Has it seemed strange lately, to find reformsters advocating for stronger charter school regulations? Does it seem odd to find guys like Mike Petrilli, one of charterdom's most tireless salesmen, traveling to Detroit to tell reformsters to police charter quality more thoroughly? Is it surprise to find Fordham calling for tougher charter regulations in Ohio, where they themselves operate charters?
In war, an army may take a position through rough and ugly means-- but once there, they consolidate that position by tightening up the troops, re-positioning defenses, and generally settling in.
Or if you prefer a more peaceful example, try retail. A good used car salesman knows to assume the sale and swiftly shift the conversation away from "Are you going to buy this car" to "How would you like to pay for this car?" Because the second conversation assumes that the purchase of the car is not in question.
Defining the new normal
Charter fans have been shifting into consolidation mode, working hard to assume the sale. In places like Ohio, where charters have grown up like kudzu and died off like your confused grandma's unwatered plants, supporters are quick to call for reform-- not an end to a charter system. In York, PA, an editorial points out in one breath that the small charter system has produced some staggering fails, but in the next breath calls for reform, not abolition. Even a new report on the state of New Orleans' mess of a charter system, written by the Center for Popular Democracy and the Coalition for Community Schools, decides that the widespread failure, fraud and abuse means it's time for more regulations.
This is particularly remarkable because back when folks were trying to get the charter foot in the door, every mention of a public school's failure or general shortcomings was proof, not that public schools needed help or resources or more government control, but that they needed to be shut down. When we found so much as a spot on the public school apple, we declared it was rotten and needed to be thrown away, but nowadays, when we find a charter apple that is brown and mushy, we just get out a paring knife and declare, "We'll just cut a couple of bad spots out and make a great pie!"
Petrilli and other charter pushers have fought hard on specific battles, but they are playing the long game as well. When Petrilli tells audiences like the New York Superintendents to seek out the sensible middle, he's really assuming the sale, selling the idea that replacing public education with a charter system is not all that wild and crazy, not at all a complete change of the point and mission of public education.
Charter fans regularly put out a simple message-- that, of course, charters are a permanent and appropriate part of the education landscape, and while we may need to talk about how to manage them, the idea that the charter system approach is now proven a failed experiment and should be dropped-- well, that's just crazy talk and we'd just as soon nobody even say it out loud.
Free-ish Un-open Market
In the process of tightening charter regulations, the charter army can also shed some of their erstwhile allies. A legion of charter operators descending on a city might have helped sell the Educational Variety Charter Concept, or made the dismantling of local public education more manageable, or just been a lovely paean to the Free Open Market.
But step two of having a Free Open Market is for some folks to dominate the Free Open Market and immediate start squeezing everybody else out of the Free Open Market (e.g. John D. Rockefeller or William Gates). This effect is compounded in the charter marketplace because some of the rabble are making the market winners look bad by association. The trick to watch for here is how the regulations are written. Market dominators usually like to get in there and help write the regulations so that the regulations favor the dominators (e.g. the food industry and the military-industrial complex). Look for charter regulations that favor the big players in the charter biz. Remember, when you are winning at Free Market, you want to squeeze out your competition and make it harder for other competitors to get in the game. Since most of the big players in the charter biz are also hedge fund guys, you know they already understand this perfectly.
Put the hammer away
Another feature of the consolidation stage is an attempt to shift the locus of power.
Once upon a time, reformsters loved the idea of getting the feds involved. The feds were maneuvered into pushing Common Core, high stakes testing, anti-teacher evaluation systems, Big Data collection and pushing turnaround mandates that would open the door for charters. Yes, once upon a time reformsters loved the federal gummint.
They loved them because the Big Federal Hammer was the only hammer big enough to break apart the state-level so-called-monopolies on education. "Go get 'em, USED," cheered reformsters.
Now, some things went wrong with that pretty quickly. I don't think anybody expected Common Core to blow up in conservative's faces so thoroughly, and the dream of two national-scale tests fell apart pretty quickly as well. Reformsters shifted pretty quickly to, "It's that darn Obama/Duncan who messed up our perfectly fine Common Core."
But reformsters were always going to turn on the feds. Say you're madly in love with Ethel, but she's dating Alphonse, who is big and strong and buff. So you hire/manipulate/coerce Waldeaux into taking Alphonse out of the picture. Before you can make your own move on Ethel, you need Waldeaux to go away. That's where we are now.
Reformsters are writing big thoughtful papers about how the feds need to shift control of the educational system back to the states while they are also pushing models for how the state can best implement charter expansions. They need the Big Federal Hammer to go away, because now that the golden eggs of individual states have been busted open, they need to NOT have federal regulations and control getting in their way. The dog that got off the leash and chewed up public schools has to be releashed before it lays any teeth on the charter biz.
Unintended consequences
No, I don't think they had this all figured out ahead of time. The collapse of Common Core, the routing of some Big Data companies, the failure of PARCC-- I think all of those required some improvisation. I also think they've been auditioning different models of state-level privatization, only just recently settling on the NOLA-Memphis style Recovery-Achievement School District model as most promising.
So, no, I don't think they've worked this all out, and I don't think we're on an unavoidable track toward charter domination.
School privatizers now face a challenge-- the writing of the rules. Pretty much everybody believes that charters, at a minimum, need some reining. But every piece of regulation can potentially cut into the power to make money easily in the sector. For charteristas, writing just the right regulations that tighten the market without turning it all into another version of the same old public school system, which is related to the puzzle of how to get government to hand over tax dollars without attaching strings to it.
For the rest of us, the challenge is to keep the right questions on the table. Charter promoters are predisposed to present each issue as a momentary blip, and not evidence that there's something fundamentally unsound about a charter-choice system. Instead of discussing how best to manage the privatized charter system, we should keep asking why we should even be having it in the first place.
Sunday, July 5, 2015
Watch "Education, Inc."
Filmmaker Brian Malone has made a worthy addition to the catalog of documentaries about reformster shenanigans. Education, Inc is well worth your time (and your money).
The challenge for any documentary about the reformster assault is to show both the large picture of what powers and policies are fueling the privatization of public ed, and also the way these issues play out on a local level. Malone meets that challenge admirably.
He begins with his local focus-- Douglas County in Colorado. As we join them, they are in the midst of a hard-fought battle for control of the local school board-- control that was lost in previous election as a slate of members were swept in on a wave of outside money. Why would little Douglass County attract anyone's attention? Probably because they have a $500 million budget.
The clash between the reformster board members and the public school supporters is hard to watch; the board uses an escalating series of moves to silence public objections and to insure that they can meet in peace to do as they wish. It's ugly and it's not even masked in a cloak of politeness or rationalization.
Malone tells his own story as a local parent slowly becoming aware that the brutal impact on his own school system is just one local manifestation of larger forces in the nation, and so eventually he travels to other cities, including Chicago and DC. He learns about No Child Left Behind and the role of ALEC in producing the privatization policies that have popped up all across America. He learns about the role of testing in driving privatization. He takes a look at the differences in how all this plays out in a neighboring county, and what can be learned from the differences. I am not sure that he entirely gets Common Core (at one point he says that "the principle of Common Core is a good one") but that is a brief portion of the film.
What Malone does get is the power of politics soaked in an ocean of money, chasing an even huger ocean of money. Malone gets how that big soggy mess is turning into ugly and destructive policies on the local level. Malone gets how free-market ideology is destroying the fundamental idea of public education.
Much of this will seem familiar to readers of this blog, buy it's still worth watching. We've all read plenty about how combative and unresponsive reformsters can be, but watching still is a punch in the gut. And the portion of the film in which an activist discovers that a school district has actually set up a dummy charter school in order to launder money on its illegal path to fund a private religious school is astonishing in a "just when you think you've seen the most cynical and giant-balled reformster move ever" way.
Malone also underlines a sad truth, but one we have to confront-- none of what happened in Douglass County could have happened without the cooperation of the vast majority of the local voters, who just stayed home and didn't vote at all. We can talk all day about how Big Money is used to sway elections, but most elections in this country could be radically altered if the voters just showed up.
Ultimately Malone brings us back to the outcome of the hotly contested school board election; I'll leave that to the movie to tell you.
I will add Education, Inc to my arsenal of material to use in getting through to folks who haven't been paying attention. You can purchase a copy for $20, which is certainly a better use of a twenty than two big meals at McDonald's or a copy of Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2. I recommend the film both for your own use to share with friends and family; Malone has done a great job of connecting the larger issues to a local setting. And here's one last thing to notice-- this is not about some urban poverty center, but beautiful, comfortable Colorado. On top of everything else, the film is a reminder that reformsters have their eyes everywhere. Time to wake up.
The challenge for any documentary about the reformster assault is to show both the large picture of what powers and policies are fueling the privatization of public ed, and also the way these issues play out on a local level. Malone meets that challenge admirably.
He begins with his local focus-- Douglas County in Colorado. As we join them, they are in the midst of a hard-fought battle for control of the local school board-- control that was lost in previous election as a slate of members were swept in on a wave of outside money. Why would little Douglass County attract anyone's attention? Probably because they have a $500 million budget.
The clash between the reformster board members and the public school supporters is hard to watch; the board uses an escalating series of moves to silence public objections and to insure that they can meet in peace to do as they wish. It's ugly and it's not even masked in a cloak of politeness or rationalization.
Malone tells his own story as a local parent slowly becoming aware that the brutal impact on his own school system is just one local manifestation of larger forces in the nation, and so eventually he travels to other cities, including Chicago and DC. He learns about No Child Left Behind and the role of ALEC in producing the privatization policies that have popped up all across America. He learns about the role of testing in driving privatization. He takes a look at the differences in how all this plays out in a neighboring county, and what can be learned from the differences. I am not sure that he entirely gets Common Core (at one point he says that "the principle of Common Core is a good one") but that is a brief portion of the film.
What Malone does get is the power of politics soaked in an ocean of money, chasing an even huger ocean of money. Malone gets how that big soggy mess is turning into ugly and destructive policies on the local level. Malone gets how free-market ideology is destroying the fundamental idea of public education.
Much of this will seem familiar to readers of this blog, buy it's still worth watching. We've all read plenty about how combative and unresponsive reformsters can be, but watching still is a punch in the gut. And the portion of the film in which an activist discovers that a school district has actually set up a dummy charter school in order to launder money on its illegal path to fund a private religious school is astonishing in a "just when you think you've seen the most cynical and giant-balled reformster move ever" way.
Malone also underlines a sad truth, but one we have to confront-- none of what happened in Douglass County could have happened without the cooperation of the vast majority of the local voters, who just stayed home and didn't vote at all. We can talk all day about how Big Money is used to sway elections, but most elections in this country could be radically altered if the voters just showed up.
Ultimately Malone brings us back to the outcome of the hotly contested school board election; I'll leave that to the movie to tell you.
I will add Education, Inc to my arsenal of material to use in getting through to folks who haven't been paying attention. You can purchase a copy for $20, which is certainly a better use of a twenty than two big meals at McDonald's or a copy of Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2. I recommend the film both for your own use to share with friends and family; Malone has done a great job of connecting the larger issues to a local setting. And here's one last thing to notice-- this is not about some urban poverty center, but beautiful, comfortable Colorado. On top of everything else, the film is a reminder that reformsters have their eyes everywhere. Time to wake up.
Detroit News Is Clueless
Detroit News writer Ingrid Jacques reports breathlessly about the arrival of education experts into the motor city. Actually, the headline writer says the experts "descend" on Detroit, which tells you plenty about how the editor views the relative position of these experts and the city, even if the editor stopped short of writing "Experts descend from on high to enlighten lowly locals."
Jacques and her editors have an odd view of what constitutes an educational expert, because the experts in question are Mike Petrilli (Fordham Foundation) and Eric Chan (Charter School Growth Fund). So, not so much "educational experts" as "charter school marketing experts." They were invited by Excellent Schools Detroit. ESD deserves its own piece, but the short form is that ESD was formed in 2010 as one of those "community philanthropic boards" that allows all sorts of privatizers to get a seat at the school management table without having to be, you know, elected or anything. These boards are carefully crafted to make sure that The Right People are in charge of making all the decisions about how to manage schools (and those sweet, sweet piles of public tax money).
Chan and Petrilli were working the next phase charter talking points, which is generally to call for tighter quality controls on charter schools, because while the theory is that charters need to be opened because the charters do a better job than public schools, it turns out that many don't do a better job than public schools and so the charter system has to be fixed. This is the newest odd paradox in the privatizing narrative-- when public school systems fail, they must be replaced, but when charter school systems fail, they must be nurtured, supported, managed and improved. Go figure.
Jacques says that Detroit should look at "models that are working," citing New Orleans and Memphis, so I guess by "working" she doesn't so much mean "providing quality community school systems" as she means "creating good revenue streams for privatizers." She does note that Detroit is "complicated" and poses some "unique challenges." Which leads us to this improbable sentence:
That's partly why the education debate in Detroit is attracting such high-profile expertise.
Will this be the place where she introduce people who are actually experts in education? (Spoiler alert: no). Her next example is Paul Pastorek, the former NOLA superintendent who turned post-Katrina public school crisis in to charter school gold (well, gold for charter operators-- for students and local communities, not so much). Pastorek has used that experience to launch a new career as traveling charter system salesman-consultant, and he's been working in Michigan to show how to make Detroit's system more profiteer-friendly.
Jacques alludes to some of Detroit's issues, including a mish-mosh of authorizers plus the state's version of an Achievement School District as well as the financial disaster that happens to a public school system when you let a swarm of charters feast on its blood. Why is all this a problem? Could it be a problem because it disenfranchises local voters, or because it creates instability for the poorest neighborhoods that need stability, or because it fails to provide decent education for the students?
Pshaw. None of that. It's a problem because it makes life harder for investors in charter schools. That's why Chan's here. His investment group has big bets placed on most of the major charter operators.
But those top management companies have shied away from Detroit because of the unstable environment that currently exists. With a dozen different authorizers opening and closing schools in Detroit, Chan says this creates unpredictable enrollment and limits the expansion potential for highest-rated operators. That could change, however.
"As an investor, I'm optimistic," Chan says. "I sense you're heading in the right direction."
So we see once again why privatizing public schools is a crappy idea-- because privatization transforms the very purpose of schools. Educating students or serving a community? Naw, that's way down the list. Provide a good return for investors-- that's the real purpose of a school system.
That's why I have to feel bad for the folks in Detroit-- they have a school system deeply in crisis, and a newspaper that can't tell the difference between a doctor and a vulture.
Jacques and her editors have an odd view of what constitutes an educational expert, because the experts in question are Mike Petrilli (Fordham Foundation) and Eric Chan (Charter School Growth Fund). So, not so much "educational experts" as "charter school marketing experts." They were invited by Excellent Schools Detroit. ESD deserves its own piece, but the short form is that ESD was formed in 2010 as one of those "community philanthropic boards" that allows all sorts of privatizers to get a seat at the school management table without having to be, you know, elected or anything. These boards are carefully crafted to make sure that The Right People are in charge of making all the decisions about how to manage schools (and those sweet, sweet piles of public tax money).
Chan and Petrilli were working the next phase charter talking points, which is generally to call for tighter quality controls on charter schools, because while the theory is that charters need to be opened because the charters do a better job than public schools, it turns out that many don't do a better job than public schools and so the charter system has to be fixed. This is the newest odd paradox in the privatizing narrative-- when public school systems fail, they must be replaced, but when charter school systems fail, they must be nurtured, supported, managed and improved. Go figure.
Jacques says that Detroit should look at "models that are working," citing New Orleans and Memphis, so I guess by "working" she doesn't so much mean "providing quality community school systems" as she means "creating good revenue streams for privatizers." She does note that Detroit is "complicated" and poses some "unique challenges." Which leads us to this improbable sentence:
That's partly why the education debate in Detroit is attracting such high-profile expertise.
Will this be the place where she introduce people who are actually experts in education? (Spoiler alert: no). Her next example is Paul Pastorek, the former NOLA superintendent who turned post-Katrina public school crisis in to charter school gold (well, gold for charter operators-- for students and local communities, not so much). Pastorek has used that experience to launch a new career as traveling charter system salesman-consultant, and he's been working in Michigan to show how to make Detroit's system more profiteer-friendly.
Jacques alludes to some of Detroit's issues, including a mish-mosh of authorizers plus the state's version of an Achievement School District as well as the financial disaster that happens to a public school system when you let a swarm of charters feast on its blood. Why is all this a problem? Could it be a problem because it disenfranchises local voters, or because it creates instability for the poorest neighborhoods that need stability, or because it fails to provide decent education for the students?
Pshaw. None of that. It's a problem because it makes life harder for investors in charter schools. That's why Chan's here. His investment group has big bets placed on most of the major charter operators.
But those top management companies have shied away from Detroit because of the unstable environment that currently exists. With a dozen different authorizers opening and closing schools in Detroit, Chan says this creates unpredictable enrollment and limits the expansion potential for highest-rated operators. That could change, however.
"As an investor, I'm optimistic," Chan says. "I sense you're heading in the right direction."
So we see once again why privatizing public schools is a crappy idea-- because privatization transforms the very purpose of schools. Educating students or serving a community? Naw, that's way down the list. Provide a good return for investors-- that's the real purpose of a school system.
That's why I have to feel bad for the folks in Detroit-- they have a school system deeply in crisis, and a newspaper that can't tell the difference between a doctor and a vulture.
ICYMI: Top Eduposts of Week (7/5)
I'm going to try a new feature- a weekly roundup of the posts from the week that were worth a look. I can guarantee that the list will not be all-inclusive, but it will be posts that I think deserve having some attention thrown their way.
Line in the Sand
Here's your "if you only read one post" post. Valerie Strauss presents a guest writer who likes Common Core (kind of) and believes in testing, but whose experience as a test scorer was just too appalling to bear. A real eye-opener for people wondering just how objective the Big Standardized Tests can be.
Are Teachers Professionals?
Sarah Blaine continues a conversation that has been going on across several blogs by noting (correctly, I think) one of the critical differences between teaching and professions like lawyering and doctoring.
US DOE Continues To Force Test Failure on Children With Special Needs and ELL Students
Nancy Bailey comments on the feds' ruling that Ne York may not common sense testing adaptations for English language learners and students with special needs. Because reasons.
State Teacher Equity Plans
Russ Walsh looks at what's wrong with some state plans for putting a super-duper teacher in every classroom.
Racism and the Charter School Movement
Over at truth-out, a professor of ethics and moral leadership breaks down the fallacies of the modern charter movement.
Questor says sell
Mercedes Schneider uncovers British investment advisors telling their customers to dump Pearson stock.
Charter-Gras 2015
Ashana Bigard travels to this years National Charter Schools convention in New Orleans, and she has a few question.
Leo Buscaglia on Education
If you are of a certain age, you remember Leo Buscaglia, teh guy who wanted us all to hug each other more often (among other things). Maria Popova dips into some of Buscaglia's writings to find some observations about education.
Saturday, July 4, 2015
The Hard Way
The Fourth of July is always a popular time for folks to reflect on what this country stands for, and we come up with many fine lists both of the best and the worst. Today, I'd like to add my own item to the list.
America stands for doing things the hard way.
When it comes to running a country, the easiest way to do it is to put one guy in charge and let him tell everybody how to do everything. He can be picked by heredity or tradition or power or wealth; he can be installed by a committee of Important People, or by the roar of the crowd, or even a legitimate-ish election. But the important part-- the easy part-- is that once you have him installed, you just let him run everything. No debates. no discussions, no big arguments about What To Do Next-- just let your Grand High Potentatial Poohbah decide it all.
There's a Less Easy but Still Pretty Easy way of doing things, which is to use an absolute democracy. Every issue that comes up, you vote on. The answer chosen by the majority is the answer the whole country uses, and discussion of the issue is over. If you're in the minority, you just shut up, and stay shut up.
We certainly toyed with all of these. Early on many citizens wanted to just crown George Washington King of America and be done with it. The founding fathers wrote all sorts of rules that they didn't want to be held to (all people are created equal, but not really) and many envisioned a country ruled by the votes of the Right People.
But instead, we dedicated our country to doing things the hard way. We wrote down a bunch of foundational premises for running a country, and then we set up a mechanism by which, over time, those principles could be interpreted and extended to their natural conclusions, even if the majority of founders didn't agree with those conclusions. The constitution is the ultimate exercise in saying, "Look, I'm going to agree to these principles, and every time I try to weasel out of actually following them, I want you to bop me over the head and stop me."
Furthermore, we set up a system based on the principle of not shutting people up, sorting them somehow into classes ranging from Those Who Must Always Be Listened to all the way down to Those Who Must Always Be Ignored.
The Framers had seen the many ways in which the easy way could go wrong, and somehow, they found the means of sitting down together with fellow citizens with whom they deeply and profoundly disagreed.
We have always been annoyed by our own system. We're irritated by the way it fosters unending debate on every little thing-- even things that we thought were already decided. And good Lord in heaven-- can't the people who are Dead Wrong just shut up and go away? We waste time, energy, and money on processes that are inefficient and inconsistent. There's hardly anything in this country that we don't do the hard way, loaded with argument and controversy and inefficiency and ambiguity.
On top of that, our peculiar brand of running a country ties all of our citizens together, so that people in one community have to worry about, be involved in, pay taxes to finance decisions in other communities. Gah! Can't we just take care of our own and let those Others go hang? Having to be all tied together is just hard!
And so we are always bedeviled by folks who want to get America to do things the easy way. And with the unleashing of Citizens United, many of our wealthy citizens are doing their best to move us to an easier system, a system where the people who are Better just go ahead and settle issues for the rest of us. Also, why shouldn't I be able to just close the doors on my gated community, pay for my own police and fire company, and just not have to give a cent to those Other People?
This pressure to start doing things the easy way is felt all across our country, but we are getting hit by it head on in education.
When Netflix CEO Reed Hastings says we should just abolish school boards because letting voters get involved in school decisions is just inefficient and disruptive, he's searching for the easy way. When Bill Gates decides that all American students (well, all non-rich non-private school students) should meet the same standards, and those standards should be the ones laid out by this couple of guys he knows, he's looking for the easy way. When folks like the Waltons and Broads look for ways to break down the teaching profession so that we can have people in classrooms who just follow the instructions they're given, it's one more search for the easy way. When people across the spectrum agitate for a standardized test that can measure the complex learning achievements of every student in America, that's a search for the easy way. When charteristas think that simply unleashing the invisible hand of the market place will somehow create excellence in education (and, perhaps, help sort the Betters from the Lessers, while making some Betters a big pile of profit)-- that's a search for the easy answer, too.
There are two problems with the easy way.
The first is a moral problem. The easy way requires us to silence everyone who is not on the Right Page. If you lost the vote, if you're in the smaller group, if you're on the less powerful side, then you just need to shut up. The easy way seeks to stop all disagreement and discussion so that we can unite behind one clean, clear, elegant solution, and there is only one way to do that-- to silence everyone who doesn't agree.
Worse, and more morally repugnant, the easy way calls on us to ignore Those People entirely. It encourages us to think of them as Lessers, which somehow makes it okay to give them less-- less service, less support, less kindness, less consideration, because, hey, they're Less Than, and so they deserve to get less. We can abandon them because that's all they deserve. It is straight up immoral to treat other human beings as less valuable than our own tribe. And yet, that immoral behavior is always required by the easy way.
Which brings us to the second problem, the practical problem-- the easy way just doesn't work. Look back through history-- a nation or institution can sustain the easy way for a generation at most, but then things just fall apart. Turns out that silencing people thoroughly and forever is really, really hard. And it also turns out that engaging in immoral behavior over time comes with huge personal, institutional, and cultural costs.
Without the arguing and debating and voices that just won't shut up, you can't move forward. As a nation we have made many huge mistakes, but by and large we have been able to move forward and try to leave those mistakes behind, because the voices who could and would point out those mistakes were not silenced. The easy way lets you get stuck in a bad place.
By creating a government structure that doesn't support tyranny easily, we have made a commitment to doing things the hard way, and every time we have tried to weasel out of that commitment, it has cost us as a culture and a country.
So the current struggle in education against the forces who would like to reduce education to an easy solution is not just about education, but another version of our national struggle. There will always be people who want to silence others in the name of ease and efficiency, and they will always be wrong. To look at the rich, complex business that is the education of an entire nation's varied population of young people-- to look at that and think that there is an easy answer to How To Do It-- is to be both unAmerican and simply foolish.
Living in a pluralistic society is hard. Saying that human beings all have value and acting like you really mean it is hard. Dealing with people who don't see things the same way you do is hard. Educating the children of an entire nation is hard. That's all right. We're Americans, and 236 years ago, we made a commitment to doing things the hard way, because, in the end, it's the way that continues to lead us, slowly but surely, to a better version of ourselves as a culture. Don't let anybody con you into anything else.
America stands for doing things the hard way.
When it comes to running a country, the easiest way to do it is to put one guy in charge and let him tell everybody how to do everything. He can be picked by heredity or tradition or power or wealth; he can be installed by a committee of Important People, or by the roar of the crowd, or even a legitimate-ish election. But the important part-- the easy part-- is that once you have him installed, you just let him run everything. No debates. no discussions, no big arguments about What To Do Next-- just let your Grand High Potentatial Poohbah decide it all.
There's a Less Easy but Still Pretty Easy way of doing things, which is to use an absolute democracy. Every issue that comes up, you vote on. The answer chosen by the majority is the answer the whole country uses, and discussion of the issue is over. If you're in the minority, you just shut up, and stay shut up.
We certainly toyed with all of these. Early on many citizens wanted to just crown George Washington King of America and be done with it. The founding fathers wrote all sorts of rules that they didn't want to be held to (all people are created equal, but not really) and many envisioned a country ruled by the votes of the Right People.
But instead, we dedicated our country to doing things the hard way. We wrote down a bunch of foundational premises for running a country, and then we set up a mechanism by which, over time, those principles could be interpreted and extended to their natural conclusions, even if the majority of founders didn't agree with those conclusions. The constitution is the ultimate exercise in saying, "Look, I'm going to agree to these principles, and every time I try to weasel out of actually following them, I want you to bop me over the head and stop me."
Furthermore, we set up a system based on the principle of not shutting people up, sorting them somehow into classes ranging from Those Who Must Always Be Listened to all the way down to Those Who Must Always Be Ignored.
The Framers had seen the many ways in which the easy way could go wrong, and somehow, they found the means of sitting down together with fellow citizens with whom they deeply and profoundly disagreed.
We have always been annoyed by our own system. We're irritated by the way it fosters unending debate on every little thing-- even things that we thought were already decided. And good Lord in heaven-- can't the people who are Dead Wrong just shut up and go away? We waste time, energy, and money on processes that are inefficient and inconsistent. There's hardly anything in this country that we don't do the hard way, loaded with argument and controversy and inefficiency and ambiguity.
On top of that, our peculiar brand of running a country ties all of our citizens together, so that people in one community have to worry about, be involved in, pay taxes to finance decisions in other communities. Gah! Can't we just take care of our own and let those Others go hang? Having to be all tied together is just hard!
And so we are always bedeviled by folks who want to get America to do things the easy way. And with the unleashing of Citizens United, many of our wealthy citizens are doing their best to move us to an easier system, a system where the people who are Better just go ahead and settle issues for the rest of us. Also, why shouldn't I be able to just close the doors on my gated community, pay for my own police and fire company, and just not have to give a cent to those Other People?
This pressure to start doing things the easy way is felt all across our country, but we are getting hit by it head on in education.
When Netflix CEO Reed Hastings says we should just abolish school boards because letting voters get involved in school decisions is just inefficient and disruptive, he's searching for the easy way. When Bill Gates decides that all American students (well, all non-rich non-private school students) should meet the same standards, and those standards should be the ones laid out by this couple of guys he knows, he's looking for the easy way. When folks like the Waltons and Broads look for ways to break down the teaching profession so that we can have people in classrooms who just follow the instructions they're given, it's one more search for the easy way. When people across the spectrum agitate for a standardized test that can measure the complex learning achievements of every student in America, that's a search for the easy way. When charteristas think that simply unleashing the invisible hand of the market place will somehow create excellence in education (and, perhaps, help sort the Betters from the Lessers, while making some Betters a big pile of profit)-- that's a search for the easy answer, too.
There are two problems with the easy way.
The first is a moral problem. The easy way requires us to silence everyone who is not on the Right Page. If you lost the vote, if you're in the smaller group, if you're on the less powerful side, then you just need to shut up. The easy way seeks to stop all disagreement and discussion so that we can unite behind one clean, clear, elegant solution, and there is only one way to do that-- to silence everyone who doesn't agree.
Worse, and more morally repugnant, the easy way calls on us to ignore Those People entirely. It encourages us to think of them as Lessers, which somehow makes it okay to give them less-- less service, less support, less kindness, less consideration, because, hey, they're Less Than, and so they deserve to get less. We can abandon them because that's all they deserve. It is straight up immoral to treat other human beings as less valuable than our own tribe. And yet, that immoral behavior is always required by the easy way.
Which brings us to the second problem, the practical problem-- the easy way just doesn't work. Look back through history-- a nation or institution can sustain the easy way for a generation at most, but then things just fall apart. Turns out that silencing people thoroughly and forever is really, really hard. And it also turns out that engaging in immoral behavior over time comes with huge personal, institutional, and cultural costs.
Without the arguing and debating and voices that just won't shut up, you can't move forward. As a nation we have made many huge mistakes, but by and large we have been able to move forward and try to leave those mistakes behind, because the voices who could and would point out those mistakes were not silenced. The easy way lets you get stuck in a bad place.
By creating a government structure that doesn't support tyranny easily, we have made a commitment to doing things the hard way, and every time we have tried to weasel out of that commitment, it has cost us as a culture and a country.
So the current struggle in education against the forces who would like to reduce education to an easy solution is not just about education, but another version of our national struggle. There will always be people who want to silence others in the name of ease and efficiency, and they will always be wrong. To look at the rich, complex business that is the education of an entire nation's varied population of young people-- to look at that and think that there is an easy answer to How To Do It-- is to be both unAmerican and simply foolish.
Living in a pluralistic society is hard. Saying that human beings all have value and acting like you really mean it is hard. Dealing with people who don't see things the same way you do is hard. Educating the children of an entire nation is hard. That's all right. We're Americans, and 236 years ago, we made a commitment to doing things the hard way, because, in the end, it's the way that continues to lead us, slowly but surely, to a better version of ourselves as a culture. Don't let anybody con you into anything else.
Friday, July 3, 2015
Philadelphia Flunks Economics 101
I continue to be amazed by the selective understanding of many reformy folks.
Philadelphia schools have handed over management of their substitute teacher workforce to Source4Teachers, a business that specializes in staffing solutions "for public and charter schools":
Filling part-time positions can be a full-time task—especially in today's demanding educational environment. At Source4Teachers, our only job is helping you do yours as effectively and efficiently as possible.
S4T has run into trouble in some of the markets it has moved into. With typical complaints about the service including unqualified subs and ballooning costs (but stagnant sub wages). In at least one case, S4T's contract was terminated after allegations of hitting a student.
A look at glassdoor.com shows middling employee satisfaction, though at least one former internal employee (a recruiter) was not a happy camper.
CEO is socially awkward and the President of the organization has a God complex and depending on the day of the week or which way the wind is blowing your guess is as good as anyone's as to how you might be treated on a given day. Benefits are non-existent, leadership is void. The COO is a former administrator that couldn't manage his way out of a paper bag.
The most common complaint was the level of pay. Looks like that's going to be the complaint in Philadelphia as well. The new pay scale (certified teachers, any grade, will be paid $90 per day; non-certified teachers, any grade, will be paid $75. And special-education positions pay the highest rate at $110 per day) represents a pay cut of well over 50% in some cases.
Philly, like many districts, has a sub shortage. My own neck of the woods has a pretty regular problem getting substitutes in. Once upon a time, substitutes were either young teachers trying to get a foot in the door, homemakers looking for some extra money, or retired teachers. All three of those streams have dried up, primarily because substituting pays really, really badly.
While nobody was watching, sub pay has fallen far, far behind. When I returned to the area in 1980, a day of subbing paid $50. Adjusted for inflation, that would be $144 today. But the going rate locally is about $85.
Administrators continue to scratch their heads over the sub shortage. This is not a mystery. Hiring personnel is like paying for any good or service-- if the seller will not give you what you want for the price you've named, you have to offer more.
It will be interesting to see how Sourc4Teachers makes out in Philly. Their big trick seems to be scooping up lots of warm bodies that don't necessarily have teaching qualifications, which may be helpful if Philly's current pool of 400 teachers suddenly gets smaller. But if they have trouble getting enough qualified subs, I believe they can find the solution in any Economics 101 textbook.
Philadelphia schools have handed over management of their substitute teacher workforce to Source4Teachers, a business that specializes in staffing solutions "for public and charter schools":
Filling part-time positions can be a full-time task—especially in today's demanding educational environment. At Source4Teachers, our only job is helping you do yours as effectively and efficiently as possible.
S4T has run into trouble in some of the markets it has moved into. With typical complaints about the service including unqualified subs and ballooning costs (but stagnant sub wages). In at least one case, S4T's contract was terminated after allegations of hitting a student.
A look at glassdoor.com shows middling employee satisfaction, though at least one former internal employee (a recruiter) was not a happy camper.
CEO is socially awkward and the President of the organization has a God complex and depending on the day of the week or which way the wind is blowing your guess is as good as anyone's as to how you might be treated on a given day. Benefits are non-existent, leadership is void. The COO is a former administrator that couldn't manage his way out of a paper bag.
The most common complaint was the level of pay. Looks like that's going to be the complaint in Philadelphia as well. The new pay scale (certified teachers, any grade, will be paid $90 per day; non-certified teachers, any grade, will be paid $75. And special-education positions pay the highest rate at $110 per day) represents a pay cut of well over 50% in some cases.
Philly, like many districts, has a sub shortage. My own neck of the woods has a pretty regular problem getting substitutes in. Once upon a time, substitutes were either young teachers trying to get a foot in the door, homemakers looking for some extra money, or retired teachers. All three of those streams have dried up, primarily because substituting pays really, really badly.
While nobody was watching, sub pay has fallen far, far behind. When I returned to the area in 1980, a day of subbing paid $50. Adjusted for inflation, that would be $144 today. But the going rate locally is about $85.
Administrators continue to scratch their heads over the sub shortage. This is not a mystery. Hiring personnel is like paying for any good or service-- if the seller will not give you what you want for the price you've named, you have to offer more.
It will be interesting to see how Sourc4Teachers makes out in Philly. Their big trick seems to be scooping up lots of warm bodies that don't necessarily have teaching qualifications, which may be helpful if Philly's current pool of 400 teachers suddenly gets smaller. But if they have trouble getting enough qualified subs, I believe they can find the solution in any Economics 101 textbook.
The Superteacher Shuffle
The most unmet requirement of NCLB and the pseudo-laws of Waiver is the Superteacher Shuffle Law. Last year the Obama administration offered this provision a big, wet kiss in a policy declaration that Mike Petrilli kind of awesomely called a "nothing burger."
The law requires that every state have a plan for making sure that high-poverty low-achieving schools have their fair share of excellent teachers, a policy idea that solidly and definitively declares its misunderstanding of the problem, therefor coming up with a solution that is only slightly more solutiony than declaring that states must provide low-performing schools with flags woven from the hair of magical unicorns.
We'll get back to the unicorns in a bit. Let's pretend that the law is correct about the problem, and that we just need to get great teachers into lousy schools. If that's the problem, then there can only be one of two solutions:
Move great teachers around. Once we've identified Great Teachers, either by using VAM sauce or by consulting our Ouija board (both equally effective), we have to convince them to move. This will require anything from bribery to rendering. Bribery would be too expensive, and rendering would be both illegal and unlikely to get people interested in teaching.
Create more great teachers. Problematic because policymakers and politicians have managed to make teaching increasingly unattractive as a profession.
But mostly what the law requires is that every state has a plan, and here they are. Popular strategies include fact-finding ("We'll have a big Great Teacher party, or First Year Teacher Party, or Sad Administrator Party, and afterwards we'll know everything we need to know about this stuff") and lots of folks like the idea of some sort of mentorship and support for beginning teachers (an idea that I am NOT going to make fun of because, actually, lack of support for beginning teachers is one ofthe great yawning gaps in the profession).
Some states have been amazingly detailed. The plan for my own state of Pennsylvania is 200-plus pages long. Damn. I've read a lot of things so that you wouldn't have to, dear reader, but for the fifty specific state plans, you are on your own (Alyson Klein has done some of our homework for us, and God bless her).
The Pennsylvania plan is numbingly corporate, with a focus on how better to manage Human Capital, but it will take a whole separate blog post to deal with its foolishness.
But for right now, let's stay focused on the national law, and why it's a bad law.
This is the Hero Teacher Syndrome writ large, the idea that great teachers carry their greatness around with them like backpacks that travel with them wherever they go, and that the solution to getting better schools is to just stuff each school with Superteachers.
If you want to understand why this is not going to work, imagine a national initiative to improve the state of marriage in this country. "We've got to fix that divorce rate," declare policymakers. "We've got to make sure that each person has a Great Spouse." So each state is required to come up with a plan for shifting the Great Spouses around so that marriage improves.
So Mr. Smithingstein, who was a great wealthy husband when he was married to his well-to-do wife, is transferred to a low-income neighborhood where he must now be husband to a woman living below the poverty level. Mrs. Bogswallow is transferred to become the wife of an absolutely abusive jerk. Mr. Blienfetz was a great hetorosexual husband, but his new transfer spouse is a man.
Teaching, like marriage, is a relationship, and while there's no question that some people bring more skills and useful qualities to the table than others, it's also true that setting, context and fellow human beings in the place can make a huge difference.
Trying to transfer your way to school excellence is like trying to transfer your way to a dry staff in a roofless building; it doesn't matter how many new, dry teachers you put in there, they will still end up wet until you fix the roof. States that have the strongest links between test scores and teacher evaluation and test scores make the task doubly hard because high-poverty, low-achieving schools are just hard places to work-- they're schools that can potentially be career-killers. The best players in the draft are not hoping to be snapped up by the worst team in the league.
Michael Fullan writes about how social capital, the health of the whole interconnected organization, is far more powerful than the ruggedly individual power of a hero teacher. It's the connections and relationships with a teaching staff that can create a whole greater (or less) than the sum of the parts, and it's the support and resources provided by community, state and federal government that either foster or stifle growth of that web of relationships.
It's not that I don't believe that some folks have more of a gift for teaching than others-- I do. But we could put twelve awesome teachers who can't work together in a building that lacks resources and support, working for terrible administrators in a crumbling facility, and we could end up with a terrible school. On the other hand, twelve middlin' educators who mesh perfectly as a team with lots of resources and administrators who know how to get those teachers to do their best-- that will be a great school.
This all explains the other huge flaw in this approach-- we can only shuffle Superteachers around if we can find them, and currently we have no idea how to do that. It's more than just the uselessness of VAM. Great teaching looks different in different places, so one measure does not fit all. And student outcomes are not the "proof." I have absolutely no doubt that there are teachers in high-poverty urban schools who are working way harder and way better than I am, here in my relatively comfy only-sort-of-poor district-- but my numbers are better.
If Runner A beats Runner B in the 100 yard dash, but Runner B started 75 yards behind, I have not proven that Runner A is faster.
So, to recap. We don't know how to find great teachers, we don't know how to move them, and we have unrealistic ideas about what moving them would actually accomplish.
The one bright I see in these plans is the mentoring. I've heard this theory more than once: A small percentage of new teachers will be great no matter what. A small percentage will be terrible (and leave) no matter what. All the rest could go either way, depending on what kind of support they get. Some new teachers' entire career is shaped by something as simple as who they eat lunch with or who shares their clerical work period.
We should have a far stronger system for mentoring new teachers and helping them become the best teachers they can be, and that system needs to be built on more than random luck. We should be focusing resources on the New Folks and helping them find their way, their strengths, and in doing so, to build up the system and relationships within a school. That would be far more useful than one more round of the Superteacher Shuffle.
The law requires that every state have a plan for making sure that high-poverty low-achieving schools have their fair share of excellent teachers, a policy idea that solidly and definitively declares its misunderstanding of the problem, therefor coming up with a solution that is only slightly more solutiony than declaring that states must provide low-performing schools with flags woven from the hair of magical unicorns.
We'll get back to the unicorns in a bit. Let's pretend that the law is correct about the problem, and that we just need to get great teachers into lousy schools. If that's the problem, then there can only be one of two solutions:
Move great teachers around. Once we've identified Great Teachers, either by using VAM sauce or by consulting our Ouija board (both equally effective), we have to convince them to move. This will require anything from bribery to rendering. Bribery would be too expensive, and rendering would be both illegal and unlikely to get people interested in teaching.
Create more great teachers. Problematic because policymakers and politicians have managed to make teaching increasingly unattractive as a profession.
But mostly what the law requires is that every state has a plan, and here they are. Popular strategies include fact-finding ("We'll have a big Great Teacher party, or First Year Teacher Party, or Sad Administrator Party, and afterwards we'll know everything we need to know about this stuff") and lots of folks like the idea of some sort of mentorship and support for beginning teachers (an idea that I am NOT going to make fun of because, actually, lack of support for beginning teachers is one ofthe great yawning gaps in the profession).
Some states have been amazingly detailed. The plan for my own state of Pennsylvania is 200-plus pages long. Damn. I've read a lot of things so that you wouldn't have to, dear reader, but for the fifty specific state plans, you are on your own (Alyson Klein has done some of our homework for us, and God bless her).
The Pennsylvania plan is numbingly corporate, with a focus on how better to manage Human Capital, but it will take a whole separate blog post to deal with its foolishness.
But for right now, let's stay focused on the national law, and why it's a bad law.
This is the Hero Teacher Syndrome writ large, the idea that great teachers carry their greatness around with them like backpacks that travel with them wherever they go, and that the solution to getting better schools is to just stuff each school with Superteachers.
If you want to understand why this is not going to work, imagine a national initiative to improve the state of marriage in this country. "We've got to fix that divorce rate," declare policymakers. "We've got to make sure that each person has a Great Spouse." So each state is required to come up with a plan for shifting the Great Spouses around so that marriage improves.
So Mr. Smithingstein, who was a great wealthy husband when he was married to his well-to-do wife, is transferred to a low-income neighborhood where he must now be husband to a woman living below the poverty level. Mrs. Bogswallow is transferred to become the wife of an absolutely abusive jerk. Mr. Blienfetz was a great hetorosexual husband, but his new transfer spouse is a man.
Teaching, like marriage, is a relationship, and while there's no question that some people bring more skills and useful qualities to the table than others, it's also true that setting, context and fellow human beings in the place can make a huge difference.
Trying to transfer your way to school excellence is like trying to transfer your way to a dry staff in a roofless building; it doesn't matter how many new, dry teachers you put in there, they will still end up wet until you fix the roof. States that have the strongest links between test scores and teacher evaluation and test scores make the task doubly hard because high-poverty, low-achieving schools are just hard places to work-- they're schools that can potentially be career-killers. The best players in the draft are not hoping to be snapped up by the worst team in the league.
Michael Fullan writes about how social capital, the health of the whole interconnected organization, is far more powerful than the ruggedly individual power of a hero teacher. It's the connections and relationships with a teaching staff that can create a whole greater (or less) than the sum of the parts, and it's the support and resources provided by community, state and federal government that either foster or stifle growth of that web of relationships.
It's not that I don't believe that some folks have more of a gift for teaching than others-- I do. But we could put twelve awesome teachers who can't work together in a building that lacks resources and support, working for terrible administrators in a crumbling facility, and we could end up with a terrible school. On the other hand, twelve middlin' educators who mesh perfectly as a team with lots of resources and administrators who know how to get those teachers to do their best-- that will be a great school.
This all explains the other huge flaw in this approach-- we can only shuffle Superteachers around if we can find them, and currently we have no idea how to do that. It's more than just the uselessness of VAM. Great teaching looks different in different places, so one measure does not fit all. And student outcomes are not the "proof." I have absolutely no doubt that there are teachers in high-poverty urban schools who are working way harder and way better than I am, here in my relatively comfy only-sort-of-poor district-- but my numbers are better.
If Runner A beats Runner B in the 100 yard dash, but Runner B started 75 yards behind, I have not proven that Runner A is faster.
So, to recap. We don't know how to find great teachers, we don't know how to move them, and we have unrealistic ideas about what moving them would actually accomplish.
The one bright I see in these plans is the mentoring. I've heard this theory more than once: A small percentage of new teachers will be great no matter what. A small percentage will be terrible (and leave) no matter what. All the rest could go either way, depending on what kind of support they get. Some new teachers' entire career is shaped by something as simple as who they eat lunch with or who shares their clerical work period.
We should have a far stronger system for mentoring new teachers and helping them become the best teachers they can be, and that system needs to be built on more than random luck. We should be focusing resources on the New Folks and helping them find their way, their strengths, and in doing so, to build up the system and relationships within a school. That would be far more useful than one more round of the Superteacher Shuffle.
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