PA: Ugly Cut Scores Coming

Brace yourself, Pennsylvania teachers. The cut scores for last years tests have been set, and they are not pretty.

Yesterday the State Board's Council of  Basic Education met to settle their recommendations to the State Board of Education regarding cut scores for the 2014-2015 test results. Because, yes-- cut scores are set after test results are in, not before. You'll see why shortly.

My source at the meeting (don't laugh-- I do actually have sources of information here and there) passed along some of the results, as well as an analysis of the impact of the new scores and the Board's own explanation of how these scores are set. The worst news is further down the stage, but first I have to explain how we get there.

How Are Scores Set?

In PA, we stick with good, old-fashioned Below Basic, Basic, Proficient and Advanced. The cut scores-- the scores that decide where we draw the line between those designations come from two groups.

First, we have the Bookmark Participants. The bookmark participants are educators who take a look at the actual test questions and consider the Performance Level Descriptors, a set of guidelines that basically say "A proficient kid can do these following things." These "have been in place since 1999" which doesn't really tell us whether they've ever been revised or not. According to the state's presentation:

By using their content expertise in instruction, curriculum, and the standards, educators made recommendations about items that distinguished between performance levels (eg Basic/Proficient) using the Performance Level Descriptors. When educators came to an item with which students had difficulty, they would place a bookmark on that question. 

In other words, this group set dividing lines between levels of proficiency in the way that would kind of make sense-- Advanced students can do X, Y, and Z, while Basic students can at least do X. (It's interesting to note that, as with a classroom test, this approach doesn't really get you a cut score until you fiddle with the proportion of items on the test. In other words, if I have a test that's all items about X, every gets an A, but if I have a test that's all Z, only the proficient kids so much as pass. Makes you wonder who decides how much of what to put on the Big Standardized Test and how they decide it.)

Oh, and where do the committee members come from? My friend clarifies:

The cut score panelists were a group that answered an announcement on the Data Recognition website, who were then selected by PDE staff. 

Plus one of the outside "experts" was from the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment, one more group that thanks the Gates Foundation for support.


But Wait-- That's Not All

But if we set cut scores based on difficulty of various items on the BS Test, why can't we set cut scores before the test is even given? Why do we wait until after the tests have been administered and scored?

That's because the Bookmark Group is not the end of the line. Their recommendations go on to the Review Committee, and according to the state's explanation

The Review Committee discussed consequences and potential implications associated with the recommendations, such as student and teacher goals, accountability, educator effectiveness, policy impact and development, and resource allocation.

In other words, the Bookmark folks ask, "What's the difference between a Proficient students and a Basic student." The Review Committee asks, "What will the political and budget fall out be if we set the cut scores here?"


It is the review committee that has the last word:

Through this lens, the Review Committee recommended the most appropriate set of cut scores-- using the Bookmark Participants recommendation-- for the system of grade 3-8 assessments in English Language Arts and Math.

So if you've had the sense that cut scores on the BS Test are not entirely about actual students achievement, you are correct. Well, in Pennsylvania you're correct. Perhaps we're the only state factoring politics and policy concerns into our test results. Perhaps I need to stand up a minute to let the pigs fly out of my butt.

Now, the power point presentation from the meeting said that the Review Committee did not mess with the ELA recommendations of the bookmark folks at all. They admit to a few "minor" adjustments to the math, most having to do with cut scores on the lower end.


You Said Something About Ugly

So, yes. How do the cut scores actually look? The charts from the power point do not copy well at all, and they don't provide a context. But my friend in Harrisburg created his own chart that shows how the proposed cut scores stack up to last year's results. This chart shows the percentage of students who fall into the Basic and Below Basic categories.

Grade	Reading 2013-2014	ELA 2014-2015	Difference	Math 2013-2014	Math 2014-2015	Difference
3rd	29.7	37.9	- 8.2	24.9	51.5	- 26.6
4th	31.1	41.4	- 10.1	23.7	55.5	- 31.8
5th	39.4	38	1.4	22.8	57.2	- 34.4
6th	35.5	40.2	- 4.7	28	60.2	- 32.2
7th	27.9	41.4	- 13.5	23.3	66.9	- 43.6
8th	20.4	41.7	- 21.3	26.4	70.1	- 43.7
		Avg	-          9.4		Avg	-          35.4

This raises all sorts of questions. Did all of Pennsylvania's teachers suddenly decide to suck last year? Is Pennsylvania in the grip of astonishing innumeracy? And most importantly, what the hell happened to the students?

Because, remember, we can read this chart a couple of ways, and one way is to follow the students-- so last year only 22.8% of the fifth graders "failed." But this year those exact same students, just one year older, have a 60.2% failure rate??!! 37% of those students turned into mathematical boneheads in just one year??!! 47% of eighth graders forgot everything they learned as seventh graders??!! 70% failure??!! Really????!!!! My astonishment can barely press down enough punctuation keys.


Said my Harrisburg friend, "There was some pushback from Board members, but all voting members eventually fell in line. It was clear they were ramming this through."

"Farce" doesn't seem too strong a word. 

At a minimum, this will require an explanation of how the math abilities of Pennsylvania students or Pennsylvania teachers could fall off such a stunningly abrupt cliff.


And that's before we even get to the question of the validity of the raw data itself. Of course, none of us are supposed to be able to discuss the BS Test ever, as we've signed an Oath of Secrecy, but we've all peeked and I can tell you that I remember chunks of the 11th grade test in the same way that I remember stumbling across a rotting carcass in the woods or vivid details from my divorce-- unpleasant painful awful things tend to burn themselves into your brain. Point being, this whole exercise starts with tests that aren't very good to begin with.

If I'm teaching a class and suddenly my failure rate doubles or almost triples, I am going to be looking for things that are messed up-- and it won't be the students.

The theme of yesterday's meeting should have been "Holy smokes!! Something is really goobered up with our process because these results couldn't possibly be right" and the theme of the meeting today when these cut scores are recommended to the whole State Board of Education should be the same.

My source thinks it's a done deal and some folks are scrambling to let people like, say, Governor Tom Wolf know that if this happens, there will be a great deal of Spirited Displeasure out in the schools and communities. If you happen to have the phone number of someone in Harrisburg who could be useful, this morning would be a good time to call.

The Chair of the State Board Larry Wittig; the Deputy Secretary of Education Matthew Stem; and the Chair of the Council of Basic Ed, Former State Board Chair and former Erie City Superintendent James Barker apparently are the conductors on this railroad. So when it turns out that your teacher evaluation just dove straight into the toilet because of these shenanigan, be sure to call them.

And here's the list of Board members, though you will literally need to contact them within the next few hours.

I will do my best to keep an eye on things and let you know, but in the mean time, if you're a PA 3-8 teacher, you'd better fasten your seatbelt, because this ride is about to get bumpy.

Update: These numbers did indeed pass. Sorry, colleagues. 

The Charleston Syllabus

Sometimes, the internet astounds me with its power. Every day there's another answer to the question, "Can the internet come up with something more useful than collections of pancake art?" In the wake of a truly terrible act of racism, the internet has birthed a powerful community and an invaluable resource.

Chad Williams is the chair of the Department of African and Afro-American Studies at Brandeis University. He's a published expert on African American military history (particularly in World War I). And on the morning of June 18, he was one more American facing one more eruption of racist-fueled violence and shocking murder.

He was looking for intelligent discussion; he was not finding it.

The Charleston massacre, albeit in the worst imaginable way, opened a blood stained door to this country's racial history. Would people have the courage to walk through it? Vapid calls for renewing the "conversation on race," a soothing focus on black forgiveness and ill-informed discussions about the Confederate flag did nothing for my confidence. Over the course of two days, it became painfully evident that the vast majority of people lacked the necessary historical awareness to engage in serious dialogue about Charleston, much less subject themselves to critical introspection.

Williams remembered the #FergussonSyllabus launched by Marcia Chatelain of Georgetown, and watched for a similar initiative to emerge for Charleston. It didn't, so he recruited other African American Intellectual History Society members to begin the conversation on twitter.



You can read more about the development of #CharlestonSyllabus here. It's an amazing example of how social media can facilitate a powerful and important dialogue. As Williams tells it

What quickly emerged in just two days was a diverse community of people from a variety of professions, with divergent levels of historical expertise, all sharing a desire to educate, learn and challenge the prevailing discourse about race stemming from the Charleston tragedy.

What also emerged was a resource list, an impressively crowd-sourced collection of materials to help inform discussion of the racist terrorism of June 17 in Charleston, but perhaps more importantly, of race, racism, and racial violence in America as a whole. In discussions of these issues (heck, in discussion of pretty much all issues), Americans often leap forward with limited or absent understanding of history and context. This list can help fill that gap.

Some of us, through circumstances of birth, geography, or just not paying attention, have not engaged in these dialogues about race in America very much over the past few decades. Well, history has caught up with us, and we can no longer pretend to have the luxury of sitting out the discussion. But it is not necessary for us to freak out.

Imagine that you've been assigned to teach classes that involve material you haven't really studied in years-- say, you've been teaching American Lit, but next fall you'll be doing the Shakespeare course.
What do you do? Well, you don't go over to the Shakespeare teacher and say, "Could you just lay this all out for me and tell me what to do, since you're the expert?" It's not her job to educate you. No, you do what your academic training taught you to do-- you go find the source materials and you do your homework.

So the Charleston Syllabus reading list has arrived in a timely manner. Yes, by fall, most of my students will have completely forgotten about the horrific murders in Charleston. But those events are just one more in a sad series of reminders that America's racial issues are not a sleeping dog that we can try to let lie. The dialogue is going to happen-- it has to happen-- and it will be most useful if participants have some knowledge of the history and context of the issues. That goes double for those of us who teach, and perhaps triple for those of us who teach in mostly-white schools. This is the world in which our students are growing up; we have to be able to talk to them about it, to help them better make sense of it.

The Charleston Syllabus has secured its own web address, with a fully developed website to follow. Let's hope that this becomes a valued resource for the nation, proof that the internet can help build community in ways that elevate us as a culture.

Originally posted in View from the Cheap Seats

ECAA AOK PDQ RIP NCLB BYOB MOUSE

The interwebs are blowing up-- and, frankly, kind of freaking out-- over the newest Congressional round of Hey Maybe We Might Do Something regarding the rewrite of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (currently stomping around under brain-eating zombie nom de nom nom nom of No Child Left Behind).

All the usual debate topics have erupted again, with the usual challenge in figuring out who exactly sides with whom. The two basic sides seem to boil down to "If we don't get everything we want, then we must take everybody's balls and go home" and "You know, a leak in the roof is still better than an ax murderer in the house."

In the second group we find folks like Mike Petrilli, who points out that conservatives got much of what they want and lefties-- well, he runs the old talking point about the civil rights awesomeness of giving test manufacturers lots of money. Meanwhile, Leonie Haimson points out that ECAA effectively defangs the feds and takes most of the high stakes away from the testing monster. Or as I put it when I first wrote about the rewrite:

The new ESEA doesn't dismantle the machine that has been chewing up public ed so much as it forces the USED to hand the keys to the Leveller over to the states.

Yes, in its current form the rewrite loves testing and charters way too much. But this is also an excellent time to think about being practical. Because as much as I don't care for aspects of the proposed ESEA, I keep remembering that this is not a choice between a bad law from this Congress and some other perfect law from some other imaginary Congress. The choice is between a new crappy law written by this Congress and NCLB.

Let me say that again. On the one hand we have a law written and passed by a Congress filled with anti-public ed representatives, free market fans, and people who generally don't know much about education except what they've heard from the corporate lobbyists hanging around their lobby-- a law that must then be signed by a President who has made it pretty clear that he likes reformster policies just fine. That's the choice on one side.

On the other side, we have No Child Left Behind.

On the one side, a lousy rewrite job.

On the other side, a law that made us realize that there are laws that simply can't be any worse, used to leverage RttT/waiver pseudo laws that made us say, "Oh, wait! I was wrong! You can make it worse!"

For me, the specifics of certain aspects of the law are not as important as shifting the locus of power, and the new bill does that. Yes, some states will use their newly-restored education control to implement terrible, awful, stupid, no good, very bad ideas. But when a state implements a terrible idea, that is a fail rate of 1/50 for the nation. When the US Education Department implements a terrible idea, that's a 50/50 fail rate.

There is much to debate in the bill, including what's in the bill. Christel Swasey is pretty sure it stomps on the opt-out movement, while Leonie Haimson is pretty sure it does the exact opposite. And there's still amending to do, all before the President, perhaps, sends it all back to the drawing board.

But at the end of the day, I don't think the rewrite would be a major crisis because it would still be better than what we've got, and what we've got is what we'll have until ESEA is finally rewritten.

Yes, high stakes standardized testing should go away, completely, forever. But defanging it even a little is an improvement. Yes, the continued implied love of Common Core (under its new handle "college and career standards") sucks. Yes, the various regulations designed to keep that sweet, sweet tax money flowing to various corporate pockets is offensive and stupid and corrupt. But it's still all better than what we've got, and what we've got is what we'll have until a rewrite is passed.

Meanwhile, the interwebs continue to blow up and Congress continues to get an earful, which is great-- that's how things should work. Write, phone, call, tweet-- I surely am, and you should, too. But if this bill is killed, all we get is the old law which has long been dead, but will not lie down and leave us alone.

MA: Reinventing the Wheel

The Huffington Posts is not picky. Their education page carries a wide variety of viewpoints, including regular posts courtesy of TeachPlus, an organization devoted to putting teacher-ish human capital in the reformster pipeline, in true Orwellian reformster fashion, diminishing the profession while praising it.

The most recent is a post by Brittany Vetter, a young woman who is the very picture of the fresh-faced, well-scrubbed enthusiastic young educator. She's here to tell us that High Stakes Testing and the Common Core are awesome and magical, and that charters have discovered the secret to educational success. In short, it's yet another attempt to squeeze every piece of reformster marketing boilerplate into one short piece.

Vetter starts by talking about the awesome conversation she'll have this fall with her sixth graders about the economic gaps between different sections Massachusetts, and how the school they're attending erases those differences. See, poverty doesn't matter.

I then stress to my sixth graders that they will have to work extra-hard to achieve beyond what others might expect of them. I emphasize that our only option is to defy the odds and gain access to opportunities that will help change the system from within.

Vetter teaches at Excel Academy, part of a charter chain in Massachusetts, a state where charters have a history of spectacular levels of student suspensions. Vetter's version of Excel is in Chelsea, and at one point racked up a suspension rate of 17.9%, the 19th highest in the state. Excel was also among those charters that made sure not to many students who didn't actually speak English.

You might also find it telling that Excel's Board of Trustees-- well, actually, it's a little telling that they even have such a board, but that board is almost entirely composed of investment managers. They've also had an advisory board since 2014, composed of politicians and businessmen (one PR expert), so I'm not sure what kind of advice they're giving. A foundation board made of banksters. And a director's council, composed of MBA's and investment bankers. And a network management team that is also devoid of actual teachers or educators. Well, what about the actual school leaders? Nope-- TFA alums, one TNTP alum, and one person with an actual MA in teaching on top of a BA in public policy. If I showed you the list of people managing this enterprise and asked you to guess what the enterprise did, you would not guess "educates children."

Vetter's school enrolls students in grades 5 through 8-- they have a total of 224 students. All of them are local to Chelsea, 83% are Latino (I don't know what that stat is even useful for) and 83% fall below federal poverty lines. No word on how many of those are ELL. The school employs five administrators and twenty-five other faculty. A few faculty have actual teaching degrees, but many are TFA alum-- some aren't even that. The staffer who designed a comprehensive English curriculum for ELL students has a BA in government and international studies.

So, yes. Excel Academy is a massive revenue-generating amateur hour. Has this gifted collection of Betters somehow discovered the secret of educating students? Well, I mean a secret beyond accepting only students who will do well and driving out any that might bring your numbers down.

Holding our schools and teachers accountable for such trajectory-changing results says that we not only believe in their possibility but in fact demand it for all of our students regardless of the neighborhood in which they live. 

What else? Well, Vetter wants to tell us the story of how they used the PARCC to make magic. When Excel decided to use the PARCC, Vetter found the multiple choice questions were "highly nuanced," which is the best way I've seen to describe PARCC's tendency to ask bubble test questions with multiple correct answers, only one of which is accepted. How did they deal with it?

We revised our unit assessments to include questions that mirrored PARCC's emphasis on supporting multiple choice answers with evidence, and we engaged in discussions about how to build our students' ability to write in a variety of genres. Initially, test averages were lower overall. But as students collaboratively corrected their missed questions and became familiar with the new level of expectations, they rose to the occasion, and their test scores began to improve.

So, lots of test prep. Vetter continues on her mission to include every reformster cliche in the book.

What's more, PARCC's alignment with Common Core has upped the rigor of my course. In the process, I discovered that Jose had a real gift for writing engaging dialogue, while Estefania could effectively integrate information from multiple sources. All of my students can now analyze how an author's choices led to a specific purpose in her writing and compare the choices of two different authors. The PARCC's emphasis on textual evidence led to much richer student discussions in my classroom, pushing me to recognize the level of thinking of which my sixth graders are truly capable. At end of the school year, my students surpassed my expectations.

This is a new twist-- Vetter apparently didn't know how to teach before, but not just the Common Core, but the combination of Common Core and the PARCC showed her how to do her job.

In all fairness to Vetter, it's entirely possible that she actually didn't know how to do her job before. Since graduating from Goucher College in 2007 with a BA in sociology, Vetter put in two years with TFA, three years at a STRIVE academy, and now three years at Excel. So it is possible, for instance, that she had no clue what level of thinking is developmentally possible for a sixth grader.

No set of reformster testy cliches would be complete without a disclaimer (the PARCC is not perfect), and followed by a wrap-up that undercuts the disclaimer.

Every teacher would agree that standardized tests are imperfect measures of the complex output that is students' growth as learners and people. However, without the data that is provided by these assessments, we would have no method for seeing how our students stack up and where to revise our approach.

Again, given that Vetter is an amateur working in a setting run and occupied by other amateurs, she may really believe that she would have no method of seeing how students stack up, or even understand that trying to stack rank students is destructive and useless (in less, of course, your school's business model is built on getting rid of the students on the bottom of the stack). It may well be that this big batch of amateurs has no idea how to collect their own data to evaluate and revise their own teaching program. And it could well be that this big bunch of amateurs doesn't understand that using a single bad standardized test to drive that process is just about the least useful way to approach the problem.

Looking into Vetter, her school, and her writing drives home for me just how lost these folks are. First, they're trying to re-invent the wheel. But they're working with roughly chiseled slabs of stone while actual trained teachers are trying to work out better bearing and support assemblies for the wheels on fully developed vehicles. And because the charter amateurs set their testing spots at the top of a steep hill, they think they've really discovered something when their giant rock slabs actually roll down the hill a ways, while real teachers in real public schools are trying to figure out how to get their educational trucks to traverse rocky, uphill terrain. The reformsters have set themselves a game that a chimp could win (Roll Things Down Easy Hill) and think they've discovered something useful in the process.

Vetter looks happy, cheery, and she's stuck with the reformster ed game for almost a decade now, but I don't know if she has a clue. She may be smart, and she may mean well, but she has nothing to teach us about how to educate students.

I'll include a link here, so that you can check my work to keep me honest, but I recommend you don't add to the Teach Plus click count. Because Excel is not only reinventing the education wheel, but Vetter is reinventing the Reformy Teacher-ish Praise wheel, and that's one wheel that just needs to stop turning.


Update: This morning when I posted this, there were three comments on HuffPo in reply to the article-- one critical, a supportive post from one of Vetter's co-workers, and my link to the piece you're reading. As of this afternoon, there are no comments up at HuffPo in reply to the article. Ironically, that commenst section is called "conversations."

Christie's Education Truth Gap

A month ago, Chris Christie was making a quick will-he-or-won't-he pre-Presidential campaign tour of Iowa when he stopped at Iowa State to drop some thinks on the education biz.

The speech was attended by a modest crowd of around 160 people (plus a great lump of media) and didn't make much of an impression at the time. But it's worth looking at because Christie laid out his education ideas. Not that there's much doubt about what Christie's ideas about education are, but it's always less certain what Christie will claim his policies are.

The print coverage of the speech was pretty clear.

As Governor, Christie said he has reformed teacher tenures, promoted charter school and school choice, installed performance-based pay, and unsuccessfully fought teachers unions for layoffs based on merit rather than seniority.

But this clip shows another level of Christie's fantasy education policy.

It's short, though I had to watch it multiple times (at least once just to get past the mesmerizing trio of young men behind the governor-- two who want to be anywhere else and one who is falling asleep). Christie is telling us that he's upped charters and passed the Urban Hope Act (aka one more way to privatize more schools). "Children and their families are flocking to them," says Christie. "We've brought in transformative leaders and we've started new programs. And none of this we've done on our own..."

Now it gets bizarre.

We've worked with teachers in those communities. We've listened to community leaders and parents to get their buy-in. And we've brought in new expertise and talent from around the country...

 Education K through 12 can be fixed in this country. And there are great people on both sides of the aisle, and wonderful teachers who are willing to do the right thing.

See? Chris Christie loves him some teachers.


He goes on to note that it was really hard to pull people together when they faced so much opposition. But "we of New Jersey" won't back down and won't take no for an answer. And just for that little extra touch of Iowa corn, Christie throws in a heartfelt, "We must put the God-given potential of every child first.



So there you have it. Chris Christie, uniter and lover of teachers.



Or maybe this article (complete with famous photo) from the Washington Post.

Or take a look at this article from Jersey Jazzman, covering such highlights as the moment when Christie compared the teachers union to ISIS.

Was Christie showing teacher love any of these times, or when he quickly abandoned his pledge to safeguard pensions. Was he working closely with community teachers and leaders  in Newark, where people had to take to the streets to be heard, or where it looks like they're unlikely to have a say in who runs their schools?

Christie is not going to be the GOP nominee, but he is going to have more opportunities to speak baloney about education, and it will be difficult to keep up with him, both in terms of listeners identifying the baloney and other candidates manufacturing their own. How soon are the elections??

Jeb's Ed Backers Revealed

Long-time observers of the reformster scene are familiar with the Foundation for Excellence in Education (FEE) the advocacy group that was, among other things, supposed to help Jeb Bush leverage his reformy career into a Presidential run.

At various times they have promoted specious arguments for testing, tried to use aging demographics to sell choice, jumped on the honesty gap train to nowhere, held a regular reformster-palooza gatheration, and tried to harness fake-ish social media presences to tout the whole reformy package. They are a one stop shop for reformster baloney, sliced to whatever thickness you prefer.

One thing they have not previously done is actually admit where their funding comes from. Until now.

In an act that appears related to Jeb Bush's Candidature Data Dumpage, FEE has finally coughed up their donors list. And it is a revelation, a shock, a stunning surprise of-- well, actually, no. It's pretty much exactly who you'd guess would be backing the mess.

FEE's list now occupies a corner of their website. John Connor of NPR broke the list down to make it a little more searchable.

It is not an exact list in that donors are organized by ranges. So we know that Bloomberg donated somewhere between $1.2 million and $2.4 million, which is quite a margin of error. But it's still a chunk of change, either way.

Joining Bloomberg Philanthropies in the Over a Cool Million Club are these folks, a completely unsurprising list:

Walton Family Foundation (between $3.5 mill and over $6 mill)
B&M Gates (between $3 mill and over $5 mill)
Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation (between $1.6 mill and $3.25 mill)
News Corporation (between $1.5 mill and $3 mill)
GE Foundation (between $2.5 mill and over $3 mill)
Helmsley Trust (at least $2 mill)

The Might Have Hit a Million Club includes

The Broad Foundation
Jacqueline Hume Foundation
Robertson Foundation
Carnegie Corporation of New York
Kovner Foundation
The Arnold Foundation

Beyond those, we find Florida businesses and a fair sampling of folks who have a stake in the FEE mission, like McGraw Hill and Renaissance Learning.

FEE's website breaks things down by year, which helps create a picture of FEE's growth. The first reported year is 2007 (that's the same year that Bush's run as Florida's governor ended), and while Bloomberg was still one of the top donors, that was with a measly five figures. This shift to private advocacy on public policy matters was not just an education thing-- in 2007 Bush also joined the board of Tenet Healthcare.

2008 was also a modest year, with no million-dollar and most donors targeting their contribution to particular FEE programs such as Excellence in Teaching or the annual Reformster-palooza Summit.

But 2009 was a great year for reformster-preneurs. Race to the Top was unveiled and the Common Core was looking so good that states were signing up for it even though they didn't know what the hell it was! FEE was looking less like a retired governor's hobby group and more like a one stop shop for people interested in making serious education money.

So it's in 2009 that FEE starts to draw the big bucks-- The Walton Family was in for six big figures, and that, like many of the support checks, was for FEE to use as it saw fit, not earmarked for a particular program. By 2010 Gates, Schwab and Broad had joined in, and by 2011 there were five donors in the $500K to $1 mill range. In 2012 GE became the first over-a-million donor, and in 2013 Gates and Helmsley joined the club.

2014 marked the first downward trend at the top end. Gates, Schwab, News Corp and GE all dropped back to the under-a-million category. Make of that what you will.

This is a ho-hum story. There are no surprises, nothing special revealed that we hadn't all already guessed. The curtain has been pulled back to reveal exactly who we thought was back there all along.

But it's still important because now we're not just guessing--we have confirmation. Yet one more reformster advocacy group is revealed to be a small club of high rollers, many of whom have vested interests in how this all shakes out.

The truth about FEE is a reminder-- for the gazillionth time-- that we have yet to see an actual hard-core full-on grass roots movement in support of reformster policies. It's also a reminder that if education issues were being decided on merit, or if all the Rich Person money just dried up tomorrow, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Ed reform is a big delicate rosebush in the middle of the desert, and money is the water that keeps it alive. Shut off the water, and it's done.

Consolidating Charter Gains

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.