Every once in a while I try to take the many complicated and twisty threads, back up, and tie them into a bigger picture. Think of this as the kind of post you can share with people who don't read blogs about education every single day (no kidding-- there are such people, and they're too busy doing the work to spend time reading about doing the work).
There are many threads to the reformy movement in education, but perhaps the most predominant one is the push for privatization. Many folks look at education and they just see a gigantic pile of money that has previously gone untouched. To them, education is a multi-billion dollar industry that nobody is making real profit from.
Many of the aspects and features of what I'm about to lay out appeal to other sorts of folks for other sorts of reasons, but here is how they fit into the agenda of privatizers.
Step One: Create Failure
Use metrics for measuring school success that will guarantee failure (that's where Common Core testing fits in). For instance, base the measure of school and teacher success on bad standardized tests that don't actually measure academic achievement as well as they measure poverty. These tests will also narrow the definition of success so that fewer students will fit through the eye of the needle (a brilliant musician who tests poorly in math and English will be counted as a failure). Norm these tests around a curve, so that somebody will always be on the failing end.
The testing will create the appearance of failure, but policy can also create actual failure by stripping resources from schools. Every voucher and charter system drains money away from public schools; in some states (e.g. Pennsylvania) there are even caps on raising taxes so that local districts couldn't replace the shortfall even if they wanted to.
Concentrate these efforts on non-white, non-wealthy districts, which are both the most vulnerable and the least "protected" because their community has little political clout.
Use stack ranking so that whatever your metric, somebody is always in the bottom X% of the spread (5% has been a popular number).
If it seems as if your state has instituted policies that will force schools to fail, this is why. If there are no failing schools, there's no crisis, and if there's no crisis, there's no trigger for step two.
Step Two: Consolidate Power
Once there's a crisis from the proliferation of failing schools, it's time to step in.
You may hear the terms "turnaround" or "rescue" or even "takeover," but the basic process is the same-- the end of local control. Currently rising in popularity is the Achievement School District model, based on the Recovery School District of New Orleans and most fully attempted in Tennessee.
The basic principle is simple. These schools are failing, therefor the state must take them over. The state will put somebody, or a board of somebodys, in charge of the district, and the new boss will answer only to someone in the state capitol. The local school board is out. The new school boss will be given the power to do whatever is necessary.
Step Three: Cash In
"Whatever is necessary" will never turn out to mean "invest in public schools." Because, remember, they are failing.
Charter schools will be set up to compete with the public school (further stripping it of resources). Or charter schools will be brought in to replace the public schools, or to take them over. The system may be called a school choice system, but it will be the schools that get to choose, so that they can select those students who are profitable. The students who are too expensive to work with (aka not good revenue generators) or who can't be made to generate "successful" numbers will be left in the public schools.
Note: It makes no difference whether the charters bill themselves as for-profit or non-profit. They are always profitable. Non-profits know many tricks for still turning a profit (eg, hiring themselves to run the school, or leasing the building back form themselves). A non-profit charter is just a for-profit charter with a money-laundering department.
These schools may operate under their own set of rules which do away with teacher job protections or school code requirements for seniority considerations. The majority of special rules are designed to allow school operators to control costs so that their school-flavored business can remain profitable.
Epilogue: The Long Term
You may wonder how this is sustainable. It isn't, and it isn't meant to be. Charters routinely drop out of the business, move on, dissolve and reform under new names, getting out of Dodge before they have to offer proof of success. This churn and burn is a feature, not a bug, and it is supposed to foster excellence. To date, there is no evidence that it does so.
But in the long term, we get a two-tier system. One is composed of private, profit-generating school-like businesses that will serve some of the students. The other is a vestigal public system, under-funded and under-served, but still serving as "proof" that public schools are failure factories and so we must have a state-run system.
Discussion: But Is This a Bad Thing
"I realize," you say, "that turning schools into profit-generating businesses is automatically repulsive to some folks, but if they get the job done, isn't this a win?"
Here's the short form for why I think the privatization of education is a bad thing.
First, all the numbers show that charters are, as a group, no more "successful" than public schools. Furthermore, what success they have is often simply the result of being careful and selective about their student body. How they do this is a whole other discussion, but the short answer is 1) they mostly don't do any better than public schools and 2) public schools could also "improve" if they were allowed to get rid of problem students. In other words, we're not talking about a new way to do public school-- we're talking about a new definition of what a public school is supposed to be.
Second, the privatization machine involves the end of local control. It is the end of any democratic control and accountability in a fundamental community institution. This is doubly troubling because so far, the people who are having democracy stripped away are mostly black, brown, and poor.
Third, turning education into a business means that business concerns will take precedence over student concerns. The purpose of a public school is to educate students. The purpose of a business is to make money. That does not make a business evil, but look around the rest of the world and ask yourself if businesses make money primarily by devoting themselves to creating the most excellent products. Operators of a school-flavored business will always have interests that are in conflict with the interests of their students. That cannot be good for education.
We are looking at a movement to change schools from a public good, a service provided by communities for their members, into a profit-generating business. Maybe that's a change we want as a society, and maybe a public discussion about such a transformation would lead us to that conclusion. I hope not, but maybe it's so. But we're not having that discussion. Instead, some folks are making changes in policy and regulation to create that transformation without anybody having a chance to object. That is not okay; it's a discussion we need to have whether some folks want us to have it or not.
Saturday, June 20, 2015
Friday, June 19, 2015
CA: What Else Could We Do...?
I've just returned from a visit to my son and his fiance. They live in the Koreatown neighborhood of Los Angeles, and over the past few years, I've noted some desultory building activity in the lots across the street from their building. But this trip, work was in full bloom.
This is not a small piece of construction, sitting on a big chunk of neighborhood. "What the heck is that?" I asked. My future daughter-in-law told me that it's a charter school. How did she know? The pastor of the church across the street told her (and, apparently, that the church was working with the charter).
Wow.
I'm just looking at the construction, the huge amount of money that must be pouring into that site, and mostly I'm thinking, "What could a public school that is already in place, that already exists, that already has a lot and a building-- what could that school do with the money being poured into that charter construction?"
It's one thing to consider all this in theory, but to actually look at the pile of money that must be going into securing the lot, building the structure, adding the bells and whistles, while meanwhile back at my own school, there's basic maintenance on things like doors that won't be done this year because we're a little stretched on the budget.
What, I wonder, will not get done in a Koreatown school this year because a river of money has been diverted so that this shiny new building can go up.
You figure out opportunity costs by asking questions like, "If you had a couple million dollars to spend on your district, what are the first five things that would go on your list?" I can't imagine that there are leaders in any school district who would say, "Not spend any of it on facilities we already have, but build whole new facilities somewhere else." I mean, look at that pile of bricks. What could we build with that many bricks at a school that already exists? What could we have done with our broken-down walls if we had the money that went into that pretty orange facing?
The school may be shiny and swell. The people behind it may be bighearted and well-intentioned. But that none of that changes the fact that in order to spend the money to create a new charter school, that money had to be taken away from public schools. It seems wasteful and inefficient and just foolish.
Wow.
I'm just looking at the construction, the huge amount of money that must be pouring into that site, and mostly I'm thinking, "What could a public school that is already in place, that already exists, that already has a lot and a building-- what could that school do with the money being poured into that charter construction?"
It's one thing to consider all this in theory, but to actually look at the pile of money that must be going into securing the lot, building the structure, adding the bells and whistles, while meanwhile back at my own school, there's basic maintenance on things like doors that won't be done this year because we're a little stretched on the budget.
What, I wonder, will not get done in a Koreatown school this year because a river of money has been diverted so that this shiny new building can go up.
You figure out opportunity costs by asking questions like, "If you had a couple million dollars to spend on your district, what are the first five things that would go on your list?" I can't imagine that there are leaders in any school district who would say, "Not spend any of it on facilities we already have, but build whole new facilities somewhere else." I mean, look at that pile of bricks. What could we build with that many bricks at a school that already exists? What could we have done with our broken-down walls if we had the money that went into that pretty orange facing?
The school may be shiny and swell. The people behind it may be bighearted and well-intentioned. But that none of that changes the fact that in order to spend the money to create a new charter school, that money had to be taken away from public schools. It seems wasteful and inefficient and just foolish.
Opting Options
.@rweingarten Including the right to opt their kids out of public schools (and take the public dollars with them)?
— Michael Petrilli (@MichaelPetrilli) June 18, 2015
Language is funny-- it sometimes creates the illusion of parallels and conections when none, in fact, exist. I could say, for instance, that the fact that you order Chicken McNuggets is proof that you are lacking in bravery, that you are too chicken to stand up for what you believe in, or maybe that you are showing that you are rushing towards consequences, since you are paying for the chance to have the chickens come home to roost.
More than a few folks have observed that opting children out of the Big Standardized Test and opting children out of public school are two things that can be described by using the phrase"opting out." But there are some fairly important differences between the two options for opting.
First, the BS Test and public school are not equivalent. Public education, provided by and paid for by the community, is one of the greater goods upon which this country is built. The door swings both ways. In order for our democracy to function, our citizens have to possess some level of education. Also, as a democracy, we recognize every citizen's right to a full education-- we do not operate on the assumption that some people deserve a good education and other lesser people do not.
A BS Test, on the other hand, is not one of the greater goods at the foundation of this country. There is not even evidence that it is a lesser good, or even a fair-to-middlin' good. There's no indication that it is good at all. Certainly there is no argument to be made that, in order to participate in democracy, every citizen ought to take a standardized test. Nor is there no case to be made that every citizen needs to be tested in order to receive all their rights. "I could have really gone somewhere in life, if only I'd had the chance to take the PARCC," said nobody ever.
Public education is provided for the benefit of the individuals being educated, and it is provided for the benefit of society as a whole. BS Testing benefits test manufacturers.
Furthermore, opting out of the BS Test does not take anything away from anyone else. As currently structured, choice systems always strip resources from the public school for every student who "opts out." The loss to the public school is always in excess of the actual reduction in the public school's costs; ten students fewer does not equate fewer building expenses, fewer teachers, or less heat and light in the building.
I can actually imagine a system with multiple schools to choose from-- but that system only works if every school is fully funded. As long as we insist that we can fund one public school and three charters for the same total cost as one public school, choice will be a zero sum game, and public schools will be the losers. This means that every child who opts out of public school leaves the students in the public school with fewer resources. If Chris opts out, Pat is left in a worsening public school situation-- and Pat has no say in the matter.
Opting out of the BS Tests, however, affects nobody except the opt-outer. The testing experience of the students who are left behind is not affected. If Chris opts out, it doesn't change Pat's testing adventure in the slightest.
Finally, Petrilli is correct in saying that those are public dollars-- and a choice-charter system denies the public any say in how those dollars are spent. Granted, the democracy of elected school boards is sometimes problematic, and as with all political situations, some voices have to work extra hard to be heard. But that is still better than a choice-charter system where decisions are made by folks who don't answer to anybody.
So, no-- these opt outs are not the same.
Sweden vs. Nevada
Folks who are excited about Nevada's joyful embrace of choice-on-steroids might want to take a look at Sweden.
As my esteemed colleague Edushyster reminds us, the all-choice system experiment has been tried. Sweden has been creating an all-choice, all-privatized system for decades, and it has not gone well.
"It was in the early 2000s that the Swedish school system somehow seems to have lost its soul. Schools began to compete no longer on delivering superior quality but on offering shiny school buildings in shopping centres, and I think that’s the issue we are really seeing." Andreas Schleicher, OECD.
I am going to keep repeating this line until it starts to sink in:
The free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing.
We have our own free-market education laboratory-- post-secondary education. As you may have heard, the cost of college has expanded like a hamster clamped onto a helium tank. There are a variety of suspects, all instructive.
One theory is that costs are driven up by the amount of money people have to spend. Student aid has been climbing, which has had the same effect on costs that you could expect if you went to a used car lot and announced, "Oh, I though I only had ten grand to spend on a car, but it turns out I actually have fifteen." (Hint: the salesman does not say, "Oh, put that extra five K away-- you won't need it for anything.")
Some analysts blame frills, like Schleicher's "shiny school buildings." Parents who drop their children off at schools far nicer than their own add anecdotal punch to this idea. Why do schools add frills? Because a frill is good, easy marketing, and because not all customers in the marketplace are driven by rational consideration of educational quality.
Other analysts have noted the increase in administrators. More money, more students, more facilities, more marketing = more people in charge.
All of this is predictable by the what I'm going to call the Jobs Effect, from an interview with Steve Jobs in which he observed that past a certain point, improving your product does not make you more money and at that point, the people who make a difference in the bottom line are the bean counters and marketters, and so those are the people who start rising through the ranks to run the business, leading to the point where product quality stops mattering and the company loses its way.
This seems to match what we find in Sweden. As a result of all-choice system, test scores plummet and gaps between the class-- well, Edushyster offers this quote from the Swedish education minister:
Instead of breaking up social differences and class differences in the education system, we have a system today that’s creating a wider gap between the ones that have and the ones that have not.
It's kind of amazing-- here's an entire country that has done exactly what charter-choice advocates want to do in this country, and they've been doing it for years, and the results are clearly visible and visibly crappy. Yes, you could argue that Sweden is a different country with a different culture, but that sort of concern certainly hasn't kept reformsters from loving on China and Finland and Estonia.
So let's not call Nevada's choice system an experiment, because it's no more an experiment than saying, "Hmm, I wonder if anything bad will happen if I smoke two packs of cigarettes a day for the next four decades." No, Nevada's new system is the same sort of willful denial as "I'm sure he'll really leave his wife this time" or "Clicking on the button the five-hundred-and-first time will make all the difference." And when it fails, the entire country of Sweden will be able to say, "We told you so."
As my esteemed colleague Edushyster reminds us, the all-choice system experiment has been tried. Sweden has been creating an all-choice, all-privatized system for decades, and it has not gone well.
"It was in the early 2000s that the Swedish school system somehow seems to have lost its soul. Schools began to compete no longer on delivering superior quality but on offering shiny school buildings in shopping centres, and I think that’s the issue we are really seeing." Andreas Schleicher, OECD.
I am going to keep repeating this line until it starts to sink in:
The free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing.
We have our own free-market education laboratory-- post-secondary education. As you may have heard, the cost of college has expanded like a hamster clamped onto a helium tank. There are a variety of suspects, all instructive.
One theory is that costs are driven up by the amount of money people have to spend. Student aid has been climbing, which has had the same effect on costs that you could expect if you went to a used car lot and announced, "Oh, I though I only had ten grand to spend on a car, but it turns out I actually have fifteen." (Hint: the salesman does not say, "Oh, put that extra five K away-- you won't need it for anything.")
Some analysts blame frills, like Schleicher's "shiny school buildings." Parents who drop their children off at schools far nicer than their own add anecdotal punch to this idea. Why do schools add frills? Because a frill is good, easy marketing, and because not all customers in the marketplace are driven by rational consideration of educational quality.
Other analysts have noted the increase in administrators. More money, more students, more facilities, more marketing = more people in charge.
All of this is predictable by the what I'm going to call the Jobs Effect, from an interview with Steve Jobs in which he observed that past a certain point, improving your product does not make you more money and at that point, the people who make a difference in the bottom line are the bean counters and marketters, and so those are the people who start rising through the ranks to run the business, leading to the point where product quality stops mattering and the company loses its way.
This seems to match what we find in Sweden. As a result of all-choice system, test scores plummet and gaps between the class-- well, Edushyster offers this quote from the Swedish education minister:
Instead of breaking up social differences and class differences in the education system, we have a system today that’s creating a wider gap between the ones that have and the ones that have not.
It's kind of amazing-- here's an entire country that has done exactly what charter-choice advocates want to do in this country, and they've been doing it for years, and the results are clearly visible and visibly crappy. Yes, you could argue that Sweden is a different country with a different culture, but that sort of concern certainly hasn't kept reformsters from loving on China and Finland and Estonia.
So let's not call Nevada's choice system an experiment, because it's no more an experiment than saying, "Hmm, I wonder if anything bad will happen if I smoke two packs of cigarettes a day for the next four decades." No, Nevada's new system is the same sort of willful denial as "I'm sure he'll really leave his wife this time" or "Clicking on the button the five-hundred-and-first time will make all the difference." And when it fails, the entire country of Sweden will be able to say, "We told you so."
Monsters
When somebody does something awful, my most immediate response is to wonder what was going on in their head that made that action seem okay. See, I believe that the vast majority of people try to do what they believe is right, what is in line with the rules for how the world is supposed to work. Even the most horrible acts are somehow, in their perpetrator's mind, okay.
Sometimes it's because that person's mind really is broken. When someone starts taking orders from the voice of Satan speaking through a dog, his perception of reality is so twisted that it's hard to imagine how he ended up in that dark and distorted place where it's okay to kill people you don't even know. But Son of Sam type killers are not the norm.
I don't think I believe in monsters. At least, I don't believe that monsters are somehow fundamentally different from the rest of the non-monstrous population. I think monsters are people who have found a way to see doing something monstrous as okay. And while I believe that each of us is ultimately responsible for our own choices, I also believe that as a culture, we grease the downward path to certain dark conclusions.
Humans are hardwired against killing other humans, and so the first step toward killing someone else is to see that person as not-a-person, not really human. A person, of course, is someone like me, someone who thinks, feels, reacts, believes as I do. Not-persons act out of some other set of impulses and motivations that I cannot comprehend.
Our culture is depressingly adept at labeling not-persons. Our entertainment narratives repeatedly hammer home that persons are white guys, and women and not-white guys are persons to the extent that they come close to the white guy. Our politics have become heavily infected with the idea of Betters and Lessers, and the notion that poverty is simply proof that some persons are less person-like, less possessed of the qualities that Real Persons have for rising above. "If I had been born into poverty," goes the formulation, "I would have just worked hard and pulled myself out of it. The way Those People are acting just goes to show that they lack some of the basic qualities of Personhood."
But when we add the view of not-person to a sense of grievance, bad stuff happens.
Slate's Jamelle Bouie has a piece about the history of rape accusations as justification for racist violence, both inside and outside the halls of justice. But while grievance can attach itself to the belief that there is some clear and present threat, it can also attach itself to the idea that I'm being kept form getting what I deserve.
Murder by Angry White Guy has its own set of common characteristics. And it's worse than you think, because even as various outlets are putting up galleries of White Guy Murderers from the past few decades, there are I-don't-even-want-to-think-about-how-many more.
You've probably don't recognize the name George Sodini, but in 2009, he walked into an LA Fitness in a Pittsburgh neighborhood and killed three women, including one of my former students. Jody was in my honors class as a junior. She was a standout basketball player, smart, and very personable. She could have been a standard-issue high school Queen Bee, but she had a warmth and kindness that most people responded to. She played ball in college, became first a physical therapist, then a medical equipment saleswoman. She was 37 when Sodini ended her life.
Sodini killed himself that same morning. Afterwards, his online journal was discovered, and it was the same old damn shit. On Obama's election, he wrote "Amerika has chosen The Black Man" and bemoaned how "dem young white hoez dig da bruthrz." He complained how he hadn't had sex in nineteen years and women just kept rejecting him, which was their fault. He planned the shooting for months, but kept losing his nerve. There was a life he was supposed to have, but somehow these Not-Persons were keeping him from it. So he went to the gym and killed three of them.
And that's just one of the however-many of such Angry White Men that didn't quite score big national press.
Should we call them terrorists? The word itself has a relatively short history. Run a search on google ngram, and the word barely appears before World War I, takes a small jump at World War II, then starts to climb through the sixties until it leaps upward in the late seventies, drops in the early eighties, and then begins a roar to prominence in the late nineties.
We haven't really had a lot of time to think about what we mean when we use the word. The connotation is often something along the lines of "A not-person who wants to hurt me for no good reason." Which would explain why we rarely call Angry White Men murderers terrorists. But if a terrorist is someone who strikes out at members of a group, treating them as proxies for the larger group-- particularly if his goal is for the members of the larger group to live in fear-- then these guys qualify. Dylann Roof is a terrorist.
I'm not sure what that designation gets us, exactly, other than forcing folks to question why some killers are "troubled" and others are "evil" or "thugs."
I don't mind if we want to call them "monsters" as long as we ask ourselves some questions about what laboratory hatched them. This does not not not NOT excuse someone like Roof from responsibility for his actions. But in the wake of this terrible act, we need to ask about "the system, the way of life, and the philosophy" that made these murders seem okay to Roof. Ironically, that requires us to see him as a person in the same way that he evidently would not see Black persons.
As teachers going forward, this is a reminder of why we have to call out any and all actions and attitudes that foster a view of some human beings as not-persons. We have to charge our students to see other people as fully human. It is one of the most fundamental purposes of education-- to become fully human ourselves and in doing so, to see what is fully human in the folks we share the planet with. Where the system treats anybody, any group of people, any category of human as less-than-human, that system must be called out. Treating people as not-persons is not wrong just because it opens the door to murder-- it's wrong for so many more reasons-- but the fact that it opens the door to murder is a sign of just how wrong it is.
Thursday, June 18, 2015
PA: Assault on Public Ed Advances
You may recall that State Senator Lloyd Smucker has been trying to sell the idea of an Achievement School District, and that he even brought some charter-choice advocates to town to help push the idea. Well, his initiative has made it out of the concept-and-hearings stage and is now an actual bill.
Senate Bill 6, the Educational Oppportunity and Accountability Act, would amend the school code to establish an Achievement School District, a state-run body that would take over local school districts. If you're wondering if this process would be politicized, here's how the seven ASD board members would be selected-- One by the Governor, two by President Pro Tempore, two by the Speaker of the House, one by Minority Leader of the Senate and one by Minority Leader of the Senate.
The ASD board would appoint an executive director who would have the power to "transfer an eligible school" to the ASD as well as the ability to authorize a charter school.
It gets worse.
The ASD has the power to convert any school under its jurisdiction to a charter school. It has to establish criteria for such conversions "consistent with national standards" which-- what? What national standards? Exactly what national standards for public-to-charter school conversion are we talking about here?
Every year the ASD must do at least one of the following to at least five (but no more than fifteen) schools in its jurisdiction:
* Replace the principal and at least 50% of the staff
* Contract with a nonprofit or for-profit management entity to operate the school
* Convert the school to a charter
* Close the school and transfer the students to some high-performing school
* Open a new charter school and give priority to students in the area
How can schools become "eligible" for this great treatment? Three ways:
* Ranking in the lowest 1% SPP rating for two consecutive years starting in 2013-2014
* A school that qualifies as an "intervention" school for three straight years starting 2013-2014
* Or 50% of the parents can pull the trigger
The first is particularly tasty, because there will always be someone in the bottom 1%. Pennsylvania could have the most awesome schools in the world, and there will still be a bottom 1%. Ka0ching, charter operators! And for those of you non-Pennsylvanians, the SPP rating is a tasty goulash of test results, VAM-soaked baloney, and fun pay-for-play features like Number of Students Who Take the SAT. If you do the math, though, the SPP is about 90% test results, and could easily be replaced by simple running the poverty numbers for the district.
Pennsylvania School Boards Association put out a position paper at the beginning of the week. They have a pretty good grasp of the situation:
PSBA strongly opposes Senate Bill 6. Not only does it entirely remove the elected school board from operational decisions of a district school, but it requires the district to pay the bill for charter tuition costs for resident students that are transferred to new privately-operated charter schools converted or created by the ASD.
Yes, Smucker's legislation privatizes everything except the bill for all this privatizing poopfest-- that bill is still delivered directly to the taxpayers who no longer have any say over what happens with their tax dollars or their school system. But if the ASD sets up a charter in their town, they still have to pay for it even as they have no say over how that charter operates.
Smucker ran a construction company before entering politics and heading to Harrisburg. Some of what he's said about the bill doesn't match up with the official summary-- most notably he's said that help and resources would first be available for the bottom 5% of schools, which matches up with the 5% number popular with ASD fans.
This is privatization at its most naked, an undisguised plan for removing local control and replacing it with taxpayer-funded profiteering. This bill should offend lefties (corporate profiteering and abandoning commitment to public education) and righties (complete loss of local control). It's just bad.
As of June 15, the bill has been passed by the education committee and has been re-referred to the Appropriations committee. Feel free to contact Senator Smucker, and if you are PA resident, please contact your elected representative. This bill is a direct assault on public education, and it should never, ever become law.
Senate Bill 6, the Educational Oppportunity and Accountability Act, would amend the school code to establish an Achievement School District, a state-run body that would take over local school districts. If you're wondering if this process would be politicized, here's how the seven ASD board members would be selected-- One by the Governor, two by President Pro Tempore, two by the Speaker of the House, one by Minority Leader of the Senate and one by Minority Leader of the Senate.
The ASD board would appoint an executive director who would have the power to "transfer an eligible school" to the ASD as well as the ability to authorize a charter school.
It gets worse.
The ASD has the power to convert any school under its jurisdiction to a charter school. It has to establish criteria for such conversions "consistent with national standards" which-- what? What national standards? Exactly what national standards for public-to-charter school conversion are we talking about here?
Every year the ASD must do at least one of the following to at least five (but no more than fifteen) schools in its jurisdiction:
* Replace the principal and at least 50% of the staff
* Contract with a nonprofit or for-profit management entity to operate the school
* Convert the school to a charter
* Close the school and transfer the students to some high-performing school
* Open a new charter school and give priority to students in the area
How can schools become "eligible" for this great treatment? Three ways:
* Ranking in the lowest 1% SPP rating for two consecutive years starting in 2013-2014
* A school that qualifies as an "intervention" school for three straight years starting 2013-2014
* Or 50% of the parents can pull the trigger
The first is particularly tasty, because there will always be someone in the bottom 1%. Pennsylvania could have the most awesome schools in the world, and there will still be a bottom 1%. Ka0ching, charter operators! And for those of you non-Pennsylvanians, the SPP rating is a tasty goulash of test results, VAM-soaked baloney, and fun pay-for-play features like Number of Students Who Take the SAT. If you do the math, though, the SPP is about 90% test results, and could easily be replaced by simple running the poverty numbers for the district.
Pennsylvania School Boards Association put out a position paper at the beginning of the week. They have a pretty good grasp of the situation:
PSBA strongly opposes Senate Bill 6. Not only does it entirely remove the elected school board from operational decisions of a district school, but it requires the district to pay the bill for charter tuition costs for resident students that are transferred to new privately-operated charter schools converted or created by the ASD.
Yes, Smucker's legislation privatizes everything except the bill for all this privatizing poopfest-- that bill is still delivered directly to the taxpayers who no longer have any say over what happens with their tax dollars or their school system. But if the ASD sets up a charter in their town, they still have to pay for it even as they have no say over how that charter operates.
Smucker ran a construction company before entering politics and heading to Harrisburg. Some of what he's said about the bill doesn't match up with the official summary-- most notably he's said that help and resources would first be available for the bottom 5% of schools, which matches up with the 5% number popular with ASD fans.
This is privatization at its most naked, an undisguised plan for removing local control and replacing it with taxpayer-funded profiteering. This bill should offend lefties (corporate profiteering and abandoning commitment to public education) and righties (complete loss of local control). It's just bad.
As of June 15, the bill has been passed by the education committee and has been re-referred to the Appropriations committee. Feel free to contact Senator Smucker, and if you are PA resident, please contact your elected representative. This bill is a direct assault on public education, and it should never, ever become law.
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.
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.
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