Charter Diversity?

The American Enterprise Institute is firmly in the free market corner of reformsterism, arguing and advocating that any form of choice, particularly charter schools, will automatically improve education. I agree that they are correct if by "improve education" you mean "make it easier for rich folks to get richer by playing in the education biz." If by "improve education" you actually mean "do a better job of providing a free, quality education for every American citizen," I think AEI is full of it. Just want to be up front about where AEI and I start respectively.

AEI, like many thinky tanks, likes to pop out the occasional PR bulletin disguised as a "research" paper, and this summer they popped one out from Michale McShane and Jenn Hatfield entitled Measuring Diversity in Charter School Offerings. And I have read it so that you don't have to.

McShane and Hatfield leap straight into the deep end with their opening sentence:

There are two main reasons given to support charter schooling: (1) that charter schools will improve academic achievement by taking advantage of flexibility not afforded to traditional public schools; and (2) that deregulation will allow for more diverse schools than would otherwise be created. 

Now, the actual practices surrounding actual charters also suggest that the list should include 3) get your children away from the children of Those People. This item is mentioned both by charter critics, who see it as a bad thing, and by charter supporters, who see it as a feature, not a bug. But that's not where AEI is headed here, so we'll let that point lie for today.

The authors note that much attention has been paid to point 1 (they do not mention that the attention suggests point 1 is bogus), but not so much to that "variety" thing. And so they set out to make that point.

They set the stage with a quickie history of charters and a reference to a Fordham survey from 2013 that shows that parents want many different things from their schools. Not exactly a shock, that one. Then AEI indicates that their research comes from seventeen cities, 1,151 charter schools, and 471K students.  So what did they find out?

The market is split

AEI says that about 50% of the charters are specialized in some way, and about 50% are like all-purpose public schools (only better). Their classification method was perhaps not super-solid. If the school's website included a mission statement (or something like one) included specializy words like "STEM" or "no excuses," they were considered specialized. If no such language appeared, they were considered general.

AEI here has the same problem NCTQ runs into-- to actually, legitimately answer the research questions they raise would require huge mountains of human-hours, so they take a shortcut which is likely to seriously reduce the validity of their findings. It's not that I'm unsympathetic to the problem, but don't tell me you've researched the prevalence of obesity in my neighborhood when all you actually did was drive down the block and count the houses with empty Twinkie wrappers in their garbage.

The writers do come up with an interesting taxonomy of charters based both on pedagogical style (e.g. no excuses) and on content focus (e.g. vocational training). By number of schools, their accounting shows that No Excuses and Progressive are most common, followed by Credit Recovery. Vocational comes up sadly back of the pack-- unfortunate because schools with a vocational focus are hugely valuable. When you break it down by average number of students enrolled, General and Public Policy lead the pack; notably, Credit Recovery, which scored high on number of schools, comes up last in number of students. When you count just plain number of total students, No Excuses, Hybrid, STEM, and Progressive are tops.

The report does break these numbers down for each of the cities in the study, so you can page through and note local variations. Denver is a big STEM city. Boston has far more general schools that specialized. Minneapolis, Camden, and Albany have far more specialized than general. Some cities show large difference between the breakdown by school and by student; Newark has far more general charters schools, but far more specialized charter students. In fact, many of the patterns shown in the combined numbers for the seventeen cities disappear entirely on the city-by-city level.

The study breaks down some demographic correlations. Among other tidbits, this reveals that No Excuses schools are definitely more connected with poor, black families.They also looked for a correlation with market share (the paper repeatedly talks about "markets") and market maturity (if charters breed variety, won't older markets show more variety). There was no clear-cut connection there.

Interviews with operators yielded a consistent result. Asked if they were promoting variety, charter operators said they were after quality first.

Maslow? 

The writers posit the interesting idea of Maslow's hierarchy applied to schools and communities:

They first look for a school that is safe, then a school with generally strong academics, and then a school with some of their desired specializations. If a school isn’t safe, it doesn’t matter if it matches their preferences for pedagogy or curriculum; parents don’t want to send their kids there.

It's an interesting way to put it. But then they spoil the mood with this:

In low-income and minority communities, the primary concern is having a school with a quality educational program. This explains why we see relatively strong correlations between enrollment in no-excuses schools and both median income (negative correlation) and the percentage of the population that is black (positive correlation).

The embedded assumption here-- that no-excuse schools are the very epitome of quality educational programs-- is a huge one. And it skips over a far more interesting discussion-- is this study showing us something about how charters actually are, or is it telling us something about how charters are actually marketed.

Now that would have been an interesting topic to pursue-- how has marketing affected the world of charters, and what kind of relationship does the marketing have to the reality. But that's not in the study.

It does have its moments 

For instance, in the conclusion we find this 

If we require all schools to perform well across one set of metrics before we think about allowing for diversity, we will most likely limit the amount of diversity that we will see. 

Yup. If we're looking for diversity, we can't very well find it, see it, or, for that matter, market it if our only metric is standardized test scores. And the conclusion of the report totally gets that. So that's something.

What else is missing?

In addition to talking repeatedly about markets without examining the implications of marketing schools as a product, the report also conspicuously leaves out public schools.

Public schools mostly involve a general approach to education, and I think that is vastly more desirable than a buffet of diverse charter offerings.

Diversity under one roof is best

There are two reasons that a diverse assortment of offerings under one roof is the best way to go.

First, it allows students to explore diverse interests. A student who wants to be both and athlete and an artist can easily do both. A student who wants to be a musician and a scientist can do both. A student who can't make up his mind can sample from a wide variety of offerings. That's the first benefit.

The second benefit is, perhaps, even greater. The musician and the athlete will sit next to each other in English class. The artist and the scientist will bond over how much trouble they have learning French.

Diversity of charter offerings is not a good thing

I know, I know. Charter fans imagine a charter world like a big educational strip mall. Some charter fans (McShane is one) even imagine a world where the buffet is sampled on a class by class basis. This is a lousy idea.

The end result of a diverse charter smorgasbord is sitting a fourteen year old down to decide what career path she wants to follow. Some small percentage will be ready for that. Most won't, and what's more, they shouldn't be. The whole diverse-charter-offering idea is predicated on the notion that by their teens, students are fixed entities, their needs, interests, preferences, wants, inclinations, issues, and future paths pretty much set in cement. That's simply not true. They have lots of change and growth and development and shifting around and trying out and sampling and succeeding and failing to do across a whole swath of paths.

Diversity in charter offerings ironically provides the very antithesis of diversity-- students locked into particular silos that can only serve particular aspects of their selves, dealing only with other individuals on a similarly narrow path. Also ironically, the diverse offerings allowing students to custom build a study path to suit themselves that McShane envisions is exactly what we offer our students here at my little rural high school.

Anyone else want to chime in?

If you want to read a more thorough look at this report, check out the National Education Policy Center review. Short form, they also find the classification methodology a little iffy and the sample too small and varied to mean much.

And what about diversity, anyway?

The report really didn't find diversity blooming over time in mature markets, and I wouldn't expect it to. Investors and entrepreneurs aren't going into the education biz in order to capture small boutique markets that bring modest returns. They got into this game because they were promised healthy ROI.

And that means a chase to the big fat middle of the road. If you want to see how the free market doesn't foster diversity, just check out your cable channels. 500 not-too-different channels all chasing a slightly different (or not even different) slice of the broadest part of the market. Or if you want to think about how the market affects diversity, meditate on the story of the Beverly Hillbillies, a show that was canceled even though it was hugely popular, because it wasn't popular with the right segment of the marketplace.

The free market doesn't really care for diversity. So in the end, I will bet that even though the dream of a big charter buffet is not a desirable one, it is unlikely to ever happen anyway.

[Update-OOPS] FEE Draws a Circle

UPDATE: It was bound to happen sooner or later. I simply screwed up. Layton's article was not about FEE (Foundation for Excellence in Education) but about FES (Families for Excellent Schools). Much of this piece still stands, and FES is a reformster hedge-fund faux grass roots group, but there is no pretending that I didn't anchor the whole business on an incorrect reading of which group was involved. I owe Layton an apology, as well as the couple-hundred people who read this in its original version. My apologies to all-- I blew it; I should have been more careful.

One of the larger mysteries of the education debates is why major journalistic outlets keep publishing "research" that is so transparently crap.

Some of this has become a regular thing, like US News' symbiotic relationship with NCTQ, a group that regularly publishes ratings for college programs that don't exist and once "researched" college teacher prep programs by looking through college commencement programs.

But in yesterday's Washington Post, Lyndsey Layton, a real reporter who usually covers actual education news, wasted a chunk of space on a new "report" from Jeb Bush's Families for Excellence in Education. She does identify FEE as an "advocacy" group, but that glosses over the fact that people who want to place advertisements for their business in a major newspaper ought to be paying for advertising space, not having their "advocacy" presented as if it's actual news.

FEE, a group that lives and breathes to see public schools replaced with a more profitable and selective charter system, has announced yet another attempt to flay the dead horse of a talking point that good teachers make all the difference, and that students on the bottom of the poverty and achievement curve get the worst teachers.

How can anyone measure such a thing, you ask? Simple.

You use teacher ratings to "find" the bad teachers. Teacher ratings are based primarily on test scores, so we "find" the worst teachers by looking for the students with the worst scores.

Then we check to see what kind of scores are achieved by students who are taught by the worst teachers, and-- voila!!-- students who have those teachers get the worst scores!

This is awesome research. It's like asking, "I wonder what color most bad dressers wear? I'll just find all the bad dressers by defining a bad dresser as anyone who wears yellow. The once I've identified those bad dressers, I will check to see what colors they're wearing! And I'll make the ratings all in numbers, because numbers are magical."

Of course, FEE's "research" is bolstered by the well-known connection between poverty and test results, so that low test scores/bad teachers will line up with poor, under-supported schools.

Ironically, it is exactly the kind of test-based teacher ratings and the attempts to tie those ratings to job security and even pay in some locations that turns the whole scenario into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because if you are an excellent teacher with a high ranking, why would you want to go to a school where the less test-adept students will tank your rating? Linking test results to teacher ratings and teacher ratings to professional rewards turns every high-poverty, low-achieving school into Career Ender Academy. And all without ever truly measuring actual teacher effectiveness.

Layton includes the disclaimer about FEE, and she gives Randi Weingarten ample space to rebut, but none of that deals with the humongous elephantine question in the foyer, which is this: why are we even talking about this bogus tissue of a fake study in the first place? FEE's "expertise" in education is based on two things-- their repeated self-appointment as experts and medias willingness to give them space.

This continues to be one of the most frustrating features of the reformster commandeering of education policy-- people who don't know what the hell they're talking about constantly being treated as if they are legitimate experts, while people who actually work in the field have no say and are reduced to things like cranky posts on backwater blogs. It's as if the discussion of quantum physics was suddenly dominated by sixth graders or hospital surgical protocols were set by airplane pilots. It is truly deeply senseless.

Administrators Must Choose

Classroom teachers are experiencing the effects of reformsterism to widely varying degrees. In some classrooms, data fetishism, aligning to the standards, and chasing test scores create a powerful cacophony that drowns out actual attempts to educate students. In other classrooms, education remains the main focus and the sturm and drang of education reforminess remain a background, like stray dogs playing in the garbage cans out behind the school.

What makes the difference?

Not state or federal policy. Not the Big Standardized Test. Not even the wise arguments of thinky tanks and bloggers.

Administration.



It's an administrator who says, "Just do your job well. I've got your back." Or it's an administrator who says, "If it's Tuesday, you'd better be on page twelve, paragraph six of the content delivery script."

The administrator's role has change over the past fifteen years. Under No Child Left Behind, many administrators just stalled for time. In many schools, the opening staff meeting was built around the phrase, "Let's just get through this year..." The year-by-year series-of-bandaids approach made sense then. Everyone knew that NCLB could not last, that the requirement that 100% of students be above average would either have to be averted or it would crash the whole system. Either way, something new would happen. "Sooner or later this has to go away," the reasoning went, "so let's just hold on and hope that day comes tomorrow."

But under the Obama-Duncan Common Core banner, the end game has been less clear, even as the choice has become clearer.

Schools can strictly follow the CCSS test-and-punish mandate designed to bring about forced failure of public schools (ploughing the field for the planting of charters and cheap teacher substitutes), or schools could decide to follow their historical mission of educating students.

This is one of the big differences between NCLB and Core-powered Race to the Top; NCLB was always going to bring about its own destruction, but Core-powered Race to the Top style reform will, unchecked, destroy American public education.

But various state-level carrots and sticks aside, it falls to administrators to choose the mission for their schools.

At first a popular choice was, "Just teach our best and let the tests worry about themselves." But since the BS Tests don't give us much of a picture of what a school's doing, that's not a viable choice. There's no evidence that aligning your curriculum or collecting data gives your students a better education, and precious little evidence that they even increase test scores. As always, test scores are best increased by extensive test prep-- not by teaching your best and hoping.

Some administrators go rogue, and either fight back vocally (e.g. Troy Lariviere) or start fighting an underground battle for education in their schools. And of course some go Full Reformster and declare that nothing is more important than aligning every worksheet, prepping for every test, and following the reformster handbook every step of the way (local professional teaching experience be damned).
Some try to split the difference by being compliant but making a frowny face while they do it. This is no better that going Full Reformster. When you punch me in the face, whether you act happy about it or not doesn't change the pain I feel or the teeth I lose. In fact, an administrative stance of, "I know this is a complete waste of our time and probably educational malpractice, but I'm not actually going to do anything about it" is beyond irritating.

I know there are situations where throwing yourself on your sword so that you can be fired today and replaced with a more compliant administrator tomorrow-- well, that isn't very useful. But be sure you've exercised the limits of your power before you start claiming helplessness.

A manager's job is to get the best work possible out of her people. That means when it's raining on the bricklaying crew, a good manager is out there with an umbrella. Well, right now there's a Common Core Test-and-Punish hailstorm monsoon in America's classrooms, and an administrator who stays safe indoors saying, "Well, I don't like it, but maybe it will pass soon," is not helping her people get a damned thing done.

Originally posted in View from the Cheap Seats

NY: It's Not the Law

Sometimes it's the small market newspapers that take risks and get out ahead of the pack. But sometimes they're just extra clueless, like the Times Herald-Record of Middletown, New York.

Here they are making noise about how the opt-out movement is doomed. Doomed!! Oh, they had a big run last year, but that was back when there were no consequences for their shenanigans. But this year things will be different. Oh, yes, baby. Different. Because the new sherif in town has laid down the law.

The THR quotes MaryEllen Elia's recent speech about how she's armed superintendents with special parent-intimidation tool kits so that supers can make it clear that it's the law. The editorial writer underlines that with punchy single-sentence paragraphs.


That’s worth repeating.

“It’s the law.”

Well, no. It's not worth repeating. It might be worth clarifying. As in, what, exactly is the law. Because while I have not examined the relevant laws of New York State in painful detail, I'm pretty sure that what the law says is that schools must give the test. There's no law that says that students must take the test.

That's worth repeating.

There's no law that says that students must take the test.

The THR scolds mightily. This time there will be no easy peasy lemon opt-out.

Elia knows better. As the THR was threatening doom and unspecified penalties for opt-out naughtiness, Elia was "clarifying" her position in the kind of political clarification that civilians think of as "taking back that dumb thing I said and trying to replace it with something less wrong."

Elia has suddenly discovered that parents do, in fact, have the right to opt out. It's even possible that they have a point about some of the test's deficiencies (they "have problems" and are "too long"). Also her threats were totally not threats. Don't be silly. But she is going to arm her superintendents with high-powered PR tool kits because she has not yet abandoned the last hope of the reformsters, which is that folks are hostile to Common Core Testing Stuff because they just don't understand how awesome it really is, and once we finally 'splain it to them the right way, they will be hollering, "Me!! Me!! Test my kids more, please!!"

Parents in New York have won the greatest victory of all-- recognition by the state that they get to decide, and that they must be convinced-- not coerced, not threatened, and not treated like the states' low-level flunkies. It may take a while for word to get to Middletown, but the state is figuring out that they can't simply order students to take the Big Standardized Test. And that's the law.

[Update: A commenter on Diane Ravitch's blog, where this post also ran, added her comments as a specialist in NY law. Follow the link for her full explanation, but the short form is that not only is the testing requirement not the law, but much of what the regents are requiring is in violation of the law.]

Minneapolis Terrible Reading Choices

Imagine that you are a Native American teacher, working with six year old students, and you come back to start the school year, only to discover that the district would like you to teach your students that Christopher Columbus "discovered" America, as if your own ancestors had never even existed. Or depicted them as a culturally tone-deaf cartoon. And when you tried to point out that the materials you were being directed to use were sexist, racist and just plain wrong, your concerns were brushed off and dismissed.

That's the situation that Minneapolis teacher Shana Dickson found herself in last week, as Minneapolis Schools decided to kick off their school year with a truly terrible $1.2 million choice in reading materials for its K-2 students.

The story is laid out in a compelling and invaluable series from Sarah Lahm on her blog Bright Lights Small City. The series of posts start here, and you can follow trhe links until you need to jump to this post and today's update.

I'm not going to recap all of Lahm's work-- you should go read it for yourself-- but there are details that are just kind of amazing in their foolishness.

The company providing the materials is Reading Horizons, an outfit that apparently identifies itself as Mormom with a mission, its materials intended to further its work in service of God.

The work reported on is not overtly religious, but it is certainly seriously retro in its portrayal of gender roles and various cultures. It includes a straight-from-1953 depiction of Native Americans

The reading materials are part of a program that boasts of being so scripted that "even a janitor" could teach it. District officials have been strikingly unresponsive to complaints, offering everything from the Little Books are a tiny part of the program to the ever-popular, "Look, everything else really sucked." Which is silly. My wife just finished a two-year stint as a first-grade teacher with a reading series complete with Little Books (decodeables, they're called) which I examined closely in the process of assembling a gazzillion of them, and while they are no great works of literature, they certainly weren't filled with the kind of foolishness that Reading Horizons is pushing.

At any rate, while I usually try to save and collect your must-read materials for Sundays, this could not wait. This is not about education reform or politics or anything except bad administration of a school district that doesn't involve its own trained teachers and consequently blows over a million dollars on materials that are transparently terrible.

If You Want To Help Chester Uplands...

If you have not been following the story, know that Chester Uplands School District in Pennsylvania is currently so broke that its teachers and staff are working without pay. You can read up on it here, here and here.

Thanks to a commenter on this blog, I can point you to three places where you can help.

PSEA operates a fund that is used to financially assist teachers in just this sort of situation. Right now only a snail mail address is available, but on-line contributing is supposed to be coming soon.

The school district itself is actually soliciting contributions on its own page. Help out. They only need $1.5 million.

A community member has started a GoFundMe for the teachers. Again, the amount needed is staggering, but it's a way to help.

In the meantime, if you're in PA you might contact your elected representatives and say:

1) Get the damn budget done and passed

2) Fix the incredibly stupid charter funding formula that is draining public schools dry.

PA: Charter Windfalls

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.