Well, the 74 is here, and it's not exactly loaded with surprises.
Campbell Brown has launched her new site devoted to bringing the Power of Journalism to bear on pushing her particular view of What Is Needed in Education. Here's what we can find there this morning.
Brown herself has an opinion piece entitled "Advocacy, Journalism, and Why Not Every Story Has Two Sides."
Through our reporting we will advocate for a public school system that truly serves the 74 million children in this country and prioritizes their needs. Without question, The Seventy Four has an agenda – children first. We will fiercely challenge those forces within the education establishment who impede innovation in our schools and who protect and defend inequality and institutional failure.
Yes, this site is For The Children. Also, they will fight for Equity and Quality, and against the Establishment. Brown continues to position herself rhetorically as a fighter for children against teachers and other educators. She is here to speak up for the voiceless.
Naïve as it sounds, I was taken with the idea that a journalist could be a voice for those who don’t have one
Interesting notion. Because one would think that a person running a website with a four million dollar budget could provide a platform to allow those people's voices to be heard. But no-- once again (and to be fair, reformsters don't have a monopoly on this) the plan is to speak for people-- not to let them speak for themselves.
The website has a Top Four feature that headlines the top four features of the day, and today the number one feature is a story about Scott Walker. It's actually a reading list, with links to nine articles about his childhood, the moral imperative of vouchers, his complicated relationship with Common Core, his war on tenure, Politifacts debunking of WI growth scores, his courting of home schoolers, his protection of vouchers against budget cuts, how he dropped out of college, and his op-ed last month.
I expect we'll see more of these sorts of pieces. Brown wants to position her website as a player in the Presidential election, and has already set up education "summits" in NH and Iowa (one for each party). Prize-winning commentator Cynthia Tucker Haynes argues that the next President will have to fix education, arguing that NCLB was a good step and Race to the Top was swell because of the teacher accountability idea, allowing us to hunt down bad teachers to get rid of them, proving I guess that you can win a Pullitzer and still not understand every topic you write about.
It does suggest that Brown's project wants to advocate for a level of federalism that is out of step with much of reformsterism. It'll be interesting to see how free-market right guys like AEI and Fordham take to her.
What else have we got?
There's a breathless expose of the secret conspiracy behind the Montclair, NJ opt out movement (hint: the dastardly teacher's union was wrapped up in it). There's an inspirational story of how Miami-Dade's superintendent saved the district by using charters and choice. There's another inspirational story about how a "heroic pilot" became a great educator thanks to Teach for America. And in state-level news, there's a story about how Nevada's only hope is to make the bold move of shifting to an all-choice system.
If that's not enough charter love, there is also a flashcard feature (in this and in many design features, the site seems to owe a bit to vox.xom) which offers us thirteen things to know about charter schools.
Point 2 is "are charter schools more successful than public schools," so kudos for acknowledging that they aren't the same thing! No kudos for answering, "Yeah, a little." Most of the thirteen points are straightforward (where do charters get their money?) but a few stretchers appear. For instance, in response to "do charters have to accept all students," we learn charters have huge waiting lists, but they settle these with lotteries and there's no proof that they counsel out problem students-- none of which actually answers the question.
So, bottom line, how does the site look?
First, Brown's site benefits from the hiring of real journalists and real professionals from the world of online news. It looks slick, and the writing is generally well-done and competent. Honestly, I'm not sure I really noticed how amateur hour Peter Cunningham's $12 million Education Post site looks and reads until I checked out The 74.
Second, it uses the modern news-ish outlet technique of letting opinion and news live right side by side so that only people paying attention will notice the difference. For the rest, the professional tone of the news reporting will give a feeling of substance to the opinion pieces that they don't really deserve (and I say this as a person whose opinion pieces run at Huffington Post). The news items up at the moment are not hugely obviously fox-news-style slanted, but give a pretty good semblance of objectivity, if not the actual thing. Which leads us straight to
Third, this is an advocacy site, and "advocacy" is our nice name for PR. It has a point of view that it wants to push, and whether that's because Brown is a clueless rich dilettante who doesn't know what she's talking about or an evil mastermind who's fronting for her husband and his disaster capitalist friends, either way, this is a site that has a point of view to push. This is no more nor less than we expected. That's evident just in the choice of topics. One good way to be subtle in slanting news is to provide fairly level coverage-- but only of the things you want to talk about.
You could, for instance, provide fairly level coverage of problems in education, but never ever send a reporter to cover the problems that turn up in charter schools. Your individual stories might be close to objective, but your overall coverage would still be slanted.
We'll see how things play out. If Brown can convince candidates to cue up for her educational summits, she may start looking like a real player in the ed debates, or at least a good mouthpiece for candidates who want to say educationy things without being challenged on their baloney.
But if you had the slightest thought that there would be any surprises at The 74, banish such foolish notions. It's a slicker package and better buns, but it's the same old pro-charter, anti-union, pro-privatization, anti-public ed meal inside. I can't wait till they start covering Brown's heroic fight to destroy tenure in New York, but I definitely won't hold my breath waiting for a hard-hitting expose of a charter school scandal.
There is no such thing as advocacy journalism. You cannot, as Brown
promises we will, have both. Either you have a journalist's interest in
pursuing the truth, wherever the path leads you, or you have an advocate's interest in finding support for the position that you have already committed yourself to. It's one or the other, and for all the journalistic trappings, Brown has chosen the path of the advocate.
Monday, July 13, 2015
Sunday, July 12, 2015
Test Scoring Monkeys
It's been less than a month since Motoko Rich traveled to San Antonio to hear a Pearson test scoring supervisor explain that scoring the tests is like making a Big Mac. Now Claudio Sanchez has made the same journey for NPR, and the results are no more flattering for Pearson than those from Rich's jaunt.
The center uses scorers from many walks of life, though a four-year degree is required. What is not required is any sort of opinion about the quality of the questions.
David Connerty-Marin, a spokesman for PARCC, says it's not up to a scorer or Pearson or PARCC to say, "Gee, we think this is too hard for a fourth-grader."
What is or is not developmentally appropriate, he says, is not an issue because the states have already made that decision based on the Common Core Standards.
One of these rainy summer days, I'll spend some time running up and down the internet and see if I can find, somewhere in the great chain of standards and testing, the person who says, "Me, I'm the one. I'm the guy who decides that this test item is appropriate for an eight year old." But until the day comes, we're stuck with test manufacturers who say, "Well, we just follow what the state tells us" and states that say, "Well, we lean on the professionals to design these things" and a whole bunch of people who point and shrug and say, "Well, you know, the standards" as if the standards were dropped down from heaven on the back of a golden cloud that deposited them on top of a burning bush.
The article's description of the scoring process reveals for the gazillionth time that the constructed open-ended responses are not any kind of open-ended response at all, but a bizarre exercise in blind matching.
Sanchez talked to one retired teacher who has worked eight years for Pearson.
She looks for evidence that students understood what they read, that their writing is coherent and that they used proper grammar. But it's actually not up to Vickers to decide what score a student deserves.
Instead, she relies on a three-ring binder filled with "anchor papers." These are samples of students' writing that show what a low-score or a high-score response looks like.
"I compare the composition to the anchors and see which score does the composition match more closely," Vickers says.
That's not an open-ended response. It's a newer, more gigantic form of multiple choice, where students choose from all the possible combinations of words in the English language in hopes of selecting the one combination that is acceptable to test manufacturers. Those folks in Texas have the same basic task as the guy checking the work of the million monkeys to see which one has typed a Shakespeare play. This is a test where students are given a box full of LEGOs and told to build something, but will only get credit if they build the right thing.
And, of course, reporters can't know any specifics about any of the actual test questions or responses.
Pearson does not allow reporters to describe or provide examples of what students wrote because otherwise, company officials say, everybody would know what's on the test.
I don't even know how to explain how insane that is. In my own classroom, my students know exactly what is going to be on a test. Any test that depends on super-duper secrecy is a terrible test. It is also possibly a test manufactured by cheap money-grubbing slackers who don't want to do the work of updating it annually.
Pearson delivers a backhanded acknowledgement that secrecy has not been their friend. One supervisor notes that since the public doesn't know what Pearson's doing, "misconceptions" abound. But Sanchez gets the last word on that subject:
Most Americans have been in the dark, says Thompson. So the risk for Pearson, PARCC and the states is that by trying to be more transparent this late in the game, people may very well end up with more questions than answers.
The center uses scorers from many walks of life, though a four-year degree is required. What is not required is any sort of opinion about the quality of the questions.
David Connerty-Marin, a spokesman for PARCC, says it's not up to a scorer or Pearson or PARCC to say, "Gee, we think this is too hard for a fourth-grader."
What is or is not developmentally appropriate, he says, is not an issue because the states have already made that decision based on the Common Core Standards.
One of these rainy summer days, I'll spend some time running up and down the internet and see if I can find, somewhere in the great chain of standards and testing, the person who says, "Me, I'm the one. I'm the guy who decides that this test item is appropriate for an eight year old." But until the day comes, we're stuck with test manufacturers who say, "Well, we just follow what the state tells us" and states that say, "Well, we lean on the professionals to design these things" and a whole bunch of people who point and shrug and say, "Well, you know, the standards" as if the standards were dropped down from heaven on the back of a golden cloud that deposited them on top of a burning bush.
The article's description of the scoring process reveals for the gazillionth time that the constructed open-ended responses are not any kind of open-ended response at all, but a bizarre exercise in blind matching.
Sanchez talked to one retired teacher who has worked eight years for Pearson.
She looks for evidence that students understood what they read, that their writing is coherent and that they used proper grammar. But it's actually not up to Vickers to decide what score a student deserves.
Instead, she relies on a three-ring binder filled with "anchor papers." These are samples of students' writing that show what a low-score or a high-score response looks like.
"I compare the composition to the anchors and see which score does the composition match more closely," Vickers says.
That's not an open-ended response. It's a newer, more gigantic form of multiple choice, where students choose from all the possible combinations of words in the English language in hopes of selecting the one combination that is acceptable to test manufacturers. Those folks in Texas have the same basic task as the guy checking the work of the million monkeys to see which one has typed a Shakespeare play. This is a test where students are given a box full of LEGOs and told to build something, but will only get credit if they build the right thing.
And, of course, reporters can't know any specifics about any of the actual test questions or responses.
Pearson does not allow reporters to describe or provide examples of what students wrote because otherwise, company officials say, everybody would know what's on the test.
I don't even know how to explain how insane that is. In my own classroom, my students know exactly what is going to be on a test. Any test that depends on super-duper secrecy is a terrible test. It is also possibly a test manufactured by cheap money-grubbing slackers who don't want to do the work of updating it annually.
Pearson delivers a backhanded acknowledgement that secrecy has not been their friend. One supervisor notes that since the public doesn't know what Pearson's doing, "misconceptions" abound. But Sanchez gets the last word on that subject:
Most Americans have been in the dark, says Thompson. So the risk for Pearson, PARCC and the states is that by trying to be more transparent this late in the game, people may very well end up with more questions than answers.
ICYMI: Top Eduposts of the Week (7/12)
Once again, here's some choice bits from around the edublogosphere that you should catch this week. I"m not perfect and this isn't every single thing you should read, but these are definitely pieces you should not miss.
Charter Schools Are Mired in Fraud and Failure
Paul Buchheit at Alternet takes a look at what's not to love about charter schools. This is a well-sourced compendium of many of the things we know are wrong. You might not find anything here you didn't already know, but it's a good source for finding it all in one place.
The Disturbing Forces Behind a School "Reform" Fight in Colorado
Jeff Bryant takes a closer look at the ongoing mess in Colorado, where Jefferson and Douglas County have both attracted the attention and money of reformsters from outside the area. This is the same fight featured in the film Education, Inc, and well worth studying up on. This is the blueprint for how outsiders take over a local district, and Bryant is, as always, thorough.
Testimony Regarding PARCC/MAS
Tracy Novick's testimony about choosing between the PARCC and Massachusetts' home-grown test (Novick picks None of the Above). A quick concise argument about what's wrong with the high stakes standardized testing regime.
False Sense of Security
This story leads off with the story of a student who found himself dealing with police twice-- just because he forgot his school id badge. A look at more effective approaches to school security.
Washington Post writes the most embarrassing, awful profile of Arne Duncan ever, completely misses the point
Lyndsey Layton took some flak this week for her profile of Arne Duncan, but nobody laid down the flak more precisely and thoroughly than Jeff Bryant at Salon with this too-long-for-twitter title.
Kansas Is Becoming a Hard Place To Teach, So Teachers Are Crossing the State Line
A Wichita public radio station notices that Kansas's anti-public ed policies are starting to drive teachers away. Complete with pics of the recruiting billboards Missouri is putting up in Kansas to poach teachers.
And finally, two pieces from Jersey Jazzman that you should not miss.
Chris Cerf's Victory Lap is a reminder that a 100% charter district is probably not the end game for privatizers. Firing Black, Experienced Teachers in Camden lays out once again, with data, how reformster programs often have a disproportionate effect on non-white teachers.
Charter Schools Are Mired in Fraud and Failure
Paul Buchheit at Alternet takes a look at what's not to love about charter schools. This is a well-sourced compendium of many of the things we know are wrong. You might not find anything here you didn't already know, but it's a good source for finding it all in one place.
The Disturbing Forces Behind a School "Reform" Fight in Colorado
Jeff Bryant takes a closer look at the ongoing mess in Colorado, where Jefferson and Douglas County have both attracted the attention and money of reformsters from outside the area. This is the same fight featured in the film Education, Inc, and well worth studying up on. This is the blueprint for how outsiders take over a local district, and Bryant is, as always, thorough.
Testimony Regarding PARCC/MAS
Tracy Novick's testimony about choosing between the PARCC and Massachusetts' home-grown test (Novick picks None of the Above). A quick concise argument about what's wrong with the high stakes standardized testing regime.
False Sense of Security
This story leads off with the story of a student who found himself dealing with police twice-- just because he forgot his school id badge. A look at more effective approaches to school security.
Washington Post writes the most embarrassing, awful profile of Arne Duncan ever, completely misses the point
Lyndsey Layton took some flak this week for her profile of Arne Duncan, but nobody laid down the flak more precisely and thoroughly than Jeff Bryant at Salon with this too-long-for-twitter title.
Kansas Is Becoming a Hard Place To Teach, So Teachers Are Crossing the State Line
A Wichita public radio station notices that Kansas's anti-public ed policies are starting to drive teachers away. Complete with pics of the recruiting billboards Missouri is putting up in Kansas to poach teachers.
And finally, two pieces from Jersey Jazzman that you should not miss.
Chris Cerf's Victory Lap is a reminder that a 100% charter district is probably not the end game for privatizers. Firing Black, Experienced Teachers in Camden lays out once again, with data, how reformster programs often have a disproportionate effect on non-white teachers.
Saturday, July 11, 2015
Jeb: Beware Big Words
Well, here's another possible explanation for why Jeb Bush favors reformster policies for breaking down public education and selling off the parts.
Jeb sat down for an interview with the New Hampshire Union Leader, and as written up, it presents a fairly boilerplate Bush campaign talk. The Union Leader reported one section of the interview like this:
"We don't have to be the world's policeman, but we have to be the world's leader," Bush said. "If we're not leading, that creates chaos and a more dangerous world."
You don’t have to be the world’s policemen, but you have to be the world’s leader and there’s a huge difference. This guy — this president and Secretary Clinton and Secretary Kerry – when someone disagrees with their nuanced approach where it’s all kind of so sophisticated it makes no sense. You know what I’m saying? Big syllable words and lots of fancy conferences and meetings and – We’re not leading. That creates chaos. It creates a more dangerous world. So restoring the alliances that have kept the world safer and our country safer – getting back to a position in the Middle East where there’s no light between Israel and the United States.
I get the Jeb is trying to paint himself as a plain-speaking, straight-shooting, git-er-done kinda guy. But his picture of the opposite-- some fancy-pants guy with his fancy conferences and big syllable words who just isn't a leader-- how does Jeb want to square that with his notion that kids need to get an education so they can compete globally and make America better?
Is his beloved Common Core supposed to provide just a basic meat-and-potatoes education without getting too fancy? Should it have a cap on number of syllables in words, or a limit on how many clauses can be put in one sentence? Will we have a federal ban on semi-colons because they're just too fancy for a simple American piece of punctuation? A limit on the number of abstract nouns used in any composition?Should we also require Microsoft to strip Word of fancy swirly script fonts? I mean, shouldn't Times New Roman be enough for any plainspoken American (okay, maybe Comic Sans for when you're feeling kind of wacky)? And the most meta of concerns-- does the word "syllable" have too many syllables?
Does any red-blooded American need a vocabulary of more than a few hundred words? Could we perhaps focus the Common Core by simply listing the, say, 500 words that every American needs to know and just drop the rest of them? Syllables, nuance, complexity-- that way lies madness and chaos.
In fact, I think we need to find out right away which five hundred words should be on Jeb Bush's List of Real American Vocabulary so that we can get our lesson plans aligned for the fall. Let's see if we can get him to send us that list soon.
Jeb sat down for an interview with the New Hampshire Union Leader, and as written up, it presents a fairly boilerplate Bush campaign talk. The Union Leader reported one section of the interview like this:
"We don't have to be the world's policeman, but we have to be the world's leader," Bush said. "If we're not leading, that creates chaos and a more dangerous world."
ave to be the world's policeman, but we have to be the world’s
leader," Bush said. "If we're not leading, that creates chaos and a more
dangerous world."
- See more at: http://www.unionleader.com/article/20150709/NEWS0605/150709206/0/FRONTPAGE#sthash.8Yj14IrD.dpuf
- See more at: http://www.unionleader.com/article/20150709/NEWS0605/150709206/0/FRONTPAGE#sthash.8Yj14IrD.dpuf
"We
don’t have to be the world's policeman, but we have to be the world’s
leader," Bush said. "If we're not leading, that creates chaos and a more
dangerous world."
- See more at: http://www.unionleader.com/article/20150709/NEWS0605/150709206/0/FRONTPAGE#sthash.8Yj14IrD.dpuf
But when C-Span took a look at the raw footage, they discovered that the Union Leader might have cleaned that quote up for Jeb a bit. The full quote sounds a little more like this:- See more at: http://www.unionleader.com/article/20150709/NEWS0605/150709206/0/FRONTPAGE#sthash.8Yj14IrD.dpuf
You don’t have to be the world’s policemen, but you have to be the world’s leader and there’s a huge difference. This guy — this president and Secretary Clinton and Secretary Kerry – when someone disagrees with their nuanced approach where it’s all kind of so sophisticated it makes no sense. You know what I’m saying? Big syllable words and lots of fancy conferences and meetings and – We’re not leading. That creates chaos. It creates a more dangerous world. So restoring the alliances that have kept the world safer and our country safer – getting back to a position in the Middle East where there’s no light between Israel and the United States.
I get the Jeb is trying to paint himself as a plain-speaking, straight-shooting, git-er-done kinda guy. But his picture of the opposite-- some fancy-pants guy with his fancy conferences and big syllable words who just isn't a leader-- how does Jeb want to square that with his notion that kids need to get an education so they can compete globally and make America better?
Is his beloved Common Core supposed to provide just a basic meat-and-potatoes education without getting too fancy? Should it have a cap on number of syllables in words, or a limit on how many clauses can be put in one sentence? Will we have a federal ban on semi-colons because they're just too fancy for a simple American piece of punctuation? A limit on the number of abstract nouns used in any composition?Should we also require Microsoft to strip Word of fancy swirly script fonts? I mean, shouldn't Times New Roman be enough for any plainspoken American (okay, maybe Comic Sans for when you're feeling kind of wacky)? And the most meta of concerns-- does the word "syllable" have too many syllables?
Does any red-blooded American need a vocabulary of more than a few hundred words? Could we perhaps focus the Common Core by simply listing the, say, 500 words that every American needs to know and just drop the rest of them? Syllables, nuance, complexity-- that way lies madness and chaos.
In fact, I think we need to find out right away which five hundred words should be on Jeb Bush's List of Real American Vocabulary so that we can get our lesson plans aligned for the fall. Let's see if we can get him to send us that list soon.
WI: Cheering Public Ed Destruction
The Wisconsin Legislature passed a budget this week that dumps more funding into the already-robust voucherific choicetastic system in Wisconsin. All the budget needs is a signature from Governor Scott Walker, and the only way Walker wouldn't approve such move would be if he were disappointed that it didn't explicitly end public education and replace public school teachers with minimum-wage temps.
Also cheering for this are the boys at the Heartland Institute, a thinky tank devoted to free market causes and a better world where rich people are free to do as they wish and poor people live the crappy lives they deserve.
But these quotes certainly show what free market folks want. No surprises here, but it's nice to see them in their own words.
"This budget shows Wisconsin legislators are taking improving education seriously. They are doing so by recognizing that throwing more money at a broken public education system in need of systemic change is not the answer," says Heather Kays. She does not go on to say, "But they do recognize that throwing money at charter operators is totally awesome and magically effective."
"The primary focus of education should be children, which the Wisconsin Legislature finally recognizes by adopting a fund-the-child approach over the funding-a-system approach," says Lennie Jarratt, who does not go on to say, "That's why we're proposing that we actually just give the kids the money and let them spend it on whatever they want."
But here's our winner:
“Wisconsin’s new budget, which expands school choice programs, is a big win for Wisconsin parents and taxpayers. The strategy of across-the-board expansion of choice accelerates the process of dismantling the inefficient ‘district-based’ system and the educational apartheid that system creates.” Says Bruno Behrend, who just goes right on ahead and uses the word "dismantling."
Yup-- that's the Randian view of education. Cut every kid a check, and those that are well-connected and have the resources can use that check as down-payment on a good education. Those Other People-- well, we gave them a voucher. How much more are we supposed to spend on Those People anyway? They have "access to" swell charter schools (in the same way that every citizen of Wisconsin has "access to" a Mercedes Benz and if they aren't able to convert that access to actual possession, well, they should have thought about that when they chose to be poor). Let's go ahead and scrap public education entirely.
Let's just all pay attention when Presidential Candidate Scott Walker signs this great piece of dismantling legislature.
Also cheering for this are the boys at the Heartland Institute, a thinky tank devoted to free market causes and a better world where rich people are free to do as they wish and poor people live the crappy lives they deserve.
But these quotes certainly show what free market folks want. No surprises here, but it's nice to see them in their own words.
"This budget shows Wisconsin legislators are taking improving education seriously. They are doing so by recognizing that throwing more money at a broken public education system in need of systemic change is not the answer," says Heather Kays. She does not go on to say, "But they do recognize that throwing money at charter operators is totally awesome and magically effective."
"The primary focus of education should be children, which the Wisconsin Legislature finally recognizes by adopting a fund-the-child approach over the funding-a-system approach," says Lennie Jarratt, who does not go on to say, "That's why we're proposing that we actually just give the kids the money and let them spend it on whatever they want."
But here's our winner:
“Wisconsin’s new budget, which expands school choice programs, is a big win for Wisconsin parents and taxpayers. The strategy of across-the-board expansion of choice accelerates the process of dismantling the inefficient ‘district-based’ system and the educational apartheid that system creates.” Says Bruno Behrend, who just goes right on ahead and uses the word "dismantling."
Yup-- that's the Randian view of education. Cut every kid a check, and those that are well-connected and have the resources can use that check as down-payment on a good education. Those Other People-- well, we gave them a voucher. How much more are we supposed to spend on Those People anyway? They have "access to" swell charter schools (in the same way that every citizen of Wisconsin has "access to" a Mercedes Benz and if they aren't able to convert that access to actual possession, well, they should have thought about that when they chose to be poor). Let's go ahead and scrap public education entirely.
Let's just all pay attention when Presidential Candidate Scott Walker signs this great piece of dismantling legislature.
Florida Charter Scam (Part 23,174)
Can you read one more story about how a charter school was used to scam taxpayers and make one more amateur education expert rich?
This one comes from Florida, courtesy of Andrew Marra at the Palm Beach Post. I'll give you the highlights; you should follow the link for the full deal.The story is one more example of how a charter school can be used as a giant money funnel, even if it wears the noble "non-profit" badge.
Gregory James Blount was a 40-ish-year-old former model and events producer who was working his way out of bankruptcy by teaching modeling and acting classes when he decided that getting into the charter school biz seemed like a fine career move. He recruited Liz Knowles, a teacher and private school chief, to run the school and write his "Artademics" curriculum. But Knowles walked away from Blount soon after (final straw-- discovering he had created a Artademics company to cash in). Knowles recalled Blount's argument for her to stay. "Don't worry, :Liz. You'll be rich."
The Eagle Arts Academy opened up, and Blount was cashing in. What's repeatedly impressive about these scam schools is that even people with no education experience or even successful business experience can still figure out how to make big money at this game. Blount was no exception.
The technique is familiar. The non-profit school hires other companies, and that's where you make your money. Blount set up a business that he called a "foundation," though it was not registered as one. The foundation sold uniforms to students at hefty prices, and that money went to Blount. Blount's company also ran a profitable after-school tutoring program on school grounds, rent free. And when Knowles walked away from writing the school's curriculum, Blount set up a company to do that; the school paid him for that as well-- even though the curriculum was both late. A third company charged the school for consulting services as well.
The Eagles Arts charter did include a clause saying that no board members of the school could profit directly or indirectly. Blount apparently got around that by simply resigning from the board during the periods that he was making money through his companies.
So, does this story end with Blount disgraced and in handcuffs?
Nope. It ends with Blount talking about plans for opening the school for its second year in August. Hey, he admits to making mistakes, but a guy's gotta make a living. And while this may all sound shady as hell, we're only reading about it because a newspaper decided to pursue it. Blount doesn't appear to have done anything illegal under Florida law. Here's the quote from the article:
“Do we like it? No,” said Jim Pegg, who oversees the county’s charter schools for the Palm Beach County School District. “Is it legal? Yes.”
So, hats off to you, Florida, for continuing your tradition of fostering some of America's finest scams. Nice to know that even with no more swampland left to sell, Florida still offers the chance to make plenty of money in the swamps of charter schools.
This one comes from Florida, courtesy of Andrew Marra at the Palm Beach Post. I'll give you the highlights; you should follow the link for the full deal.The story is one more example of how a charter school can be used as a giant money funnel, even if it wears the noble "non-profit" badge.
Gregory James Blount was a 40-ish-year-old former model and events producer who was working his way out of bankruptcy by teaching modeling and acting classes when he decided that getting into the charter school biz seemed like a fine career move. He recruited Liz Knowles, a teacher and private school chief, to run the school and write his "Artademics" curriculum. But Knowles walked away from Blount soon after (final straw-- discovering he had created a Artademics company to cash in). Knowles recalled Blount's argument for her to stay. "Don't worry, :Liz. You'll be rich."
The Eagle Arts Academy opened up, and Blount was cashing in. What's repeatedly impressive about these scam schools is that even people with no education experience or even successful business experience can still figure out how to make big money at this game. Blount was no exception.
The technique is familiar. The non-profit school hires other companies, and that's where you make your money. Blount set up a business that he called a "foundation," though it was not registered as one. The foundation sold uniforms to students at hefty prices, and that money went to Blount. Blount's company also ran a profitable after-school tutoring program on school grounds, rent free. And when Knowles walked away from writing the school's curriculum, Blount set up a company to do that; the school paid him for that as well-- even though the curriculum was both late. A third company charged the school for consulting services as well.
The Eagles Arts charter did include a clause saying that no board members of the school could profit directly or indirectly. Blount apparently got around that by simply resigning from the board during the periods that he was making money through his companies.
So, does this story end with Blount disgraced and in handcuffs?
Nope. It ends with Blount talking about plans for opening the school for its second year in August. Hey, he admits to making mistakes, but a guy's gotta make a living. And while this may all sound shady as hell, we're only reading about it because a newspaper decided to pursue it. Blount doesn't appear to have done anything illegal under Florida law. Here's the quote from the article:
“Do we like it? No,” said Jim Pegg, who oversees the county’s charter schools for the Palm Beach County School District. “Is it legal? Yes.”
So, hats off to you, Florida, for continuing your tradition of fostering some of America's finest scams. Nice to know that even with no more swampland left to sell, Florida still offers the chance to make plenty of money in the swamps of charter schools.
Friday, July 10, 2015
Competing Globally
On the list of empty rhetoric that's thrown into the ring for the reformster dog and pony show, we should include "compete globally."
It is frequently used as the bottom line for the reformster argument. We need standards so we can raise test scores so we can prove that students are career and college ready? Why? So that they can compete globally.
What does that even mean? Compete with which parts of the globe? Compete at what?
I mean, there are many areas in which we are not winning global competitions. While Americans go hungry and tons of tons of edible food end up in landfills, France has made it illegal for stores to throw food away. While Americans (and their government) try to get rich off of men and women trying to get a college education, many countries recognize the benefits of making it easy to home-grow educated adults with no-cost colleges. And while we commit so many acts of policy and profit "for the children," we remain one of the absolute worst countries in the world for child-care leave. Anything for the children-- except letting them have their mothers handy during the first months of life.
And Estonia? That country we're worried about catching up to? I learned this week that they are the leaders in free wifi for everybody (instead of preserving it as private source of corporate profit).
Nevertheless, aren't we still a major world power? Is China not still trying to imitate us economically? Are we not among the world's leaders, economically and politically? Also, our women just won the world cup, so in your face, global competition.
So what do our students need to be doing about competing globally?
No, when reformsters talk about competing globally, they're generally talking about jobs and economics. Like this sentence that leads off a White House essay about competing globally:
To create true middle class security, we must out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the rest of the world, positioning American companies to thrive in a 21st century economy.
There are two problems here.
The first is the use of the term "American companies." I'm not sure that anybody even knows what that means anymore. GE is a quintessential American company; we can all remember various GE products being advertised no matter how old or young we are. But of GE's roughly 300,000 employees, fewer than half (about 134,000) are in the US. "American" automaker Chrysler barely employs more Americans than "Japanese" Toyota.
Five years ago, when McKinsey was beating the drum at the front of the reformy parade, they weren't even bothering to talk about "American companies" so much as "multinational companies headquartered in the US."
Multinationals owe no allegiance to a particular country, nor even to a particular way of life. Robert Reich included this quote in a 2012 look at the issue:
An Apple executive says “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.”
Nor, for that matter, is Apple obliged to solve China's problems either, and so Apple, like many companies, benefits from a culture where sacrificing one's life for a meager paycheck. China's working conditions suck, but that's not the multinational's problem. It is, in fact, to their benefit.
And that brings us to the second problem with the White House statement.
Reformsters repeatedly talk about this global competition as if it's just a matter of education instead of a matter of controlling costs. This "paper" by the Center for American Progress gives exactly one sentence to the issue
We are quite familiar with what economists call “global labor arbitrage,” the substitution of high-wage workers in advanced economy countries with low-wage workers in developing economies.
Having noted their familiarity, the writers spend the rest of the paper speaking as if competitiveness is strictly a matter of education and training, and not a willingness to provide labor at the lowest possible costs.
The examples are endless. GE is sitting on a mountain of money, and yet they even as they have moved jobs to cheaper overseas locations, they have slashed benefits and created two-tier pay systems for their American workers. Does the recent kerfluffle about Microsoft laying off workers with one hand while pressing Congress for more guest worker visas with the other-- does that all seem familiar? That's because we went through exactly the same kerfluffle a year ago. Google "do we need more STEM workers" and watch the arguments line up.
We aren't losing jobs because we can't "out-innovate, out-educate or out-build" the rest of the world, but because we don't have enough people willing to work for far less money in far crappier conditions. (Even if we were, you don't raise people who can out-innovate anyone by forcing students through a one-size-fits-all, test-driven straightjacket of an education program-- even China understands that.)
Competing how?
It is true that American students are poorly equipped to compete in a marketplace when what they've been told is, "I've got ten Chinese workers willing to live in a dorm away from home and work 80-hour weeks for peanuts. Can you beat that?" But it's not entirely clear how college and career ready standards, backed up by high stakes testing fueling a big stick threat-heavy approach to public schools will help.
I can find plenty of writing about the issues in big broad terms, but try as I might, I can't find somebody who lays out the direct connection. I'm eighteen and I've proven I can pass a test about literature taught the David Coleman way-- exactly what will that allow to say in a job interview that will make a potential employer say, "Yes, I definitely want to hire you, and not that guy in China."
Exactly what is the connection between passing PARCC and scoring a good middle class job?
Reformsters keep trying to frame the issue as an issue or worker worthiness. Surely our American workers would be better paid at better jobs if they deserved to be. The fact that they aren't is proof that they don't deserve to be. I have no doubt that when Jeb Bush says American workers should work more hours, he's displaying the reformster disconnect, not even noticing that 1) vast number of employers won't hire people for more than part-time jobs and 2) employers just fought hard for their right to screw workers out of overtime pay.
In other words, we have somehow taken a broad economic problems-- the human costs of corporations that want to pay absolute bottom dollar for labor-- and turned it into the workers' fault. Don't whine to me, Mr. Smith-- if you had gotten a better education, working part time at the widget store would pay better.
The global competition is to scour the globe to find the cheapest good-enough labor to be found so that corporate coffers can be crammed full. Multinationals are on their way to reducing national governments to the role of human resources department-- get us a good applicant pool for jobs, take care of health care costs and any other maintenance costs for keeping the human capital in working order. And so nations are in a global competition to see which can bring the most good-enough human capital under budget. Who's going to compete for the job of looking out for the interests of the human capital. Turns out that there is no global competition to be best at that job.
It is frequently used as the bottom line for the reformster argument. We need standards so we can raise test scores so we can prove that students are career and college ready? Why? So that they can compete globally.
What does that even mean? Compete with which parts of the globe? Compete at what?
I mean, there are many areas in which we are not winning global competitions. While Americans go hungry and tons of tons of edible food end up in landfills, France has made it illegal for stores to throw food away. While Americans (and their government) try to get rich off of men and women trying to get a college education, many countries recognize the benefits of making it easy to home-grow educated adults with no-cost colleges. And while we commit so many acts of policy and profit "for the children," we remain one of the absolute worst countries in the world for child-care leave. Anything for the children-- except letting them have their mothers handy during the first months of life.
And Estonia? That country we're worried about catching up to? I learned this week that they are the leaders in free wifi for everybody (instead of preserving it as private source of corporate profit).
Nevertheless, aren't we still a major world power? Is China not still trying to imitate us economically? Are we not among the world's leaders, economically and politically? Also, our women just won the world cup, so in your face, global competition.
So what do our students need to be doing about competing globally?
No, when reformsters talk about competing globally, they're generally talking about jobs and economics. Like this sentence that leads off a White House essay about competing globally:
To create true middle class security, we must out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the rest of the world, positioning American companies to thrive in a 21st century economy.
There are two problems here.
The first is the use of the term "American companies." I'm not sure that anybody even knows what that means anymore. GE is a quintessential American company; we can all remember various GE products being advertised no matter how old or young we are. But of GE's roughly 300,000 employees, fewer than half (about 134,000) are in the US. "American" automaker Chrysler barely employs more Americans than "Japanese" Toyota.
Five years ago, when McKinsey was beating the drum at the front of the reformy parade, they weren't even bothering to talk about "American companies" so much as "multinational companies headquartered in the US."
Multinationals owe no allegiance to a particular country, nor even to a particular way of life. Robert Reich included this quote in a 2012 look at the issue:
An Apple executive says “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.”
Nor, for that matter, is Apple obliged to solve China's problems either, and so Apple, like many companies, benefits from a culture where sacrificing one's life for a meager paycheck. China's working conditions suck, but that's not the multinational's problem. It is, in fact, to their benefit.
And that brings us to the second problem with the White House statement.
Reformsters repeatedly talk about this global competition as if it's just a matter of education instead of a matter of controlling costs. This "paper" by the Center for American Progress gives exactly one sentence to the issue
We are quite familiar with what economists call “global labor arbitrage,” the substitution of high-wage workers in advanced economy countries with low-wage workers in developing economies.
Having noted their familiarity, the writers spend the rest of the paper speaking as if competitiveness is strictly a matter of education and training, and not a willingness to provide labor at the lowest possible costs.
The examples are endless. GE is sitting on a mountain of money, and yet they even as they have moved jobs to cheaper overseas locations, they have slashed benefits and created two-tier pay systems for their American workers. Does the recent kerfluffle about Microsoft laying off workers with one hand while pressing Congress for more guest worker visas with the other-- does that all seem familiar? That's because we went through exactly the same kerfluffle a year ago. Google "do we need more STEM workers" and watch the arguments line up.
We aren't losing jobs because we can't "out-innovate, out-educate or out-build" the rest of the world, but because we don't have enough people willing to work for far less money in far crappier conditions. (Even if we were, you don't raise people who can out-innovate anyone by forcing students through a one-size-fits-all, test-driven straightjacket of an education program-- even China understands that.)
Competing how?
It is true that American students are poorly equipped to compete in a marketplace when what they've been told is, "I've got ten Chinese workers willing to live in a dorm away from home and work 80-hour weeks for peanuts. Can you beat that?" But it's not entirely clear how college and career ready standards, backed up by high stakes testing fueling a big stick threat-heavy approach to public schools will help.
I can find plenty of writing about the issues in big broad terms, but try as I might, I can't find somebody who lays out the direct connection. I'm eighteen and I've proven I can pass a test about literature taught the David Coleman way-- exactly what will that allow to say in a job interview that will make a potential employer say, "Yes, I definitely want to hire you, and not that guy in China."
Exactly what is the connection between passing PARCC and scoring a good middle class job?
Reformsters keep trying to frame the issue as an issue or worker worthiness. Surely our American workers would be better paid at better jobs if they deserved to be. The fact that they aren't is proof that they don't deserve to be. I have no doubt that when Jeb Bush says American workers should work more hours, he's displaying the reformster disconnect, not even noticing that 1) vast number of employers won't hire people for more than part-time jobs and 2) employers just fought hard for their right to screw workers out of overtime pay.
In other words, we have somehow taken a broad economic problems-- the human costs of corporations that want to pay absolute bottom dollar for labor-- and turned it into the workers' fault. Don't whine to me, Mr. Smith-- if you had gotten a better education, working part time at the widget store would pay better.
The global competition is to scour the globe to find the cheapest good-enough labor to be found so that corporate coffers can be crammed full. Multinationals are on their way to reducing national governments to the role of human resources department-- get us a good applicant pool for jobs, take care of health care costs and any other maintenance costs for keeping the human capital in working order. And so nations are in a global competition to see which can bring the most good-enough human capital under budget. Who's going to compete for the job of looking out for the interests of the human capital. Turns out that there is no global competition to be best at that job.
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