 9% of evening cable shows about education included educators as guests. I have no doubt that the 9% reflects a common belief that teachers are not worthy experts when it comes to speaking about education. But I also wonder how much the 9% is influenced by the need to tape segments during the day, or the need for a guest to be in a studio at a late hour on a school night. I've had that conversation and had to tell a booker that, no, I can't even do a quick fifteen minute phone segment because at that time I will be helping fourteen-year-olds tell the difference between adjective and adverb clauses.

This has always been the disadvantage for teachers with legislators and policy makers. While a teacher is busy doing her job in a classroom, a lobbyist is being paid to be available to talk to Important People on any day at any time. Perhaps this is part of why so many policy makers don't seem to love us-- they hear, "I don't have time to talk to you because I'm doing more important things, like collecting lunch money from seven-year-olds." It's possible that teachers are accidentally triggering legislators' sad memories of withholding parents who were always "too busy."

But summer is different. Summer offers opportunity for communicating across the gap between teachers and the creators and pushers of policy.

Teachers can (and should) channel time and effort into contacting their elected representatives. Tell them what you think about the various assaults of testing and evaluation and charter takeovers and the rest of the mess of reformsterism. Do it on a regular basis. If it's hard to get everything you want to say into one email or letter, write twelve. Call them up. Make sure that policy makers have every opportunity to hear your voice.

Teachers can (and should) take the time to read up on issues and learn about the policy discussions going on. I am still astonished at the number of teachers who just don't know much about what's happening, who know that something's going on that is making their job harder, but they don't know what's being done, by whom it's being done, or where it's being done. The days when teachers could ignore policy and politics and stay happily cocooned in their classrooms are gone. If we're going to advocate for our students, we have to understand the forces arrayed against them and us.

Meanwhile, reformy advocates could reach out to teachers. Not carefully vetted, pre-selected, chosen for their willingness to agree with policymakers teachers, but actual working teachers who aren't necessarily fans. Read the blogs. You don't have to agree with them, and you don't have to like them.

But when people are being honestly and sincerely critical of you, the very least you can learn from them is how your work is coming across. Communication is not just about what you said; it's about what they heard. Reformsters have the opportunity to get a very clear picture of what public school advocates hear them saying. All that's necessary is some listening.

Folks can even reach out across the gulf. As my esteemed colleague Jennifer Berkshire has noted, some public ed advocates and some reformy folks do share some things-- a passion about education, a frustration with large lumpen bureaucracy, even an inability to shut up about the topics. It is always a mistake to assume that the people who disagree with you do so because they are greedy, stupid, or evil. In this day and age, it is child's play to reach across the divide with a tweet or an email. During the summer, teachers have the time for that sort of thing. People who are sincerely interested in doing something about US education should take advantage of a chance to contact real experts in the field.

Every summer of my career, I've made it my business to try to Learn Stuff. It is a great opportunity, a real privilege that I have as a teacher. Now more than ever, it's an opportunity that all of us should be taking advantage of.

Jurassic Education World

Like apparently over half the world's population, we saw Jurrasic World last weekend. Fun film, and we always love the Chris Pratt at our house.

But as with last year's Lego Movie, I could not help noticing that the film underlines how much of popular culture is actually NOT aligned with the values and ideals of reformsters.

Data Driven Control

We know that our female lead is in need of rehabilitation because she is devoted to data. She calls the animals "assets" and cannot bring herself to see them as living, breathing beings. When asked by the owner if the park's visitors and the park's animals are happy, she replied with a customer satisfaction index for the visitors and, flustered, notes that they don't have an instrument for measuring the contentedness of the dinosaurs. The owner says one has to look the creatures in the eyes-- she doesn't understand what he's talking about.

Her unfit nature is further underlined by her inability to relate to her nephews. The character's moral journey involves learning to empathize, to relate, to connect to the children and the animals through something other than data and monitors and spreadsheets.

Beyond that character's journey, we have the usual moral of everything ever written by or based on works of Michael Chrichton-- that human beings invariably put way too much faith in their tools and control (seriously-- it's in everything he's ever written). The data control dream is that if we know everything, we can control everything, and if we control everything, we can make everything turn out exactly the way we want to. The film underlines the inherent falsehood in every clause of that sentence: we can't know enough, knowledge does not bring control, and the chaos inherent in any complex system guarantees unexpected and unplanned for outcomes.

Our unfit, morally adrift park manager is just like a data-driven school reformster, certain that spreadsheets and data are sufficient to turn a school into a factory that creates perfect products (aka students). And the pop culture sees that character as one who must be reformed.

Competition

The closest thing to a villain in the piece is Vincent D'Onofrio's military stooge, the guy who wants to use the barely-trained raptors as a military weapon. But the filmmakers don't position him as an actual official soldier. That would be perhaps unclear to the audience, so they leave him in civilian dress, and rather than talking about power, the writers give him a speech about competition.

The speech strikes all the notes we know-- competition will bring excellence, it pushes folks to greatness, it kills off and weeds out the weak and unfit. And the audience knows he is absolutely a bad guy (also, that he will be eaten by a dinosaur before we're done).

The idea that competition is to be worshiped as a means of Making Things Better, even if people must be sacrificed along the way. We understand that this is glorifying a system over individual creatures, and the character's death is not just a sort of narrative revenge on a bad guy, but an earned irony-- the character is so blind to the human cost of such a competitive that it never really occurs to him that he might be part of that cost.

Competition fans always like the view from a thousand feet up. It's when competition gets up close and personal that it becomes ugly.

Pop Culture Love

It's not like this movie is the only one to include these ideas, but it certainly is going to be one of the biggest ones in a while. And there on the billion dollar, the pop culture underscoring accents what everybody already knows-- deifying data and competition over basic humanity is bad. Not just bad, but the mark of a bad person who needs to be either redeemed or eaten.

Many people really are on the side of public education. They're just slow to realize that charter-choice data and competition fans are selling the same baloney that the movies reject.

Magical Magical Standardized Tests

We have become accustomed to teacher essay about magical Common Core Standards. "I used to stumble about my classroom drooling and pummeling my students with rote reading rocks until I discovered Common Core, and now I use reading and writing and thinking in the classroom which is awesome because no teacher ever thought of that before ever."

Well, now we're getting Magic of Standardized Tests Essay. Huffington Post has an essay from Teach Plus KIPPster Chris Hoffman about how deeply invaluable standardized tests are to his classroom practice, because with ESEA being discussed we need to remember how important Big Standardized Tests are for every student, every year in order for corporate profiteers to keep pulling in that sweet sweet tax money students to learn. (It should be noted that this was back in March, but somehow I missed it. It still cries for response.)

Hoffman's piece is short on words but long on baloney.

He begins with the story of Alex, a student that Hoffman saved by the power of testing. Alex was actually pumped full of two years worth of learning in just one year, and that reminds us once again that you can't actually measure learning in years, but okay. How did testing help Hoffman perform this feat?

Well, before Alex even entered the classroom, Hoffman checked out his standardized test results.* This means one of a couple of things:

1) Hoffman is playing fast and loose with the term "standardized test," because no BS Test that I low of gets results back to teachers before the next school year starts. So Hoffman is talking about some in-house standardized test, which is not at all what ESEA reauthorizers are talking about.

2) California, where Hoffman works, has a speedier turnaround on BS Tests than anyone else I've heard about which, hey, would not be the first time I didn't know something.

3) KIPP schools start in November.

Now, Hoffman acknowledges some limitations:

While these tests never paint a complete picture, they give me a great start. I am able to identify struggling students and make immediate efforts to remedy their skill and knowledge gaps. In the case of Alex, I was able to meet with his parents before the start of the school year to ensure support at home.

Seriously-- you need BS Tests for this? Do you not identify struggling students by talking to their previous teacher, who has  whole year's worth of data and personal first-hand information. Is KIPP's grade reporting so weak that it won't identify struggling students? How can that even be? Do the grades tell you what you need to know ("Hey, Alex got a 75 last year-- Alex must be struggling") or do they not reflect anything important ("Hey, Alex got a 95 last year, but the test shows Alex is struggling"). I mean, this is a KIPP school-- I thought you guys had a coherent carefully integrated program. Does it not give you consistent and reliable information about students? Is your school not small enough to allow teachers to communicate directly? And are you telling me that if not for the standardized test results, you would not have bothered to contact Alex's parents?

Hoffman says that talking to the parents clued him in to Alex's need to have a low-distraction seat in the classroom, and that's great-- but how do we give the standardized test credit for that. And once again, wouldn't that sort of information come easily through staff communication? Don't KIPP teachers talk to each other?

Hoffman makes the case for "every year" by admitting that a single test is just a single data point, so it could be an outlier. But hey-- three data points going into fourth grade. That would totally clarify the picture.

I fear that without yearly testing teachers would lose the perspective provided by a longitudinal view of their students.

Longitudinal picture my Aunt Fanny. Do KIPP teachers not give assignments and grades and stuff? Do they not talk to each other?

It looks like they do, because Hoffman's next paragraph paints a pictures of KIPP teachers in team meetings poring over BS Test results to find blind spots in their curriculum. So KIPP teachers do talk to each other.

Identifying a student's strengths and weaknesses, tweaking individual instruction, getting holes in the program filled in-- these are all perfectly good goals. What Hoffman and the other acolytes of BS Testing consistently fail to do is show why standardized testing is the best way to accomplish any of these goals. Even if I accepted that the tiny little sliver of bad data generated by these lousy tests did have some actual utility, I can still think of a dozen easier, cheaper, more accurate, just plain better ways to accomplish these goals.

But there are two problems with a solution as simple as having teachers talk to each other and share their regular classroom data from the year (because, yes, classroom teachers generate and collect and analyze their own data every minute of every day-- not just one time a year).

Problem number 1: Testing companies don't make money from teacher-generated data

Problem number 2: It's hard to keep teacher-generated data consistently available when your business plan depends on burning and churning staff every year.

But Hoffman's piece (which was apparently part of a weeklong onslaught) is a reminder that the test manufacturers are still working hard to get their product cemented into school law. Those of us who know better need to keep speaking up.

*Okay. In the comments section we learn that yes, CA does get tests back before school starts, but that schools haven't been giving tests long or consistently enough for his point to make sense.

Building Social Capital

Top of my serious summer reading list is Robert Putnam's new book, about which I expect I'll blog plenty once I've read it. But I assigned myself a pre-reading exercise. I'm going to write out what I think I understand about social capital and where it comes from.

Social capital is a kind of fancy term for a quality that is critical for education, but also for pretty much everything else, and it's another way to understand the differences between rich and poor, powerful and powerless, that goes beyond simply saying, "Some people have money and some people,  not so much." And if you like your social studies woolgathering to have some science included, I've written before about this long study in Baltimore by John Hopkins. The marque headline was that family and money "cast a long shadow," but what was really casting the shadow was social capital.

I feel like I know a little something about social capital because I have lived most of my life in the same small town, and when we talk about how the quintessential small town is different, I think one way of understanding what we're talking about is social capital-- though even in small town America, we're losing it, and have been for a century or so (I've read Putnam's previous work, Bowling Alone-- everybody should).

So what do I think are some of the critical elements of social capital, why do they matter, and how have we stopped building them?

Interconnectedness

In a small town, everybody knows everybody. This does not mean that everybody is friends, but there is a level of familiarity that creates a sort of comfort that comes from having known somebody for decades so that every encounter is not charged with the sort of defensive fling-out that marks so many simple encounters in a big city. And it means that after decades, we may not be buddies, but we have an understanding, even to the point that w get along well because I know who you are and how you are and it's like the local climate-- it just is what it is.

Part of that interconnectedness is that we encounter each other in a variety of roles. The guy who checks out my groceries may be my neighbor or sing in church choir with me or lead my kid's scout troop. Members of the community know each other in several different contexts, which means we have access to different dimensions, different angles of view for each other.

This creates some social capital because it forces people to be more thoughtful about interactions. In LA you might be a jerk to your waitress because you'll never see her again. But social capital greases the wheels of karma, and the wrong you do at lunch may be biting you in the ass by supper time. Even if you don't buy altruism and kindness and general human decency, it makes practical sense to avoid peeing in your own weld.

True story. Years ago a new manager of a local hotel decided he would try to become a hub of arts activities as a business plan. His first move was to try to get local choirs to come do a fest at his place for free, so he approached each choir director by saying, "Well, all the other directors have signed on." But some of those directors sang in the same church choir, played in the same town band, were or former students of the same local teacher-- it took about a day for him to be caught in his lie, and he was done. Interconnectedness magnifies positive effects (everyone pitches in for a good cause) and squelches negative ones (it's very hard to be a successful small town con artist).

We lose this when the community is too large (I don't know how large that is, exactly, but I'm curious) or when movement through the community is too much (nobody sticks around long enough to become connected) or when people are dispersed. I cannot recommend strongly enough that teachers live in the communities they serve, but that is challenging in some situations and absolutely impossible if a school is not community based.

When you keep scrambling people around, spreading them out, or isolating them, the opportunity to be interconnected is lost, and so is the magnifying effect of social capital.

Shared experience

A little over a century ago, my county had an amusement park. Located a few miles from both of our larger cities, it could only be reached by streetcar (like most parks of the period, it was owns by the transportation company as a means of creating demand for transportation). On major holidays, the cities were empty-- everyone went to Monarch Park. If you were alive at that time, you knew exactly how everybody sent the Fourth of July and even if you were otherwise strangers, you had that common experience.

Shared experience can even transcend time. In lots of small town areas, grown adults still ask each other, "Where did you go to school?" Because even if you graduated from the same high school fifteen years apart, you share the same school, the same traditions, probably even some of the same teachers.

Shared experiences give us a shared vocabulary, as well as a shared measuring stick (If you hated Mr. McBoogerface as a teacher but I loved him, we now know something about each other). If we belong to the same club (literally or figuratively) we have a bond that connects us.

But if there's anything that has been eroded by the last sixty years of progress, it is shared experience. As a larger culture, we don't watch the same shows, listen to the same music, see the same movies, follow the same websites. Monarch Park was killed by the automobile-- people could go wherever they wanted on their own schedule, so they did. Choices work against shared experiences.

It's true that this was never as great as we like to think. The fifties are often held up as a swell time in which all Americans were pretty much on the same page, but that was only mostly true for white heterosexual males. But today we have sorts ourselves into far more discrete categories because, given the current levels of technology and media, we can. We get what we want, but walled up in our small personal silos, we don't get much shared experience, and we especially don't get shared experience with people unlike ourselves.

Making schools part of this sorting does not help build social capital. More importantly, it keeps it within small groups, and like money, social capital only does any good when it's moving around.

Sharing capital

An individual's social capital accumulates (or diminishes) over time. Do you make connections? Build networks? Share experiences? Do you look out for other members of your community?  Favors, assistance, a little slack-- these are all purchased with social capital

Like other currencies, social capital can be shared. You can cash in your social capital to get a favor for yourself or for someone else. You can use your clout for yourself or for the benefit of others. But doing favors for others often garners you more capital in the economy of favors.

Diane Ravitch collected a great deal of social capital by her connections, but she has used that to fourth a cause, and that has included using much blog space to amplify the voices of other writers. Hollywood, heartless as it may seem, is billed with stories of people who become famous and use that fame to lift up other people who are still low in social capital or career success.

Pay it forward is all about social capital-- recognizing that much of what you have was passed to you by folks before you, and so resolving to spend some of your capital on those fourth down the ladder than you. This keeps social capital building and growing. It is very hard to create social capital out of air, but given a little bit of it, you can turn it into a great deal more.

While our culture has a deep love of "I've got mine, Jack," selfishness, a closer look shows the social capita sharing economy in action. The Wizard of Oz is one of many stories in which the hero's main "power" is the power of connecting, building a community, and sharing the capital that is accrued. Even supposedly bootstrappy Horatio Alger stories invariably involve some mentor figure who helps lift up the deserving young scrappy poor kid.

But the sharing economy is a big deal, because the cool thing about social capital is that, as with any god investment, when you share it, you keep all that you had and get more besides.

Where does it come from?

So how do you get social capital. I can think of three ways.

1) You're born with it. You are born into the community your parents live in, and so all their connections are yours at birth. If your are born a rich white guy, you automatically enter the world with more social capital than a non-rich non-white guy.

2) Someone gives it to you. As above-- somebody decides to mentor, boost, share or otherwise help you to some social capital.

3) You earn it. Best way? By being good at something.

Schools and building social capital

So can social capital be created, and if so, what role can schools have in the process? Well, yes, and yes. Schools have a structure that is well-suited for creating social capital.

First, public schools have longevity. When people talk with pride about their children attending the same school they did (and having the same teacher-- I am on children of children of former students at this point), they are talking about social capital. They are talking about interconnectedness and shared experiences, and schools can help with that by being stable and by making sure that many of the shared experiences are positive. Traditions, particularly those that are inclusive and kind of cool, build social capital (love the idea of "clapping out" sixth graders). And traditions in high schools are easy to launch-- it takes just four years to go from "That new thing we're doing" to "That thing we've always done."

The structure of a public school is also like playing at social capital with monopoly money. Seniors have more social capital than freshmen just because. The trick would be to implement programs to teach them how to spend it wisely, to create a culture of sharing. We can also teach our students how to recognize social capital, which I suspect is a lot like learning to recognize privilege without triggering the usual defensiveness.

We can play with that traditional structure to create more interconnectedness; this already happens in things like sports and music programs, where students from all different grades and abilities work together and get to know each other. But we can also extend that interconnectedness out into the community to which the school is attached by bringing family and community leaders into the school.

These connections have to be built over time and with real connections. Drive-by do-Gooding, where some hot-shot breezes into the school and then leaves to never return again does not build connection, community or capital.

What about social capital poverty zones?

The John Hopkins study looked at the problem of communities that are low on social capital, low on connectedness, low on shared experiences that are positive and uplifting.

In communities that are strong in social capital, the big web of connectedness is hung from the topmost peg-- there's somebody connected to that community who has plenty of social capital that is connected thousands of ways to thousands of people and that's what keeps the whole business hanging high.

My own community is largely rural and not very wealthy. You can only rise so high here without simply getting of the community. It was not always that way--we once had a couple of wealthy well-connected families here, but their wealth and social capital did not survive the next few generations. Replacing that would be- I don't even know how you do it. Up the road there is an even smaller community that a wealthy doctor actually bought and refurbished-- built a hotel, a small concert space, some shops, a golf course. It has worked well, but the key was that he moved there and made it his home by carefully connecting to the people who already lived there. He didn't just try to breeze through and he didn't try to brush aside the local connections.

I don't know enough about urban poverty zones to know how to approach this challenge, but I feel certain I know some things that don't work. Taking the connectedness that is there and shattering it to spread the children across an entire city (eg Newark or New Orleans) will destroy more than it builds. Trying to do long-distance fixes without actually entering the community, or ignoring the people who are already connected to each other and the community-- that will destroy more than it helps, too.

Building strong traditions. Finding ways to achieve real self-directed excellence (which is not remotely the same n as scoring well on a test somebody else slapped on you). Building on the economies off sharing that exist.

My homework

This is most of what I think I know now. I will start reading Putnam's book soon; I'm hoping I'll be able to glean some insights from that. I'm sure I'll let you know.

Flying First Class

Traveling always gives me time to think, and I spent yesterday making my way to the West Coast, where my wife and I are spending some time in LA hanging out with my son and daughter, their partners, and my grandson (my in-laws are tending to the house and the dog, who cannot even successfully manage a car trip across town).

On one leg of the journey yesterday, we ended up sitting just behind the bulkhead that separated we Mere Mortals from the folks in First Class.

I've never traveled first class, in fact have never traveled sitting far enough forward to see the wonders that occur there.

I marveled at how those twenty-four travelers, of all of us cattle-jammed into the plane, had essentially their own personal staff of attendants to provide them with a steady stream of amenities, from taking their lunch orders to delivering via tongs some nicely warmed towels. One business traveler's seat would not recline, and after contortions worthy of Godzilla's chiropractor, the flight attendant promised a financial compensation for the travelers emotional pain and suffering from being forced to do without his six degrees of inclination.

I reflected that it made a certain amount of sense-- those folks had likely forked over (sans tongs) a ton of money to sit in airplane nirvana, and so had personally generated a great deal of the plane's profit (I'm pretty sure their extra charges more than covered the expense of the tongs). And to give full disclosure, I was only at the bulkhead where I could watch because I had sprung some extra money to pay for the extra luxury of sitting next to my wife on the trip (she is way better than a warm towelette). So I, too, was a traveler who had the financial means to make my travels a little better.

We all made the exact same trip to the same destination. And we all the opportunity, the access, to the seats in first class. The airline made that section available to everyone, but only some were willing and able to take advantage of it. Could they have provided tongs (and seats with enough space for grown humans) to everybody? Not really, because that wouldn't be economically viable. What works economically, business-model-wise, is to sort passengers out so that folks with more money get more service and folks without money just get where they're going in one (uncomfortable) piece. Occasionally folks are "upgraded" to first class, but that changes nothing about how the system fundamentally works. The airline still retains the ability to sort people based on how much profit those people deliver.

This is what treating education as a business promises us (it is, in fact, exactly what it has delivered to us on the college level) -- sorting out customers with levels of service provided to those customers based on how much revenue they can generate. People who are insisting that a charter-choice system would provide greater educational equality are just plain wrong. A free market charter-choice business-style approach to education gets us more inequality, with some folks up in first class and some folks stuck sitting in the back of the bus plane.

I'm Defending Teach for America

I'm about a week behind on this, mostly because I don't usually pay any attention to conservative rantist Michelle Malkin. Yes, she often rants against Common Core and corporate commandeering of public education, but when I first started picking apart the odd alliances, congruence, and alignments of the education debates, one thing became clear to me-- in these debates, as in other aspects of life, the enemy of my enemy might well be my enemy. Or at the very least, a trellis asshat.

Malkin made her recent stink in the New York Post, where she accused Teach for America of harboring dangerous radicals.

But those concerns pale in comparison to the divisive, grievance-mongering activities of the group’s increasingly radicalized officials and alumni.

TFA’s most infamous public faces don’t even pretend to be interested in students’ academic achievement. It’s all about race, tweets and marching on the streets.

She goes on to give accounts of recent civil rights activism by TFA members and alums, including popularizing and promoting the #BlackLivesMatter movement. She links this to TFA's recent initiative to include more men and women of color. She stops just short of saying that TFA has been taken over by a bunch of uppity black folks who don't know how to stay in place-- but only just short of that.

Look-- nobody is ever going to mistake me for a TFA supporter. I've explained numerous times why the organization, which has morphed into one more corporate-stoogery corporation, is bad for education. They started out with one simple foolishly naïve idea (any Better Person from the Right School can become a teacher in five weeks) and built on that foundation a structure of even worse ideas (our Better People can replace the inferior professionals and help charters cut the legs out from under public education). And they have long carried the smell of "white man's burden" colonial-style racism in their operation.

But here's two things about TFA. One is that their initiative to recruit men (and women) of color for the classroom is a response to a real problem. It might be a cynical marketing response, but g's still a response to a real problem. The other is that while I have no love or respect for the organization itself, I have always recognized that many folks join TFA with pure hearts and good intentions (yes, many are just looking at their resume, but not all). That to me one of the great evils of TFA-- they take young people with an interest in teaching, who might have been good teachers, and give them the worst possible introduction to the classroom.

And it's really those TFA recruits that Malkin is going after. She connects the corporate dots, but she's using that to work her way to the big reveal-- our tax dollars are supporting Black People Who Won't Sit Down and Shut Up.

TFA deserves a lot of things, not the least of which is to go away forever, but they don't deserve to be the excuse for a racist rant, and they certainly haven't earned the right to be painted as a training ground for Naughty Black Activists.

I know there are folks whose attitude is that we should attack our enemies whenever the chance presents itself  and that we should embrace anybody who wants to attack the people we want to attack. But what Malkin and the people who have followed her lead have constructed is a racist lie, and that's just not okay.

This is just one more reason to define oneself by what you stand for, not what you're against. There are plenty of folks out there who are against Common Core and high stakes testing who are also against public education (particularly when it spends tax dollars on Those People). I am not on the same side as those folks.

TFA deserves to be attacked for many reasons, but it's just wrong to support an attack on them that is based on inflammatory foolishness and which feeds the fires of racism.

Schneider: No NOLA Miracle

I'm not going to add much of anything to Mercedes Schneider's post except to say that, in case you missed it-- you should read it.

The New Orleans story is one of the charter-choice golden narratives. It is the place where the reformsters got everything they wanted, so it has to be a success narrative because if they can't make it there, they can't make it anywhere.

Schneider is one of most invaluable researchers in true world of public school defenders, and she has done yet another piece of invaluable research. One chapter of the NOLA magical success tale is "The Story of How Charter-Choice Raised Graduation Rates." Turns out, not so much.

Reformsters tell that story wit a pre-Recovery School District graduation rate of 54.4% (because made up numbers are more credible when they're very specific). But out turns out that the pre-RSD rate was identical (or perhaps better) than then RSD rate. And looking at her methodology,

So read her post. Bookmark her post. Share her post. And whenever someone tries to tell you how the Recovery School District totally fixed New Orleans education, please acquaint them with some actual facts.