The financial crushing of Chester Uplands Schools, where teachers and staff are now working without pay while legislators dither over a long-past-due budget in Harrisburg-- well, this mess has ended up dragging ugly worm into the light of day.
Here's an excerpt from the Judge Chad Kenney's ruling nixing the state's proposed relief for CUSD:
The Charter Schools serving Chester-Upland Special Education students reported in 2013-2014, the last reporting period available, that they did not have any Special Education students costing them anything outside the zero (0) to twenty-five thousand dollar ($25,000.00) range, and yet this is remarkable considering they receive forty thousand dollars ($40,000.00) for each one of these Special Education students under a legislatively mandated formula. This means the legislative formula permits the Charters to pocket somewhere between fourteen thousand ($14,000.00) and forty thousand dollars ($40,000.00) per student over and above what it costs to educate them. While this discrepancy needs to be seen in most instances as the operators of Charters taking advantage of legal mandates, it is clear that the Legislature did not mean for its averages to produce such windfalls to the Charter School industry in a distressed district.
(Hat tip to Keystone State Education Coalition)
Yes, I have to keep explaining this to people because it seems so incredible-- the state of PA has a payment system for charters that doesn't factor in anything about what it actually costs the charters to educate students. The legislature has set it up so that charters like the ones in Chester can pick up a minimum of $15,000 pure profit.
You may remember a time when a selling point for charters was that they would do more with less. That has never been the case in PA-- charters promise to do whatever they feel like with as much money as they can get. PA is a textbook demonstration of how charter schools increase the overall cost of education. Here's how it works.
We start with a public school classroom that educates 10 students for $10,000. One of those students leaves for a charter. At the charter, they know that they get the 1 grand no matter what, so their goal is to spend as little of it as possible on the student's education. Meanwhile, the public schools revenue has dropped by $1,000, and its costs have dropped not at all, so it goes back to the taxpayers and raises taxes, or if it's really strapped, it reduces services.
End result-- the taxpayers of Pennsylvania end up spending more total money on education, and getting less for it. That's how we're doing it in the Keystone State.
The ruling in the CUSD case underlines just how huge the windfall for charter operators can be (and for cyber charters, who don't have brick-and-mortar overhead and who can assign a single teacher to several hundred students, can really clean up). This is how guys like Vahan Gureghian end up with $85 million mansions.
Tuesday, September 1, 2015
4 Bad Business Practices for Education
"Schools should run like a business" is one of the modern reformster mantras, and schools are so obviously NOT businesses that we can end up overlooking the other problem with this idea-- that reformsters often mean to incorporate practices that aren't even good business practices.
If you have friends or family in the private sector, or if you've just been paying attention, you may have noticed that businesses are increasingly run very, very badly. Many of the principles that reformsters want to apply to education are, in fact, failures in the private sector.
1) Eliminate expertise.
Take, for instance, the belief that industry-specific expertise is not only unnecessary, but undesirable. Even the robber barons rose to power by working up through the jobs of their respective industries and knowing something about how the business work, but nowadays the Cult of Management insists that the only important skill is bean counting and managerial managosity. The last guy to come in to run what used to be one of the major companies in my area had previously managed a toy company and a soup company. He was brought here to run an oil company. He had never worked any job in his life except managing stuff.
These guys frequently make stupid mistakes because they actively avoid listening to people who have worked in their industry. The history of business failures in my part of the country is the history of upper management being filled up with guys who didn't know anything about the industry they were suddenly working in.
2) Aim at the wrong target.
Reams have been written in the past fifty years about the folly of focusing on short-term financial goals instead of the long-term health of the business. Never mind where the business will be in ten years-- how can we get the stocks to trend upward in the next six months. Since the management nomads will not be here in ten years, anyway, who really cares?
This mistaken direction of the company means that the main job of the company is no longer to make a good or a service, but to make money for stockholders and management. We are awash in companies that have literally forgotten what they do, and America is not better for it.
3) Hire and fire at will
Why should teachers have job security when nobody else does? That's a dumb question, the wrong question. The better question is why does nobody have job security any more?
It has not always been this way. My father, as was typical of his generation, took a job with a company right after he graduated from college, and he worked there until the day he retired. The company, a manufacturer of underground coal mining equipment, had been the linchpin of the local economy since the 1920's. When times got tough, they had guys with the company who would go looking for work-- any kind of work-- to keep the plant going and the workers employed.
This was not abnormal in the American business world. Yes, the big marquee companies run by the robber barons treated workers like disposable meat widgets, but many mid-sized and small companies felt that one of their purposes was to keep the people in their community employed and their community healthy. The people who ran these businesses felt a responsibility to the community and their employees.
Modern corporate managers want the power to do whatever they want to whoever they want for whatever reason they want. They hate unions and government regulations the same way a toddler hates being told "no." And they want to do all this free of consequences-- they complain about the lack of employee loyalty and the problem maintaining institutional memory and continuity and the fact that consumers these days don't stay faithful to a brand. In many cases they have fired all the people who used to help the company do good and replaced them with people whose job is to make the company look good.
And corporate America has systematically turned against skill, trying to reduce every job to something that a trained chimp could handle-- not because this makes a better product, but because it means that no employee will ever be in a position to tell management what to do.
4) No community ties
Implied by everything above, but worth its own section. It's not just that corporations no longer consider the economic support of their communities a mission-- they aren't even interested in their country. We reached the point where a slogan like "What's good for General Motors is good for the USA" no longer sounds menacing and evil, but has become quaint. Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller were patrician, condescending, self-important, uber-controllling, worker-abusive jerks, but at least they felt some sense of obligation to make their community and their country better.
Our modern corporate overlords feel no particular sense of loyalty to their country, and their "community" is the insulated world of other corporate overlords. Communities are expendable collections of meat widgets that can be abandoned when they no longer provide the kinds of compliant meat widgets that the company desires.
These practices, with their disregard for community voices and health, their disinterest in sustainability, their warped idea of mission, and their disdain for real skill and expertise-- these practices have not made modern businesses better-- and in fact have impaired business leaders ability to even understand what "better" even means. They have not been good for business, they have not been good for communities, and they have not been good for the country.
It is the hugest kind of lie to turn to education and say, "Well, this is what all the cool kids, the big winners, are doing in the corporate world, so it's what you should do, too." These are bad ideas. They don't work for anybody (except the members of the 1%, and ultimately I don't think these practices are going to turn out well for the uber-rich, either), and they certainly don't belong in education.
If you have friends or family in the private sector, or if you've just been paying attention, you may have noticed that businesses are increasingly run very, very badly. Many of the principles that reformsters want to apply to education are, in fact, failures in the private sector.
1) Eliminate expertise.
Take, for instance, the belief that industry-specific expertise is not only unnecessary, but undesirable. Even the robber barons rose to power by working up through the jobs of their respective industries and knowing something about how the business work, but nowadays the Cult of Management insists that the only important skill is bean counting and managerial managosity. The last guy to come in to run what used to be one of the major companies in my area had previously managed a toy company and a soup company. He was brought here to run an oil company. He had never worked any job in his life except managing stuff.
These guys frequently make stupid mistakes because they actively avoid listening to people who have worked in their industry. The history of business failures in my part of the country is the history of upper management being filled up with guys who didn't know anything about the industry they were suddenly working in.
2) Aim at the wrong target.
Reams have been written in the past fifty years about the folly of focusing on short-term financial goals instead of the long-term health of the business. Never mind where the business will be in ten years-- how can we get the stocks to trend upward in the next six months. Since the management nomads will not be here in ten years, anyway, who really cares?
This mistaken direction of the company means that the main job of the company is no longer to make a good or a service, but to make money for stockholders and management. We are awash in companies that have literally forgotten what they do, and America is not better for it.
3) Hire and fire at will
Why should teachers have job security when nobody else does? That's a dumb question, the wrong question. The better question is why does nobody have job security any more?
It has not always been this way. My father, as was typical of his generation, took a job with a company right after he graduated from college, and he worked there until the day he retired. The company, a manufacturer of underground coal mining equipment, had been the linchpin of the local economy since the 1920's. When times got tough, they had guys with the company who would go looking for work-- any kind of work-- to keep the plant going and the workers employed.
This was not abnormal in the American business world. Yes, the big marquee companies run by the robber barons treated workers like disposable meat widgets, but many mid-sized and small companies felt that one of their purposes was to keep the people in their community employed and their community healthy. The people who ran these businesses felt a responsibility to the community and their employees.
Modern corporate managers want the power to do whatever they want to whoever they want for whatever reason they want. They hate unions and government regulations the same way a toddler hates being told "no." And they want to do all this free of consequences-- they complain about the lack of employee loyalty and the problem maintaining institutional memory and continuity and the fact that consumers these days don't stay faithful to a brand. In many cases they have fired all the people who used to help the company do good and replaced them with people whose job is to make the company look good.
And corporate America has systematically turned against skill, trying to reduce every job to something that a trained chimp could handle-- not because this makes a better product, but because it means that no employee will ever be in a position to tell management what to do.
4) No community ties
Implied by everything above, but worth its own section. It's not just that corporations no longer consider the economic support of their communities a mission-- they aren't even interested in their country. We reached the point where a slogan like "What's good for General Motors is good for the USA" no longer sounds menacing and evil, but has become quaint. Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller were patrician, condescending, self-important, uber-controllling, worker-abusive jerks, but at least they felt some sense of obligation to make their community and their country better.
Our modern corporate overlords feel no particular sense of loyalty to their country, and their "community" is the insulated world of other corporate overlords. Communities are expendable collections of meat widgets that can be abandoned when they no longer provide the kinds of compliant meat widgets that the company desires.
These practices, with their disregard for community voices and health, their disinterest in sustainability, their warped idea of mission, and their disdain for real skill and expertise-- these practices have not made modern businesses better-- and in fact have impaired business leaders ability to even understand what "better" even means. They have not been good for business, they have not been good for communities, and they have not been good for the country.
It is the hugest kind of lie to turn to education and say, "Well, this is what all the cool kids, the big winners, are doing in the corporate world, so it's what you should do, too." These are bad ideas. They don't work for anybody (except the members of the 1%, and ultimately I don't think these practices are going to turn out well for the uber-rich, either), and they certainly don't belong in education.
Monday, August 31, 2015
Middle Way
In the midst of the back and forth over her comments about New Orleans' Myth of School Makeovers, Andrea Gabor dropped this quote from Howard Fuller:
“I do believe things are better for a large number of kids than before Katrina. But I don’t want to be put in the position of saying: pre-Katrina was all bad, post-Katrina is all good. When we set it up that way, we’re negating anything that was positive before Katrina. What that tends to negate is the capacity of black people to do anything of excellence.
“The firing of those teachers is a wound that will never be closed, never be righted. I understand the issue of urgency. But a part of this quite frankly has to do with the fact that I do not believe that black people are respected. I don’t believe that our institutions are respected. And I don’t believe that our capacity to help our own people is respected…
“Its hard for me, because I do support the reforms and think there are some great things that have happened. I do have to ask the same question as Randi (Weingarten)—at what cost?
“Even if you talk to black people who drank the Kool-aide: The issue still is– this was done to us not with us. That feeling is deep. It can’t be ignored. It speaks to any type of long-term sustainability of what’s happening in New Orleans.
“When black people came out of slavery, we came out with a clear understanding of the connection between education and liberation. Two groups of white people descended upon us—the missionaries and the industrialists. They both had their view of what type of education we needed to make our new-born freedom realized. During this period there’s an analogy—I’ve said this to all my friends in Kipp And TFA. During this period two groups of white people descended on us the industrialists and the missionaries. And each one of them have their own view of what kind of education we need.
“What people have never grasped is that we want to be helped, we don’t want to be controlled. In this process, we wanted to be a critical part of defining what role education should play in our continuing struggle to truly realize freedom in America. That’s the thing that’s truly unsettled in my soul. How do I make that happen, when I’m swimming with sharks on the left and on the right. And trying to find an independent course that speaks to the pain that my people experience every single day.”
It's a bruisingly honest response from someone who has paid double dues on the front lines of education and education reform and who has been a willing voice for the privatizers and charter pushers for a long, long time. And it's a reminder of what is wrong with the most extreme narratives on opposite sides of the public education debates.
The cartoon reformster narrative: US education was hopelessly effed up in a morass of self-serving institutionally calcified failure. Our poorest, most vulnerable, and historically most underserved populations were being left further and further behind. Only a complete guttting of the system can blast loose the systemic problems.
The cartoon public school supporter narrative: the reform movement is an unnecessary attempt to gut public education, and they should go away and let us get back to what we were doing.
The challenge in threading the space between these two narratives. each side has things it needs to face up to.
Public education advocates need to recognize that there is no going back, that in some places, public schools have functioned primarily as institutions heavily embedded with all the neglect and racism and dumping on the people at the bottom of the ladder that we could possibly hate. New Orleans was, by most accounts, terrible in every way that a school district can be terrible. Many other poor urban schools were in a similar place.Something had to change.
But reformsters need to recognize that many of those districts were filled with excellent teachers in excellent schools working in communities where they were the educational equivalent of strong salmon trying to swim up Niagara Falls. And many of the reformsters of good faith (I believe there are such people) need to recognize that they opened a door that let it all manner of money-grubbing vermin who had no real interest in improving education for anybody-- just cashing in on a movement that opened up a mountain of public money to private profit.
The irony is that while reformsters recognized that some aspects of the system needed to change, they have ended up holding onto the aspect that needed the most change of all-- the continued disempowerment, disenfranchisement, disinvestment, and disintegration of the communities in which the schools were found. Folks in places like New Orleans traded a system in which it was hard for community voices to be heard, hard for community leaders to take charge, and hard for community needs to be considered-- they traded that for a system in which it is now impossible for the community voices to be heard, empowered, and responded to. In both the old version and the new version, schools are something that is "done to" the members of these communities.
And yes-- I did not represent the two sides as needing equal amounts of correction. They don't. By disregarding the expertise of professionals and the voice of the community, reformsters have put themselves far out in left field. They are not wrong about the need for change and improvement and a system that better responds to the needs of America's poor, and they have won plenty of support by showing they get the need while public education advocates have said, "Look, we're doing great. Just let us do our thing, and trust us."
But reformsters are dead wrong, and have been dead wrong nearly every step of the way, about what reforms will improve the situation. Some don't care about being wrong; they're simply focused on "solutions" that will redirect that beautiful river of money and power to The Right People, the Betters. Or they have a blind and foolish faith in The Market (which will never, ever, get us better schools). Or they have blind faith in their own superior wisdom.
But those who do care about getting it right have listened to the wrong people, and supporters of public education have made it easy for them to do so by being slow to respond to real concerns, real needs, real problems.
It's something to read Fullers words, to see a guy who's been unapologetic about taking mountains of Walton money (re: John Walton "I love that man"), say straight up that nobody on any side of the fight gets it. Not his opponents, and not his allies, either. The NOLA restrospectives taken together highlight one thing-- that all of this public education stuff is complex, and that people who believe in simple answers or explanations are kidding themselves (and lots of other people, too).
“I do believe things are better for a large number of kids than before Katrina. But I don’t want to be put in the position of saying: pre-Katrina was all bad, post-Katrina is all good. When we set it up that way, we’re negating anything that was positive before Katrina. What that tends to negate is the capacity of black people to do anything of excellence.
“The firing of those teachers is a wound that will never be closed, never be righted. I understand the issue of urgency. But a part of this quite frankly has to do with the fact that I do not believe that black people are respected. I don’t believe that our institutions are respected. And I don’t believe that our capacity to help our own people is respected…
“Its hard for me, because I do support the reforms and think there are some great things that have happened. I do have to ask the same question as Randi (Weingarten)—at what cost?
“Even if you talk to black people who drank the Kool-aide: The issue still is– this was done to us not with us. That feeling is deep. It can’t be ignored. It speaks to any type of long-term sustainability of what’s happening in New Orleans.
“When black people came out of slavery, we came out with a clear understanding of the connection between education and liberation. Two groups of white people descended upon us—the missionaries and the industrialists. They both had their view of what type of education we needed to make our new-born freedom realized. During this period there’s an analogy—I’ve said this to all my friends in Kipp And TFA. During this period two groups of white people descended on us the industrialists and the missionaries. And each one of them have their own view of what kind of education we need.
“What people have never grasped is that we want to be helped, we don’t want to be controlled. In this process, we wanted to be a critical part of defining what role education should play in our continuing struggle to truly realize freedom in America. That’s the thing that’s truly unsettled in my soul. How do I make that happen, when I’m swimming with sharks on the left and on the right. And trying to find an independent course that speaks to the pain that my people experience every single day.”
It's a bruisingly honest response from someone who has paid double dues on the front lines of education and education reform and who has been a willing voice for the privatizers and charter pushers for a long, long time. And it's a reminder of what is wrong with the most extreme narratives on opposite sides of the public education debates.
The cartoon reformster narrative: US education was hopelessly effed up in a morass of self-serving institutionally calcified failure. Our poorest, most vulnerable, and historically most underserved populations were being left further and further behind. Only a complete guttting of the system can blast loose the systemic problems.
The cartoon public school supporter narrative: the reform movement is an unnecessary attempt to gut public education, and they should go away and let us get back to what we were doing.
The challenge in threading the space between these two narratives. each side has things it needs to face up to.
Public education advocates need to recognize that there is no going back, that in some places, public schools have functioned primarily as institutions heavily embedded with all the neglect and racism and dumping on the people at the bottom of the ladder that we could possibly hate. New Orleans was, by most accounts, terrible in every way that a school district can be terrible. Many other poor urban schools were in a similar place.Something had to change.
But reformsters need to recognize that many of those districts were filled with excellent teachers in excellent schools working in communities where they were the educational equivalent of strong salmon trying to swim up Niagara Falls. And many of the reformsters of good faith (I believe there are such people) need to recognize that they opened a door that let it all manner of money-grubbing vermin who had no real interest in improving education for anybody-- just cashing in on a movement that opened up a mountain of public money to private profit.
The irony is that while reformsters recognized that some aspects of the system needed to change, they have ended up holding onto the aspect that needed the most change of all-- the continued disempowerment, disenfranchisement, disinvestment, and disintegration of the communities in which the schools were found. Folks in places like New Orleans traded a system in which it was hard for community voices to be heard, hard for community leaders to take charge, and hard for community needs to be considered-- they traded that for a system in which it is now impossible for the community voices to be heard, empowered, and responded to. In both the old version and the new version, schools are something that is "done to" the members of these communities.
And yes-- I did not represent the two sides as needing equal amounts of correction. They don't. By disregarding the expertise of professionals and the voice of the community, reformsters have put themselves far out in left field. They are not wrong about the need for change and improvement and a system that better responds to the needs of America's poor, and they have won plenty of support by showing they get the need while public education advocates have said, "Look, we're doing great. Just let us do our thing, and trust us."
But reformsters are dead wrong, and have been dead wrong nearly every step of the way, about what reforms will improve the situation. Some don't care about being wrong; they're simply focused on "solutions" that will redirect that beautiful river of money and power to The Right People, the Betters. Or they have a blind and foolish faith in The Market (which will never, ever, get us better schools). Or they have blind faith in their own superior wisdom.
But those who do care about getting it right have listened to the wrong people, and supporters of public education have made it easy for them to do so by being slow to respond to real concerns, real needs, real problems.
It's something to read Fullers words, to see a guy who's been unapologetic about taking mountains of Walton money (re: John Walton "I love that man"), say straight up that nobody on any side of the fight gets it. Not his opponents, and not his allies, either. The NOLA restrospectives taken together highlight one thing-- that all of this public education stuff is complex, and that people who believe in simple answers or explanations are kidding themselves (and lots of other people, too).
AP Notices Common Core Failure
In the midst of arguing about whose poll data supports which side in the debate about public education, AP writer Christine Amario Saturday noted that "As Common Core results trickle in, initial goals unfulfilled."
What began as an effort to increase transparency and allow parents and school leaders to assess performance nationwide has largely unraveled, chiefly because states are dropping out of the two testing groups and creating their own exams.
Common Core boosters have dealt with this big slice of failure by simply ignoring it and developing selective amnesia about the goal of having every state on the same page. But Amario offers a few reminders.
For instance, she takes us back to 2010 and Arne Duncan's promise that the tests would end the practice of having "fifty goalposts." In fact, back in the Core's infancy, Core pushers were pretty straightforward about how the whole program leaned on the testing component would push schools to adopt matching-- well, they couldn't say the word "curriculum" because a federally-inflicted curriculum would be illegal. But remember-- one advantage would be that a student moving from Idaho to Arkansas would be able to make the transition without missing a beat.
Amario even manages to get someone from Brookings to say something useful.
"The whole idea of Common Core was to bring students and schools under a common definition of what success is," said Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "And Common Core is not going to have that. One of its fundamental arguments has been knocked out from under it."
Of course, part of the problem was that Core fans grossly underestimated the reaction to federal overreach. And while some Americans did (and still do) support the ideas behind the Core and Core testing in practice, they found that the reality of both was far less appealing. And so the vision of a country in which every single state gave one of two national Big Standardized Tests began collapsing almost instantly. But the PARCC is down to no more than eleven states, while SBA is down to fifteen. She also notes on the comparability front that PARCC and SBA don't even give the same number of performance levels (five for PARCC, four for SBA).
Amario tries to see if the tests are actually useful, and here her work is less impressive.
Rather than paper-and-pencil multiple choice tests, the new exams are designed to be taken by tablet or computer. Instead of being given a selection of answers to choose, students must show how they got their answer. Answer correctly and get a more difficult question. Answer incorrectly, get an easier one.
Welllllll... instead of being given a selection of answers to bubble in, students must, click, or drag and drop answers. And the record on adaptive testing is mixed at best.
Amario also lets an LAUSD official drop in an unchallenged assertion that the tests are providing "richer" information, which is patently ridiculous. In most states teachers are forbidden to see the questions and get no information about student performance beyond a simple score, which tells nothing about what the students did and did not answer correctly.
She notes that many test results came in low, but she doesn't examine the issue of cut scores and how they are set, a critical point, since the average civilian would find the idea of setting passing levels AFTER you've scored the test kind of dopey and rather the opposite of having standards.
So there's plenty of work still to be done. But still-- the AP just called out the Core for a total failure on one of its original major goals. That's at least one small victory for fans of public education.
What began as an effort to increase transparency and allow parents and school leaders to assess performance nationwide has largely unraveled, chiefly because states are dropping out of the two testing groups and creating their own exams.
Common Core boosters have dealt with this big slice of failure by simply ignoring it and developing selective amnesia about the goal of having every state on the same page. But Amario offers a few reminders.
For instance, she takes us back to 2010 and Arne Duncan's promise that the tests would end the practice of having "fifty goalposts." In fact, back in the Core's infancy, Core pushers were pretty straightforward about how the whole program leaned on the testing component would push schools to adopt matching-- well, they couldn't say the word "curriculum" because a federally-inflicted curriculum would be illegal. But remember-- one advantage would be that a student moving from Idaho to Arkansas would be able to make the transition without missing a beat.
Amario even manages to get someone from Brookings to say something useful.
"The whole idea of Common Core was to bring students and schools under a common definition of what success is," said Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "And Common Core is not going to have that. One of its fundamental arguments has been knocked out from under it."
Of course, part of the problem was that Core fans grossly underestimated the reaction to federal overreach. And while some Americans did (and still do) support the ideas behind the Core and Core testing in practice, they found that the reality of both was far less appealing. And so the vision of a country in which every single state gave one of two national Big Standardized Tests began collapsing almost instantly. But the PARCC is down to no more than eleven states, while SBA is down to fifteen. She also notes on the comparability front that PARCC and SBA don't even give the same number of performance levels (five for PARCC, four for SBA).
Amario tries to see if the tests are actually useful, and here her work is less impressive.
Rather than paper-and-pencil multiple choice tests, the new exams are designed to be taken by tablet or computer. Instead of being given a selection of answers to choose, students must show how they got their answer. Answer correctly and get a more difficult question. Answer incorrectly, get an easier one.
Welllllll... instead of being given a selection of answers to bubble in, students must, click, or drag and drop answers. And the record on adaptive testing is mixed at best.
Amario also lets an LAUSD official drop in an unchallenged assertion that the tests are providing "richer" information, which is patently ridiculous. In most states teachers are forbidden to see the questions and get no information about student performance beyond a simple score, which tells nothing about what the students did and did not answer correctly.
She notes that many test results came in low, but she doesn't examine the issue of cut scores and how they are set, a critical point, since the average civilian would find the idea of setting passing levels AFTER you've scored the test kind of dopey and rather the opposite of having standards.
So there's plenty of work still to be done. But still-- the AP just called out the Core for a total failure on one of its original major goals. That's at least one small victory for fans of public education.
Sunday, August 30, 2015
Report on Systematic Crushing of Local Control
The Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools is a broad network of groups standing up for local and community schools, linking everything from the two national teacher unions to parent and community groups. AROS this month released a report looking at the issues surrounding the privatization of local schools and the stripping of local control. "Out of Control" is worth a read, particularly as it puts the newest reformster development in context.
In the introduction, AROS reminds us that this month marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, and notes that the act has been under attack as recently as the 2013 Supremes decision. But that's not the main focus of the report.
But there is a different attack on minority enfranchisement not addressed in the Voting Rights Act. Instead of barriers to the ballot box, local elected governance is being dissolved altogether.
The local governance that's being dissolved is the local elected oversight of schools, and AROS notes that these state-level take-overs of local schools "are happening almost exclusively in African American and Latino schools and districts—in many of the same communities that have experienced decades of underinvestment in their public schools and consistent attacks on their property, agency and self-determination."
The report looks at some specific instances of this sort of take-over and disenfranchisement, but the strength of the report is in how it gives context to what is going on.
School takeovers in non-wealthy, non-white neighborhoods come on the heels of decades of disinvestment. Even with Brown vs. Board of Education, most states linked school funding to local property taxes which, as the report notes, "embeds inequalities based on race and class." Poor schools exist in poor neighborhoods, where poor residents suffer from disinvestment in their neighborhoods as well as pressure to hold down costs of any relief or support, right down to fighting against unionization ("right to work" anyone?) and a higher minimum wage.
The rise of the modern charter movement meant a renewed interest in draining money out of poor communities, and financial pressures on states left more and more schools strapped for cash. The pattern was born in 1989 New Jersey-- states would not spend more money to support or improve the schools, but would instead take the districts over and give that money to private entities to run the schools instead, and in the process, wipe away all vestiges of democratic process. Twenty-nine US states now have a mechanism for a takeover.
Schools would be something done to poor black and brown citizens, not something done by them
AROS looks at the specific cases of Newark and New Orleans, and then they consider come of the implications and effects of these takeovers.
Fragmentation of political power. Local folks have no say in any aspect of the privatization. Charters answer to their own governing board, and as "recovery" and "achievement" districts spring up, even corporate control is unmanageable spread out. In Detroit, there are at least 45 separate entities running schools; in New Orleans there are 44, and nobody who is actually responsible for keeping track of all New Orleans students. The cracks through which one can fall are now huge, and the ability of local parents and voters to seek solutions from the People In Charge has been erased.
Loss of community-based institutions. In many poor communities, the school is one stable community center. But state takeover invariably involves "freeing" students from "the tyranny of geography." Saying that students should not be trapped in a particular school because of their address sounds noble, but in practice it means that the neighborhood loses one more unifying, strengthening connection (I recommend Robert Putnam's Our Children for a clear and thorough explanation of why that's a very bad idea). But in Chicago, some neighborhoods have no schools at all.
Increased segregation. The numbers are in, and charter schools exacerbate segregation. Now, frankly, local control in the hands of racist jerks can not only support segregate, but can make the effects of it far worse. But even in those cases, there is an electoral remedy. In state-run charter systems, there is no remedy at all.
Financial instability. Let me say it one more time-- if you think you can run multiple parallel school systems and maintain a total system with far more capacity than you use and do it all for the same costs as a single public system, you are a dope. And of course by the time the state steps in, the school district has already been starved of resources and needs more than simply maintenance-level support. As we've also seen repeatedly, the charters who are hired to run these schools commit to doing the job only as long as it suits them financially. On top of all that, let's consider a state like Ohio, which has exercised no educational or financial oversight over its charters, leading to a system that is laughably full of graft, corruption and incompetence. And yet, the state now wants to start taking over school districts and hiring a CEO to serve as conductor on the charter gravy train that will take the public school's place.
On top of this, it has to be said-- and AROS says it-- that this state-led destruction of democracy and school systems is happening almost exclusively in poor black and brown communities, communities that sometimes welcome the takeover because the neglect has previously been so bad, only to discover that state takeovers leave local citizens without a democratic voice or a community school for their children.
Read the whole report-- it's not too long and while it doesn't really break any new ground, it puts many of the pieces of this mess in one clear and cohesive narrative that can help you wrap your head around this huge disenfranchisement of American citizens in our poorest communities.
In the introduction, AROS reminds us that this month marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, and notes that the act has been under attack as recently as the 2013 Supremes decision. But that's not the main focus of the report.
But there is a different attack on minority enfranchisement not addressed in the Voting Rights Act. Instead of barriers to the ballot box, local elected governance is being dissolved altogether.
The local governance that's being dissolved is the local elected oversight of schools, and AROS notes that these state-level take-overs of local schools "are happening almost exclusively in African American and Latino schools and districts—in many of the same communities that have experienced decades of underinvestment in their public schools and consistent attacks on their property, agency and self-determination."
The report looks at some specific instances of this sort of take-over and disenfranchisement, but the strength of the report is in how it gives context to what is going on.
School takeovers in non-wealthy, non-white neighborhoods come on the heels of decades of disinvestment. Even with Brown vs. Board of Education, most states linked school funding to local property taxes which, as the report notes, "embeds inequalities based on race and class." Poor schools exist in poor neighborhoods, where poor residents suffer from disinvestment in their neighborhoods as well as pressure to hold down costs of any relief or support, right down to fighting against unionization ("right to work" anyone?) and a higher minimum wage.
The rise of the modern charter movement meant a renewed interest in draining money out of poor communities, and financial pressures on states left more and more schools strapped for cash. The pattern was born in 1989 New Jersey-- states would not spend more money to support or improve the schools, but would instead take the districts over and give that money to private entities to run the schools instead, and in the process, wipe away all vestiges of democratic process. Twenty-nine US states now have a mechanism for a takeover.
Schools would be something done to poor black and brown citizens, not something done by them
AROS looks at the specific cases of Newark and New Orleans, and then they consider come of the implications and effects of these takeovers.
Fragmentation of political power. Local folks have no say in any aspect of the privatization. Charters answer to their own governing board, and as "recovery" and "achievement" districts spring up, even corporate control is unmanageable spread out. In Detroit, there are at least 45 separate entities running schools; in New Orleans there are 44, and nobody who is actually responsible for keeping track of all New Orleans students. The cracks through which one can fall are now huge, and the ability of local parents and voters to seek solutions from the People In Charge has been erased.
Loss of community-based institutions. In many poor communities, the school is one stable community center. But state takeover invariably involves "freeing" students from "the tyranny of geography." Saying that students should not be trapped in a particular school because of their address sounds noble, but in practice it means that the neighborhood loses one more unifying, strengthening connection (I recommend Robert Putnam's Our Children for a clear and thorough explanation of why that's a very bad idea). But in Chicago, some neighborhoods have no schools at all.
Increased segregation. The numbers are in, and charter schools exacerbate segregation. Now, frankly, local control in the hands of racist jerks can not only support segregate, but can make the effects of it far worse. But even in those cases, there is an electoral remedy. In state-run charter systems, there is no remedy at all.
Financial instability. Let me say it one more time-- if you think you can run multiple parallel school systems and maintain a total system with far more capacity than you use and do it all for the same costs as a single public system, you are a dope. And of course by the time the state steps in, the school district has already been starved of resources and needs more than simply maintenance-level support. As we've also seen repeatedly, the charters who are hired to run these schools commit to doing the job only as long as it suits them financially. On top of all that, let's consider a state like Ohio, which has exercised no educational or financial oversight over its charters, leading to a system that is laughably full of graft, corruption and incompetence. And yet, the state now wants to start taking over school districts and hiring a CEO to serve as conductor on the charter gravy train that will take the public school's place.
On top of this, it has to be said-- and AROS says it-- that this state-led destruction of democracy and school systems is happening almost exclusively in poor black and brown communities, communities that sometimes welcome the takeover because the neglect has previously been so bad, only to discover that state takeovers leave local citizens without a democratic voice or a community school for their children.
Read the whole report-- it's not too long and while it doesn't really break any new ground, it puts many of the pieces of this mess in one clear and cohesive narrative that can help you wrap your head around this huge disenfranchisement of American citizens in our poorest communities.
Why Trump Is Not Sanders
Warning: this piece is about the Presidential race and only tangentially about education. You've been warned. Also, I use a rude word repeatedly, and while many of you won't mind, my mom often reads here, and she doesn't like it when I use bad language.
There has been a tendency, both in the media and in casual conversation, for people to see a parallel or even equivalency between the runs of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. This is a mistake. The two candidates have one shared feature-- they are both benefiting from near-universal disgust with politics as usual in the US. Past that, Sanders and Trump are exact opposites.
American politics run on bullshit. Loads and loads and loads of bullshit. The Sanders candidacy is what a Presidential run would look like stripped of bullshit, without the slick, pretty candidate and the focus-group-crafted messages. The Trump campaign is what a Presidential run would look like if you cranked the bullshit up to twelve.
Regular politics are that one kid in your class-- the one who punches the kid in the next seat or throws paper wads across the room or passes abusive notes, and does it all when your back is half-turned, and then when you call him on it, shrugs and says, "What? I didn't do anything. That kid just yelped all of a sudden. I don't know why. "
Teachers are annoyed by that kid for two reasons-- one is that he's mean and disruptive and rotten to the other students, and the other is that the subtext for his denials is some version of, "I'm pretty sure you're a frickin' idiot, and you're way too stupid to know what I'm doing."
But Trump. Trump just turns around, punches the kid in the next desk right in the face, turns to you, the teacher, and just shrugs and smiles, like "What are you gonna do, you know?" And then he says, "What? I didn't do anything? I think maybe he ran into my fist." Still smiling, like this is all kind of fun. And you can't help it-- he's such a transparent asshole that you're charmed.
When someone else is the class tries the sneaky punch routine, Trump gladly narcs on him-- "Hey, teacher!! Jebby just punched Floyd in the arm!" Catch someone in a lie? Trump's glad to tattle because when Trump wants to lie, it's a big, fat, indefensible lie, so baldfaced that it invites applause for its audacity.
Conventional politicians play a game in which they lie, pretend, ignore their own history, attack various groups of Americans, and lie some more, but they do it all in a gutless over-thought manner, with the ultimately goal of doing all those things without looking like they're doing all those things. But Trump lies, pretends, ignores his own history, attacks various groups of Americans, and lies some more-- and never pretends to be doing anything else. That's why the other kids on the GOP playground can't call him out-- because he's not doing anything that they don't do. He's just doing it in plain sight, without artifice. Conventional politicians try to convince the public that their bullshit is caviar and goose pate; Trump just backs the truck up and makes Bullshit Mountain with the confidence of a man who knows that this is what the game is really about.
When Trump criticizes other politicians because they "can't get anything done," he's criticizing their lack of guts, their lack of understanding about how a real salesman plays the baldfaced bullshit game. They want to play at playing the game while looking like they're not playing the game. Trump is playing the game, full on.
That's the difference from Bernie Sanders, who is not playing a game at all, but is simply trying to communicate a message. Trump, who is playing a game, has no message to communicate. Sanders is revealing the hollowness of the Presidential race by showing what substance looks like. Trump is revealing the hollowness by turning it into performance art, an exaggerated cartoon candidacy, a show that turns to the other candidates and says, "Look, if you really want to play this bullshit game, let's really do it, and not just half-ass it like you bums are used to doing. If you want to be a bullshit slinging, woman-bashing, minority-abusing, ethically rudderless asshat, let me show you how it's really done."
How far Trump's show can go is a mystery. The most entertaining alternative would be that he actually breaks the GOP, and we see the emergence of a real third party founded on reclaiming the values that the GOP once stood for. That's probably as unlikely as Sanders reclaiming the Democratic party from the corporate overlords who have commandeered it, but this feels like a year in which surprising things could happen.
There has been a tendency, both in the media and in casual conversation, for people to see a parallel or even equivalency between the runs of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. This is a mistake. The two candidates have one shared feature-- they are both benefiting from near-universal disgust with politics as usual in the US. Past that, Sanders and Trump are exact opposites.
American politics run on bullshit. Loads and loads and loads of bullshit. The Sanders candidacy is what a Presidential run would look like stripped of bullshit, without the slick, pretty candidate and the focus-group-crafted messages. The Trump campaign is what a Presidential run would look like if you cranked the bullshit up to twelve.
Regular politics are that one kid in your class-- the one who punches the kid in the next seat or throws paper wads across the room or passes abusive notes, and does it all when your back is half-turned, and then when you call him on it, shrugs and says, "What? I didn't do anything. That kid just yelped all of a sudden. I don't know why. "
Teachers are annoyed by that kid for two reasons-- one is that he's mean and disruptive and rotten to the other students, and the other is that the subtext for his denials is some version of, "I'm pretty sure you're a frickin' idiot, and you're way too stupid to know what I'm doing."
But Trump. Trump just turns around, punches the kid in the next desk right in the face, turns to you, the teacher, and just shrugs and smiles, like "What are you gonna do, you know?" And then he says, "What? I didn't do anything? I think maybe he ran into my fist." Still smiling, like this is all kind of fun. And you can't help it-- he's such a transparent asshole that you're charmed.
When someone else is the class tries the sneaky punch routine, Trump gladly narcs on him-- "Hey, teacher!! Jebby just punched Floyd in the arm!" Catch someone in a lie? Trump's glad to tattle because when Trump wants to lie, it's a big, fat, indefensible lie, so baldfaced that it invites applause for its audacity.
Conventional politicians play a game in which they lie, pretend, ignore their own history, attack various groups of Americans, and lie some more, but they do it all in a gutless over-thought manner, with the ultimately goal of doing all those things without looking like they're doing all those things. But Trump lies, pretends, ignores his own history, attacks various groups of Americans, and lies some more-- and never pretends to be doing anything else. That's why the other kids on the GOP playground can't call him out-- because he's not doing anything that they don't do. He's just doing it in plain sight, without artifice. Conventional politicians try to convince the public that their bullshit is caviar and goose pate; Trump just backs the truck up and makes Bullshit Mountain with the confidence of a man who knows that this is what the game is really about.
When Trump criticizes other politicians because they "can't get anything done," he's criticizing their lack of guts, their lack of understanding about how a real salesman plays the baldfaced bullshit game. They want to play at playing the game while looking like they're not playing the game. Trump is playing the game, full on.
That's the difference from Bernie Sanders, who is not playing a game at all, but is simply trying to communicate a message. Trump, who is playing a game, has no message to communicate. Sanders is revealing the hollowness of the Presidential race by showing what substance looks like. Trump is revealing the hollowness by turning it into performance art, an exaggerated cartoon candidacy, a show that turns to the other candidates and says, "Look, if you really want to play this bullshit game, let's really do it, and not just half-ass it like you bums are used to doing. If you want to be a bullshit slinging, woman-bashing, minority-abusing, ethically rudderless asshat, let me show you how it's really done."
How far Trump's show can go is a mystery. The most entertaining alternative would be that he actually breaks the GOP, and we see the emergence of a real third party founded on reclaiming the values that the GOP once stood for. That's probably as unlikely as Sanders reclaiming the Democratic party from the corporate overlords who have commandeered it, but this feels like a year in which surprising things could happen.
ICYMI: This Week's Readings from the Edusphere
Some reading from this week in the edusphere.
13 Years of Dress Rehearsal
Chris Thinnes ran a back-to-school parent's night speech by Rachel Thinnes that is a great reminder that school is not just about students getting ready to live their lives -- their lives are going on right now. She also references Excellent Sheep, which is always bonus points as far as I'm concerned.
EdTPA and TFA Are Two Sides of the Same Coin
Fred Klonsky spent a chunk of his week fending off feverish defenders of Pearson's teacher certification baloneyfest, EdTPA. Klonsky wrote several good take-downs of the program, but this one put it in the context of another favorite reformster program.
10 Years of Corporate Media Celebrating Disaster
You'll need a strong stomach for this look back at some of the decades most notable cheerleading for death and destruction in New Orleans. Because who cares how many people have to die, neighborhoods have to be destroyed, and citizens have to be permanently displaced if, when it's all done, privatizers can make some money and test scores go up, a little, in some places, for some people.
Message from Bethlehem Superintendent
The superintendent of Bethlehem Area Schools in PA wrote in the local paper a piece to show that he gets it, and that he regrets "a different world we are now in where a teacher potentially risks a negative evaluation because she is committed to helping her students develop their passions, gifts and talents."
NC Teachers Being 'Voluntarily Exploited'
Brief but powerful profile of three North Carolina teachers and how they make it work. These ladies are inspirational-- wait till you read about how one turns the experience of not being able to buy groceries into a growth experience for her own practice.
13 Years of Dress Rehearsal
Chris Thinnes ran a back-to-school parent's night speech by Rachel Thinnes that is a great reminder that school is not just about students getting ready to live their lives -- their lives are going on right now. She also references Excellent Sheep, which is always bonus points as far as I'm concerned.
EdTPA and TFA Are Two Sides of the Same Coin
Fred Klonsky spent a chunk of his week fending off feverish defenders of Pearson's teacher certification baloneyfest, EdTPA. Klonsky wrote several good take-downs of the program, but this one put it in the context of another favorite reformster program.
10 Years of Corporate Media Celebrating Disaster
You'll need a strong stomach for this look back at some of the decades most notable cheerleading for death and destruction in New Orleans. Because who cares how many people have to die, neighborhoods have to be destroyed, and citizens have to be permanently displaced if, when it's all done, privatizers can make some money and test scores go up, a little, in some places, for some people.
Message from Bethlehem Superintendent
The superintendent of Bethlehem Area Schools in PA wrote in the local paper a piece to show that he gets it, and that he regrets "a different world we are now in where a teacher potentially risks a negative evaluation because she is committed to helping her students develop their passions, gifts and talents."
NC Teachers Being 'Voluntarily Exploited'
Brief but powerful profile of three North Carolina teachers and how they make it work. These ladies are inspirational-- wait till you read about how one turns the experience of not being able to buy groceries into a growth experience for her own practice.
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