Dear Lily:
I am a thirty-seven year classroom veteran, a former local EA president, and a lifelong NEA member. I am a member, and I have concerns.
The internet has been buzzing with the news of an upcoming endorsement of Hillary Clinton as the Democratic Presidential nominee. In particular, there is talk of a procedural move that will sidestep the general membership and their representatives. The most likely motivation would seem to be that Clinton's campaign is sinking, and it is reported that while you admit Sanders is more in line with our interests, you see Clinton as more electable.
I am asking you, as a member-- please don't do this.
It is true that I'm not a fan of Clinton, and that I see her as likely to carry on the corporate, anti-public education policies of the last two administrations. And it's also true that I am, cautiously, a Sanders fan. But believe me when I tell you that, even were this maneuver being considered in support of Sanders, I would still oppose it.
Here's why.
The assault on public education-- the push to close public schools and replace them with money-making charters, the various "reform" actions to redirect public tax dollars to private corporate coffers, the use of Big Standardized Tests to foster a narrative of failure, the constant attempts through all political avenues to break down the teaching profession so that an experienced well-paid unionized workforce can be replaced with a cheaper, inexperienced, short-term more easily controlled pool of pseudo-teachers-- all of these are part of a larger assault.
An attempt to circumvent democracy itself.
At Dyett High, in New Orleans, in Newark and Camden, in Detroit, in Philadelphia to Eli Broad's new LA takeover, the push is to disenfranchise voters, taxpayers, citizens, community members. Reformsters of all different stripes, from Bill Gates to Reed Hastings to Campbell Brown to Arne Duncan-- they all share one simple belief: that in this country there are some people who should have a say, and some people who should not. It's a movement that says that some peoples' voices just don't matter.
NEA cannot become part of that narrative.
I've been a local president during a strike. I know how seductive the old belief about ends justifying means can be. I know how easily and often union leaders end up in a meeting about how we need the members to make a particular decision, so here's how we'll stage manage the meeting so that they decide what we want them to decide. There have been times, I suppose, when such realpolitik was an acceptable choice.
But now more than ever, NEA cannot sidestep democracy.
It's a mistake, and it's a mistake for two reasons.
Read Anthony Cody's more complete analysis of how an early endorsement will backfire within the NEA. Teachers are tired of having their voices silenced and ignored. We have been silenced and ignored by political leaders, corporate leaders, virtually every big name in the last fifteen years of education reformy fiasco. To ask us to accept the same from our own national union is just too much. The democratic process is under attack in our country; we do not want to see it under attack within our own union.
It is a mistake on the larger scale as well. The early endorsement is just another attempt to circumvent the democratic process, to say, "Well, it looks like the voters at large might make a choice we don't like, so we are going to take steps to keep that from happening. We can't just be letting the Democratic Party make these choices based on the will of the voter. We need to tip the scale." This does not say, "We have faith in the American voters." It says, "The American voters are boobs, and we need to push them where we want them."
It won't work. The howls from NEA members will be loud and palpable, and the whole mess will feed the narrative that NEA is NOT the voice of three million teachers, but a group of political operatives who try to harness those voices for their own purposes.
Democracy is under attack. The voices of ordinary citizens are being ignored and silenced. NEA must not become one more big organization saying, "Some peoples' voices just don't matter."
I am begging you not to offer an early endorsement.
Let the candidates make their case to the members. Let them earn an endorsement from the members. And if they find that the members are slow to embrace them, let them think long and hard about why that might be. We handed Barrack Obama a blank check and he used it to bring in Arne Duncan and policies that simply built on the failed policies of Bush II.
Take a step back. Reach out to some rank and file (hell, give me a call-- I'll be glad to talk).
But do not let the NEA be one more group that is more interested in circumventing the democratic process than embracing, preserving, and advocating for it. How will we stand up for students in communities where parents and neighbors have been silenced, when we have been silenced by our own union? How will we stand up for a representative, democratic process when we don't use it ourselves.
Do not do this.
Do. Not. Do. This.
Sincerely,
Peter Greene
Saturday, September 26, 2015
Friday, September 25, 2015
Grove City & The College Scoreboard
First, let me confess that I like the idea of the new USED College Scorecard. It is the right sort of approach-- providing information without making judgment. I compare it to the nutritional facts panel now included with all our food. Don't give me some government rating of "Good" or "Awesome" or "Sucky." Don't decide for me how many grams of fat I should eat-- just tell me how many are in there and let me decide.
I know the feds wanted to offer their judgment on how great colleges are, because Duncan's ed department is devoted to the idea that only they are wise enough to understand and all citizens are dopes. But if we pretended for a moment that all citizens weren't dopes, and we just provided them with information so that they could make informed choices. Maybe I don't care how much calcium is in my Twinkies, but if I want to know, it's there, and if I still don't care, I'm free to ignore it.
But the Washington Post noted this week that a handful of colleges are not in the data base, and that grabbed my interest, because one of them is Grove City College of Pennsylvania.
Grove City College is right up the road from me. My brother attended there. Members of my extended family graduated from there. We send lots of our graduates there. I've had several student teachers from there.
It is an excellent school, though certainly less liberal than many. It's major (but loose) church affiliation is with the Presbyterians, and you know how wild those folks get. GCC has a great reputation as a school for engineers, a strong humanities emphasis, and also as a place for young ladies to get their MRS degree (at orientation: "Look to your left. Look to your right Your future mate may be in sight"). They are not LGBT friendly, but then, they aren't really very excited about allowing any heterosexual activity on campus, either. They are not snooty, though they may get a largish sampling of privately and even home- schooled students. Students must attens chapel sixteen times per semester. Every teacher education program has its own reputation-- when we get a GCC student teacher, we expect someone who really knows their content, but may find dealing with public school students a challenge.
GCC has made the news a few times over the years. Back in the eighties, they were in court to be excused from filing federal paperwork about Title IX because they didn't directly take federal funds, an argument that GCC essentially won-- but then soon after new laws were passed to plug the hole that GCC had walked through. Today, GCC does not participate in federal programs such as the Pell grants or Stafford loans, which keeps them free of the federal requirements;they fill the financial gaps with their own loan program-- the school was founded by a close friend of the founder of Sun Oil. (They also ended up in the news when a student turned out to be paying his way through school by shooting gay porn videos- he was suspended, not expelled).
Folks who don't know the school assume that Grove City wanted to be free to discriminate against women. But ironically, when the school opened in the late 1800's, they became one of the first colleges in America to take both men and women, and they have maintained a 1-to-1 male-female ratio. I've known many women who attended the school, and while GCC tends to attract many (but not exclusively) women with a traditional bent, I've never heard any complain about being ill-used, mistreated, ignored or underserved by the school.
Mostly, I think GCC has a big libertarian streak that makes them allergic to paying people just to file a bunch of federal paperwork, and access to the kind of money that makes it possible for them to tell the feds to shove off.
GCC doesn't do any of that federal reportage, including reporting on Title IV. GCC has never been noted for having a very high non-white population, but neither does my entire region. GCC is a very white college, but they are also the college that employs Ej Brown, the creator of the mugshots series, a group of photos challenging views of black men.
That lack of Title IV reportage lies at the center of the USED's omission of GCC (and the other skipped schools). The GCC president says that the feds told him they were working from the Title IV list.
So were the feds trying to nail conservative colleges? It seems more likely that they were deliberately overlooking colleges that don't play ball with the federal government. That's arguably six of one, half dozen of the other, but there seems no reason to believe that a liberal school that didn't do Title Iv paperwork wouldn't also be omitted.
For that matter, if you were going to target conservative colleges, Grove City hardly belongs at the top of your. Further up the road is Geneva College, small but hugely conservative, or we could just go to Liberty University, a place that makes GCC look like UCLA. Both Geneva and Liberty have report cards.
Grove City College, like many "authentic" conservatives, is a little more complicated than the kind of cartoon conservatives that liberals sometime imagine. It has provided a good college home for many of my students who wanted college without a distracting emphasis on getting drunk and laid (and it is notoriously safe-- like "people don't lock their dorm room" safe-- so parents love it), and it provided them a good education as well, and it didn't turn them into tin-hatted Bible-hammering lunatics but did, in many cases, instill a sense of responsibility for making useful contributions to the world. It's too strict and conservative for my tastes, but it doesn't scare me in the same way that some homophobic, xenophobic, otherphobic, thinkingophobic alleged places of education do. It deserves better than to be left out of this lovely government created marketing tool.
I know the feds wanted to offer their judgment on how great colleges are, because Duncan's ed department is devoted to the idea that only they are wise enough to understand and all citizens are dopes. But if we pretended for a moment that all citizens weren't dopes, and we just provided them with information so that they could make informed choices. Maybe I don't care how much calcium is in my Twinkies, but if I want to know, it's there, and if I still don't care, I'm free to ignore it.
But the Washington Post noted this week that a handful of colleges are not in the data base, and that grabbed my interest, because one of them is Grove City College of Pennsylvania.
Grove City College is right up the road from me. My brother attended there. Members of my extended family graduated from there. We send lots of our graduates there. I've had several student teachers from there.
It is an excellent school, though certainly less liberal than many. It's major (but loose) church affiliation is with the Presbyterians, and you know how wild those folks get. GCC has a great reputation as a school for engineers, a strong humanities emphasis, and also as a place for young ladies to get their MRS degree (at orientation: "Look to your left. Look to your right Your future mate may be in sight"). They are not LGBT friendly, but then, they aren't really very excited about allowing any heterosexual activity on campus, either. They are not snooty, though they may get a largish sampling of privately and even home- schooled students. Students must attens chapel sixteen times per semester. Every teacher education program has its own reputation-- when we get a GCC student teacher, we expect someone who really knows their content, but may find dealing with public school students a challenge.
GCC has made the news a few times over the years. Back in the eighties, they were in court to be excused from filing federal paperwork about Title IX because they didn't directly take federal funds, an argument that GCC essentially won-- but then soon after new laws were passed to plug the hole that GCC had walked through. Today, GCC does not participate in federal programs such as the Pell grants or Stafford loans, which keeps them free of the federal requirements;they fill the financial gaps with their own loan program-- the school was founded by a close friend of the founder of Sun Oil. (They also ended up in the news when a student turned out to be paying his way through school by shooting gay porn videos- he was suspended, not expelled).
Folks who don't know the school assume that Grove City wanted to be free to discriminate against women. But ironically, when the school opened in the late 1800's, they became one of the first colleges in America to take both men and women, and they have maintained a 1-to-1 male-female ratio. I've known many women who attended the school, and while GCC tends to attract many (but not exclusively) women with a traditional bent, I've never heard any complain about being ill-used, mistreated, ignored or underserved by the school.
Mostly, I think GCC has a big libertarian streak that makes them allergic to paying people just to file a bunch of federal paperwork, and access to the kind of money that makes it possible for them to tell the feds to shove off.
GCC doesn't do any of that federal reportage, including reporting on Title IV. GCC has never been noted for having a very high non-white population, but neither does my entire region. GCC is a very white college, but they are also the college that employs Ej Brown, the creator of the mugshots series, a group of photos challenging views of black men.
That lack of Title IV reportage lies at the center of the USED's omission of GCC (and the other skipped schools). The GCC president says that the feds told him they were working from the Title IV list.
So were the feds trying to nail conservative colleges? It seems more likely that they were deliberately overlooking colleges that don't play ball with the federal government. That's arguably six of one, half dozen of the other, but there seems no reason to believe that a liberal school that didn't do Title Iv paperwork wouldn't also be omitted.
For that matter, if you were going to target conservative colleges, Grove City hardly belongs at the top of your. Further up the road is Geneva College, small but hugely conservative, or we could just go to Liberty University, a place that makes GCC look like UCLA. Both Geneva and Liberty have report cards.
Grove City College, like many "authentic" conservatives, is a little more complicated than the kind of cartoon conservatives that liberals sometime imagine. It has provided a good college home for many of my students who wanted college without a distracting emphasis on getting drunk and laid (and it is notoriously safe-- like "people don't lock their dorm room" safe-- so parents love it), and it provided them a good education as well, and it didn't turn them into tin-hatted Bible-hammering lunatics but did, in many cases, instill a sense of responsibility for making useful contributions to the world. It's too strict and conservative for my tastes, but it doesn't scare me in the same way that some homophobic, xenophobic, otherphobic, thinkingophobic alleged places of education do. It deserves better than to be left out of this lovely government created marketing tool.
The Big Map O' Charter Failure
The Center for Media and Democracy has done a great public service, collecting and sorting a big pile of charter school failure data that the USED somehow just wasn't interested in pursuing all that much.
They have taken the NCES data from 2000-2013 and pulled out a state-by-state list of failed charter schools. This gives you, or your local press if they actually feel moved to pursue a story, a heaping database of charter failure info. One interesting feature from a Your Tax Dollars at Work perspective-- the charter schools that hoovered up some tasty public tax dollars and never even opened in the first place! In Michigan in the 2011-2012 school year, according to CMD, twenty-five charters received grants and never opened.
But for those of you who are visual learners, CMD has a big interactive map. I'll include that here, but I recommend you go over to CMD and read the whole piece for more details. Here's what charter failure to the tune of 2,500 schools (2,500!!) looks like. (And remember-- this is only through 2013)
Source: NCES Common Core of Data Public Elementary/Secondary School Universe Survey for school years 2000 to 2013. Data are available at https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/pubschuniv.asp. For purposes of this analysis, schools coded in the survey as “closed since last report,” and “inactive-temporarily closed” were deemed closed. Schools that changed status from “charter” and “open” to “not applicable” and “closed” in subsequent year were also deemed to be closed charter schools. Additionally, schools coded as open charters in one year that then are missing from the survey for at least the next two subsequent years are also deemed to be closed. - See more at: http://www.prwatch.org/node/12936#sthash.I4eFu51g.dpuf
They have taken the NCES data from 2000-2013 and pulled out a state-by-state list of failed charter schools. This gives you, or your local press if they actually feel moved to pursue a story, a heaping database of charter failure info. One interesting feature from a Your Tax Dollars at Work perspective-- the charter schools that hoovered up some tasty public tax dollars and never even opened in the first place! In Michigan in the 2011-2012 school year, according to CMD, twenty-five charters received grants and never opened.
But for those of you who are visual learners, CMD has a big interactive map. I'll include that here, but I recommend you go over to CMD and read the whole piece for more details. Here's what charter failure to the tune of 2,500 schools (2,500!!) looks like. (And remember-- this is only through 2013)
Source: NCES Common Core of Data Public Elementary/Secondary School Universe Survey for school years 2000 to 2013. Data are available at https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/pubschuniv.asp. For purposes of this analysis, schools coded in the survey as “closed since last report,” and “inactive-temporarily closed” were deemed closed. Schools that changed status from “charter” and “open” to “not applicable” and “closed” in subsequent year were also deemed to be closed charter schools. Additionally, schools coded as open charters in one year that then are missing from the survey for at least the next two subsequent years are also deemed to be closed. - See more at: http://www.prwatch.org/node/12936#sthash.I4eFu51g.dpuf
Kansas Solves Teacher Eval Riddle
Governor Sam Brownback wants to pay teachers strictly based on merit, and some legislators think that's a darn fine idea.
For instance, here's a member of the special committee to find a new finance formula for schools
“I say the highest paid individual in your school should be your best teacher, period, and I believe that,” said Rep. Ron Highland, a Republican from Wamego
Of course, lots of folks find that idea appealing, but the problem remains-- how exactly does one determine who that best teacher is? What are the qualities that are most valued in a teacher, and how does one measure those qualities or outcomes or what-have-you? Well, Rep. Highland has that puzzle solved as well.
“I can walk into any school and talk to the janitor and I can tell you who the best teacher is in every school. They all know, so telling me you can’t figure that out, I don’t buy that argument,” said Highland.
So there you have it. Just ask the janitor.
Highland may have a point. I'll bet if I ask a janitor in a school building who the best teacher is, he can give me an answer.
In fact, if I ask two janitors-- or two janitors, a cafeteria lady, the floating specialist, the principal, a couple of parents, and the guy who lives next door to the school, they can all tell me who the best teacher is, they can all tell me.
They just won't tell me the same thing.
Identifying excellent teachers is not a problem. It has never been a problem. The problem has been, and remains, that every person has a different idea about what "excellent teacher" means. Despite repeated insistence by public ed critics and the secretary of education that schools are packed with terrible, awful, no good teachers, I'm betting that it's very hard to find a classroom teacher that doesn't have at least one fan.
You know the old saying-- a person with one watch always knows what time it is, but a person with two watches is never sure.
I'll give Highland this much-- his Ask a Janitor evaluation method couldn't work any worse than the various VAM models in use around the country (assuming the school still has a janitor).
For instance, here's a member of the special committee to find a new finance formula for schools
“I say the highest paid individual in your school should be your best teacher, period, and I believe that,” said Rep. Ron Highland, a Republican from Wamego
Of course, lots of folks find that idea appealing, but the problem remains-- how exactly does one determine who that best teacher is? What are the qualities that are most valued in a teacher, and how does one measure those qualities or outcomes or what-have-you? Well, Rep. Highland has that puzzle solved as well.
“I can walk into any school and talk to the janitor and I can tell you who the best teacher is in every school. They all know, so telling me you can’t figure that out, I don’t buy that argument,” said Highland.
So there you have it. Just ask the janitor.
Highland may have a point. I'll bet if I ask a janitor in a school building who the best teacher is, he can give me an answer.
In fact, if I ask two janitors-- or two janitors, a cafeteria lady, the floating specialist, the principal, a couple of parents, and the guy who lives next door to the school, they can all tell me who the best teacher is, they can all tell me.
They just won't tell me the same thing.
Identifying excellent teachers is not a problem. It has never been a problem. The problem has been, and remains, that every person has a different idea about what "excellent teacher" means. Despite repeated insistence by public ed critics and the secretary of education that schools are packed with terrible, awful, no good teachers, I'm betting that it's very hard to find a classroom teacher that doesn't have at least one fan.
You know the old saying-- a person with one watch always knows what time it is, but a person with two watches is never sure.
I'll give Highland this much-- his Ask a Janitor evaluation method couldn't work any worse than the various VAM models in use around the country (assuming the school still has a janitor).
Wednesday, September 23, 2015
Gates Plan Crashes, Burns School District
Back in 2012, "teacherpreneur" Ryan Kinser wrote on the Gates Foundation blog, Impatient Optimists, to sing the praises of the Gates partnership with Hillsborough County schools in a program called Empowering Effective Teachers.
Back in 2009, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded the Hillsborough County, Florida, school system a $100 million grant to revamp teacher evaluation. The Empowering Effective Teachers Initiative (EET) resulted in a massive overhaul of how we view teaching and learning in the nation’s eighth largest district.
Sure-- the Gates had made yet another commitment to completely changing the whole teaching profession, because, hey-- they're rich and they think they know what needs to be done.
In 2012, Kinser talked about three big lessons from the program.
1) View teachers as the solution, not the problem. That lesson must have come later, because part of the original plan was to fire the bottom 5% of the teaching force every year (there's that magic 5% again).
2) Teachers and evaluators must build trust. The plan cycled teachers out of the classroom for stints as evaluators, because, reasons. Apparently, that was not always a big team-building exercise.
3) Use multiple measures that are transparent and authentic. Yeah, the fact that this was a lesson that had to be learned tells you how straight their heads were to start with.
Oh, and Kinser refers to the ongoing program as building the ship while sailing it-- oddly less terrifying than building the plane while flying it, but still not exactly stuffed with we-know-what-we're-doing-ness.
Well, that was 2012. A few other things have happened in the meantime. Back in 2010, Arne Duncan and Dennis Van Roekel stopped by to make a fuss, but that was about the last time that anybody wanted to throw an EET party.
That fire 5% of the sucky teachers thing? It should have gotten rid of 700 (700!!!) teachers-- you know, the expensive ones, because everyone knows that the bad teachers that need to be rooted out are, coincidentally, the older teachers who cost a bunch of money. But it never happened.
And that $100 million grant that Kinser was so proud of? Funny thing. Gates officials would now like you to know that the grant actually said "up to" $100 million.
I am kind of excited about that, because I now realize that I can tell, say, a used car dealer that I will pay "up to" seventy grand for a car and just pay five thousand bucks. I could promise to buy a new house with "up to" $10 million and just fork over a check for $10.75. I do regret not knowing this trick when my children were young and I could have bribed them to do chores with offers of "up to" $100 for mowing the lawn.
The original deal was $102 million from the district and $100 million from Gates. Turns out those numbers are a little off-- the district has kicked in about $124 million, while Gates has put in $80 million. And the district estimates that the total cost of the program will land in the $271 million.
Have there been problems. Well, another cornerstone of the program was merit pay (to offset Florida teacher pay which, to use a technical term, sucks), and that merit pay element turns out to be real expensive (which, it turns out, was a problem that could even be predicted by a lowly high school English teacher).
Other issues? Well, in 2014, the Tampa Bay Times sat down with some local officials and Gates honcho Vicki Phillips, and Phillips herself recognized one unfortunate effect of the program:
Another tough challenge is education's biggest oxymoron: teacher respect. "One thing we are dismayed about is how we have made teachers feel over the last 15 years," Phillips said. "We shamed and blamed them. It was unconscionable. We do not want them to feel that way."
Meanwhile, since 2009, Gates Foundation has caught on to the researched news that merit pay doesn't work. In fact, even when it's studied by the reform-friendly Roland Fryer of Harvard, it doesn't work. (Of course, "work" means "raise student test scores" because it's always always always about test scores). So the Gates isn't very interested in the Hillsborough EET program any more.
Once again, we see the problem with a business-style reformster approach to education. Gates didn't come in and make a commitment to Hillsborough Schools-- they came in and made commitment to their own business theory, and despite the number of years written into that commitment, the actual length of the commitment was "as long as it makes business sense to keep putting money into this."
Public schools make an institutional commitment to educate students in their community for, well, ever. Businessmen make a commitment to spend money on something as long as it makes sense to them. This does not make businessmen evil, but it does mean that they are bad candidates to become involved in the institution of public education. Hillsborough has been left holding a multi-million dollar bag because, while the Gates Foundation can walk away any time they feel like it, Hillsborough County schools are committed to educating children in the county as long as there are children in the county.
Charter operators are bad enough, sweeping into a community, hoovering up as many tax dollars as they can get their hands on, and quitting when it suits them to do so. But this seems somehow worse-- the Gates paid Hillsborough a pile of money for the chance to use their schools and their teaching staff as guinea pigs. And once the experiment looked like it wasn't going to pan out, the Gates just walks away from the lab, leaving someone else to clean up the mess and look after the experimental subjects with no regard for how badly those subjects may have been messed up.
One would hope that Gates would eventually learn something, that with a little reflection he might say to himself, "Gee, I was so sure that small schools would work, but they didn't. Then I was so sure merit pay would work, but it didn't. Maybe I should think twice about other stuff I'm so sure of before I start screwing with people's lives and livelihoods." Of course, there's a worse possibility-- that Gates isn't "so sure" at all, but that he's just casually tinkering with notions like a ten year old poking new trails for ants with a stick and as he wreaks havoc, he's not even all that invested in what he's doing. That would be awful, and I have a hard time imagining someone that detached from the lives he messes with, but as I remember his "We'll have to wait a decade to see if this stuff works" comment-- well, it's not inconceivable.
P.S. If the Hillsborough School district sounds vaguely familiar, it may be because you heard it in conjunction with MaryEllen Elia, who is currently the Reformy Boss of Education in New York State. But before that, she was the superintendent of Hillsborough schools when this Gatesian money pit was welcomed into the district. Honestly, some days I feel as if public education is an orphan in a coincidence-riddled Dickensian novel.
Back in 2009, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded the Hillsborough County, Florida, school system a $100 million grant to revamp teacher evaluation. The Empowering Effective Teachers Initiative (EET) resulted in a massive overhaul of how we view teaching and learning in the nation’s eighth largest district.
Sure-- the Gates had made yet another commitment to completely changing the whole teaching profession, because, hey-- they're rich and they think they know what needs to be done.
In 2012, Kinser talked about three big lessons from the program.
1) View teachers as the solution, not the problem. That lesson must have come later, because part of the original plan was to fire the bottom 5% of the teaching force every year (there's that magic 5% again).
2) Teachers and evaluators must build trust. The plan cycled teachers out of the classroom for stints as evaluators, because, reasons. Apparently, that was not always a big team-building exercise.
3) Use multiple measures that are transparent and authentic. Yeah, the fact that this was a lesson that had to be learned tells you how straight their heads were to start with.
Oh, and Kinser refers to the ongoing program as building the ship while sailing it-- oddly less terrifying than building the plane while flying it, but still not exactly stuffed with we-know-what-we're-doing-ness.
Well, that was 2012. A few other things have happened in the meantime. Back in 2010, Arne Duncan and Dennis Van Roekel stopped by to make a fuss, but that was about the last time that anybody wanted to throw an EET party.
That fire 5% of the sucky teachers thing? It should have gotten rid of 700 (700!!!) teachers-- you know, the expensive ones, because everyone knows that the bad teachers that need to be rooted out are, coincidentally, the older teachers who cost a bunch of money. But it never happened.
And that $100 million grant that Kinser was so proud of? Funny thing. Gates officials would now like you to know that the grant actually said "up to" $100 million.
I am kind of excited about that, because I now realize that I can tell, say, a used car dealer that I will pay "up to" seventy grand for a car and just pay five thousand bucks. I could promise to buy a new house with "up to" $10 million and just fork over a check for $10.75. I do regret not knowing this trick when my children were young and I could have bribed them to do chores with offers of "up to" $100 for mowing the lawn.
The original deal was $102 million from the district and $100 million from Gates. Turns out those numbers are a little off-- the district has kicked in about $124 million, while Gates has put in $80 million. And the district estimates that the total cost of the program will land in the $271 million.
Have there been problems. Well, another cornerstone of the program was merit pay (to offset Florida teacher pay which, to use a technical term, sucks), and that merit pay element turns out to be real expensive (which, it turns out, was a problem that could even be predicted by a lowly high school English teacher).
Other issues? Well, in 2014, the Tampa Bay Times sat down with some local officials and Gates honcho Vicki Phillips, and Phillips herself recognized one unfortunate effect of the program:
Another tough challenge is education's biggest oxymoron: teacher respect. "One thing we are dismayed about is how we have made teachers feel over the last 15 years," Phillips said. "We shamed and blamed them. It was unconscionable. We do not want them to feel that way."
Meanwhile, since 2009, Gates Foundation has caught on to the researched news that merit pay doesn't work. In fact, even when it's studied by the reform-friendly Roland Fryer of Harvard, it doesn't work. (Of course, "work" means "raise student test scores" because it's always always always about test scores). So the Gates isn't very interested in the Hillsborough EET program any more.
Once again, we see the problem with a business-style reformster approach to education. Gates didn't come in and make a commitment to Hillsborough Schools-- they came in and made commitment to their own business theory, and despite the number of years written into that commitment, the actual length of the commitment was "as long as it makes business sense to keep putting money into this."
Public schools make an institutional commitment to educate students in their community for, well, ever. Businessmen make a commitment to spend money on something as long as it makes sense to them. This does not make businessmen evil, but it does mean that they are bad candidates to become involved in the institution of public education. Hillsborough has been left holding a multi-million dollar bag because, while the Gates Foundation can walk away any time they feel like it, Hillsborough County schools are committed to educating children in the county as long as there are children in the county.
Charter operators are bad enough, sweeping into a community, hoovering up as many tax dollars as they can get their hands on, and quitting when it suits them to do so. But this seems somehow worse-- the Gates paid Hillsborough a pile of money for the chance to use their schools and their teaching staff as guinea pigs. And once the experiment looked like it wasn't going to pan out, the Gates just walks away from the lab, leaving someone else to clean up the mess and look after the experimental subjects with no regard for how badly those subjects may have been messed up.
One would hope that Gates would eventually learn something, that with a little reflection he might say to himself, "Gee, I was so sure that small schools would work, but they didn't. Then I was so sure merit pay would work, but it didn't. Maybe I should think twice about other stuff I'm so sure of before I start screwing with people's lives and livelihoods." Of course, there's a worse possibility-- that Gates isn't "so sure" at all, but that he's just casually tinkering with notions like a ten year old poking new trails for ants with a stick and as he wreaks havoc, he's not even all that invested in what he's doing. That would be awful, and I have a hard time imagining someone that detached from the lives he messes with, but as I remember his "We'll have to wait a decade to see if this stuff works" comment-- well, it's not inconceivable.
P.S. If the Hillsborough School district sounds vaguely familiar, it may be because you heard it in conjunction with MaryEllen Elia, who is currently the Reformy Boss of Education in New York State. But before that, she was the superintendent of Hillsborough schools when this Gatesian money pit was welcomed into the district. Honestly, some days I feel as if public education is an orphan in a coincidence-riddled Dickensian novel.
The Feds Don't Get Testing Consequences
Valerie Strauss asked a fairly simple question of the White House and the Education Department: Are you aware that one consequence of the policy requiring test results in teacher evaluation is that many teachers' evaluations are based on subjects or students they don't teach.
For example, in New York City middle schools, it’s been estimated that over 60 percent of New York City teacher evaluations are out-of-subject. An art teacher would be evaluated in part on student math scores. Are you aware of this state-level consequence of federal policy and do you think it is fair to teachers?
The White House response was, "Go ask the Education Department."
Strauss presents the entire USED answer without comment. I would like to go ahead and present some comment.
Their Answer
The feds open with the right general sorts of noises. Parents have a right to know how their kids are doing, and student performance should be assessed because otherwise some groups will be swept under the rug (and this has been the narrative for so long that you would think, by now, the USED would be holding up some students that they finally found hiding under a rug and hollering, "See, we never would have found these kids except for The Test" but no, that hasn't happened).
After "rug" the next sentence is "Communities deserve accountable schools" which somehow thrown into this same paragraph as if assessing student progress and evaluating schools and teachers are exactly the same subject, as if there were nothing at all to discuss about how directly student achievement is a straight-ahead measure of school effectiveness. Anyway, "multiple measures" in italics and underlined. "Only a handful of states" link non-tested subject teachers to test scores, which just seems unlikely, given that the feds required all states to use test scores in the waivers, and in fact spanked Washington State for refusing to do so.
The response now moves to the DC Public Schools as an exemplar, and when that happens you know you're in the weeds. Maybe you're in the weeds with an intern who was assigned this response and doesn't know any schools except DCPS. The DC bullet points discuss the use of the state tests in teacher assessments, while ignoring the question of whether those were used for teachers of non-tested subjects or not.
Then USED quotes from its own ESEA Flexibility Policy Document, which does include a part that says you can use another assessment as long as it -- holy crap!! -- after developing, piloting and implementing, it must do all of the following--
1) be used for continuous improvement of instruction
2) rank and sort students into at least three different levels
3) I have to just copy this one because it's such bureaucratic gobbledeegook
use multiple valid measures in determining performance levels, including as a significant factor data on student growth for all students (including English Learners and students with disabilities), and other measures of professional practice (which may be gathered through multiple formats and sources, such as observations based on rigorous teacher performance standards, teacher portfolios, and student and parent surveys);
4) evaluate teachers and principals on regular basis
5) provide clear, timely and useful feedback for instruction and PD
6) must be used as part of personnel decisions
Oh, and all personnel must be trained on the system. Annnnd the data must insure that poor and minority children are not taught by a disproportionate number of inexperienced, unqualified or out-of-field teachers.
Oh, Really
First of all, can we please note that the current Big Standardized Test system in place does not meet these requirements. I mean-- clear, useful, and timely feedback? Would that be the part where we aren't allowed to see the test and get nothing back but raw scores and don't get them till the following school year? I am also wondering if the prohibition against inexperienced and unqualified teachers for poor kids would bar TFA temps from working in high-poverty areas? Ha! Of course not.
Second-- this is the solution? The art teacher in my building is supposed to do all of this, including training all of us in how the art assessment works, on top of making sure that art students are sorted into "Great," "Okay," and "Sucky" because an important part of all education is ranking students into winners and losers.
But Mostly
I want to point out that the Education Department NEVER ANSWERED STRAUSS'S QUESTION!!
What they did was carefully outline what their regulations say could be happening, maybe. They did not say if they have any knowledge of that actually happening. Nor did they acknowledge the real-world conclusion of many states which is "We can either spend a bunch of everybody's time and money working up these assessments or we can just use the BS Tests in the formula, since the USED is clearly perfectly happy with that."
The Duncan USED is an abject failure in many ways, but that failure is facilitated by their absolute refusal to confront-- or even see-- the actual consequences of their ill-considered amateur hour policies. In particular, their insistence on putting the BS Tests in the drivers seat, in making those tests the focus and purpose of education, has been hugely destructive to public education and the teaching profession. Their continued attempts to paper that over with pretty words shows that either they are truly, deeply clueless about what they've done, or they understand perfectly and are just hugely cynical. I would ask them which is the case, but if a major education writer from a major American newspaper can't get an answer, I don't imagine I'd do any better.
For example, in New York City middle schools, it’s been estimated that over 60 percent of New York City teacher evaluations are out-of-subject. An art teacher would be evaluated in part on student math scores. Are you aware of this state-level consequence of federal policy and do you think it is fair to teachers?
The White House response was, "Go ask the Education Department."
Strauss presents the entire USED answer without comment. I would like to go ahead and present some comment.
Their Answer
The feds open with the right general sorts of noises. Parents have a right to know how their kids are doing, and student performance should be assessed because otherwise some groups will be swept under the rug (and this has been the narrative for so long that you would think, by now, the USED would be holding up some students that they finally found hiding under a rug and hollering, "See, we never would have found these kids except for The Test" but no, that hasn't happened).
After "rug" the next sentence is "Communities deserve accountable schools" which somehow thrown into this same paragraph as if assessing student progress and evaluating schools and teachers are exactly the same subject, as if there were nothing at all to discuss about how directly student achievement is a straight-ahead measure of school effectiveness. Anyway, "multiple measures" in italics and underlined. "Only a handful of states" link non-tested subject teachers to test scores, which just seems unlikely, given that the feds required all states to use test scores in the waivers, and in fact spanked Washington State for refusing to do so.
The response now moves to the DC Public Schools as an exemplar, and when that happens you know you're in the weeds. Maybe you're in the weeds with an intern who was assigned this response and doesn't know any schools except DCPS. The DC bullet points discuss the use of the state tests in teacher assessments, while ignoring the question of whether those were used for teachers of non-tested subjects or not.
Then USED quotes from its own ESEA Flexibility Policy Document, which does include a part that says you can use another assessment as long as it -- holy crap!! -- after developing, piloting and implementing, it must do all of the following--
1) be used for continuous improvement of instruction
2) rank and sort students into at least three different levels
3) I have to just copy this one because it's such bureaucratic gobbledeegook
use multiple valid measures in determining performance levels, including as a significant factor data on student growth for all students (including English Learners and students with disabilities), and other measures of professional practice (which may be gathered through multiple formats and sources, such as observations based on rigorous teacher performance standards, teacher portfolios, and student and parent surveys);
4) evaluate teachers and principals on regular basis
5) provide clear, timely and useful feedback for instruction and PD
6) must be used as part of personnel decisions
Oh, and all personnel must be trained on the system. Annnnd the data must insure that poor and minority children are not taught by a disproportionate number of inexperienced, unqualified or out-of-field teachers.
Oh, Really
First of all, can we please note that the current Big Standardized Test system in place does not meet these requirements. I mean-- clear, useful, and timely feedback? Would that be the part where we aren't allowed to see the test and get nothing back but raw scores and don't get them till the following school year? I am also wondering if the prohibition against inexperienced and unqualified teachers for poor kids would bar TFA temps from working in high-poverty areas? Ha! Of course not.
Second-- this is the solution? The art teacher in my building is supposed to do all of this, including training all of us in how the art assessment works, on top of making sure that art students are sorted into "Great," "Okay," and "Sucky" because an important part of all education is ranking students into winners and losers.
But Mostly
I want to point out that the Education Department NEVER ANSWERED STRAUSS'S QUESTION!!
What they did was carefully outline what their regulations say could be happening, maybe. They did not say if they have any knowledge of that actually happening. Nor did they acknowledge the real-world conclusion of many states which is "We can either spend a bunch of everybody's time and money working up these assessments or we can just use the BS Tests in the formula, since the USED is clearly perfectly happy with that."
The Duncan USED is an abject failure in many ways, but that failure is facilitated by their absolute refusal to confront-- or even see-- the actual consequences of their ill-considered amateur hour policies. In particular, their insistence on putting the BS Tests in the drivers seat, in making those tests the focus and purpose of education, has been hugely destructive to public education and the teaching profession. Their continued attempts to paper that over with pretty words shows that either they are truly, deeply clueless about what they've done, or they understand perfectly and are just hugely cynical. I would ask them which is the case, but if a major education writer from a major American newspaper can't get an answer, I don't imagine I'd do any better.
Tuesday, September 22, 2015
LA Plan To Crush Public Education
The LA Time published further confirmation of the story they broke in August-- Eli Broad and friends would like to replace public education in Los Angeles, taking over half of the district's "business."
The confirmation comes by way of an extraordinary document-- the Great Public Schools Now Initiative. It's nothing short of amazing-- a plan to do away with democratically controlled, publicly accountable education in LA.
Granted, LA schools have never been short of people willing to just go ahead and impose their will on the school district. It was just last week the Times ran the news that a group of "concerned citizens" had gotten a meeting with LAUSD school board president Steven Zimmer to tell him what they think he should do about filling the superintendent spot. How cool is that?! I think I will call the mayor of my town and tell him I want to meet to discuss my recommendations for how to make a budget. In fact, speaking of budgets, maybe I'll just summon my state's governor and some key legislators to a meeting where I'll tell them what they should do about the budget impasse. Because, you know, representative democracy is for suckers and little people-- People Who Matter just pick up the phone and tell elected officials what's what.
But the Great Public Schools Now Initiative puts the "aud" in "audacious" and the "balls" in "holy schneikes but you have a big brass pair on you!" It's forty-four pages of How To Completely Circumvent the Public School System For Fun and Profit.
The Times coverage hits some special highlights, so I am going to skate across this pond of barely frozen pig poo as quickly as possible. But just in case you think some of what you're seeing about this plan involves scrutinous depalabration (my new term for close reading-- patent pending), here are the goals of the plan in the plain executive summary English:
This effort will be structured over an eight-year period from 2016 to 2023 with the following objectives: (1) to create 260 new high-quality charter schools, (2) to generate 130,000 high-quality charter seats, and (3) to reach 50 percent charter market share.
That is, not incidentally, almost doubling the current charter capacity in LA. But the creators of this plan say that "the opportunity is ripe for a significant expansion" of charter baloney in LA.
Big Ripe LA Dreams
GPSN thinks that LA is redolent with potential, positively fecund with charter possibilities, because reasons. [Insert Chamber of Commerce boilerplate here.]
But the dream is not just to tap into the huge market of students trapped in failing blah blah blah waiting for their chance for high-quality seats (and, man, I would love to see one of these seats, sit in one of these seats, visit the High Quality Seat Factory and see how these seats are made) blah blah blah.
No, the dream is to "create a national proof point for other states and cities seeking to dramatically improve K-12 education." GPSN wants LA to be the new New Orleans, the exemplar for charter champions everywhere, as they head out to double down, buckle up, and cash in. Gosh, let's see what kind of program they have in mind, because I'm sure it won't turn out to be a hollow, costly, unscaleable, irreproduceable, unsustainable plan at all.
But first...
Background: LA Schools Suck
Urban minority students trapped in zip codes blah blah blah no change in last years blah blah blah. Poor minority students have potential for success, and that potential goes untapped because of schools and not at all because of systemic racism and poverty. Nuh-uh. Just bad schools. Which, incidentally we keep throwing money at, but they don't get any better. Also, achievement gap.
Charter Schools Fix Everything While Riding Unicorns Across Rainbows
LA is filled with parent demand for charters, plus the suckiness of LAUSD. Oddly enough, the Deasy-loving tablet-pushing reformsters behind GPSN are not going to pause to consider their own role in the LAUSD suckness. But it doesn't matter because they have the biggest charter sector in the world, and it's awesome.
Charters "have maintained impressive growth" and now show a "total market share" of almost twenty-five percent. This is because of "the success of charters to push past environmental and political factors and achieve sustainable growth over time." So success = more of them, It's almost as if we're discussing an investment business, and not a school. And indeed, we go on to discuss charter unit growth and enrollment trends.
We will also discuss student achievement, relying on API (Academic Performance Index) scores, and we don't have time right now to discuss how much baloney is stuffed into this mostly-standardized-test-scores measure. But GPSN wants you to know that the charters do better at the API stuff, mostly, pretty much. The state also has a special sauce for setting predictions of outcomes, and while I'm not super-familiar, it sounds like one more variation on "We're going to compare your students to other imaginary students over here that are more or less the same even if they are imaginary."
At any rate, charters are awesome. This report does not address the possibility that charters are creaming and skimming, nor does it discuss the value in regular, intense test prep. Charter are awesome. Awesome! And CREDO, a group that exists primarily to promote charters, says so, too, so it must be true. So many days of learning (whatever the hell that is) are added.
Waitlists
If you believe that waitlists actually provide meaningful data, we have some charts for you. Everyone else can just move on. Unless you want to look at the map that highlights some great market opportunities.
Things We'll Need Our Friendly Elected Officials To Do
The California Charter School Association has helpfully dragged the LAUSD into court so that judges can 'splain to them that they have to give us whatever we want. Kewl, because we're going to need space for all those super seats.
We made some headway on the last school board elections. We just need to get more people involved in the elected school board who will roll over and let us stomp them in the head.
The public support is growing. As proof, they offer a picture of a rally. You know, the kind where charter operators get all their parents to come, or else. The data point GPSN likes? There are now more charter parents than unionized teachers.
Any Obstacles?
GPSN spots a few.
Real estate and builders are needed to get enough snazzy charters built and filled. But the state's tax-exempt bond market is opening up to charter operators, so that's a plus.
Human capital. Yes, that's what they call it. They are going to need many, many teachers, even as the teacher pipeline in California is choking and sputtering (teacher ed program enrollment down 53%). The charters will have to compete with LAUSD for both quantity and quality (And--update-- as commenter Jack Covey notes below, the LAUSD actually got back in the game by actually giving teachers a raise, and free marketeers never want to apply the free market to teacher salaries). Charters look to "high quality providers," by which they mean TFA and Relay Academy, so it's possible they have some different definition of "high-quality"-- anyway, TFA is tanking and Relay hasn't arrived in LA yet, so charters are stuck trying to hire actual teachers with actual training. Of course, some charter outfits like Aspire are creating their own fake teaching credentials, but those don't serve the larger cause.
Also, finding principals will be a real bear.
GPSN wants to double the charter market in eight years, but by gum, they just won't sacrifice quality to do it. So funding. And closing down crappy charters that don't belong to the Right People.
Let's Talk Money
Speaking of sustainability.
Remember when a charter's selling point was that it could do more with less. That was apparently not in LA, where, if I'm reading these charts correctly, GPSN will need almost a half a billion-with-a-b dollars of outside money over the next eight years to pull this off (excluding any potential overruns, which I'm sure won't be an issue when building a few hundred new schools). In fact, late in this report, it starts to become clear that this is, in part, an investors prospectus.
That half-a-billion includes funds for building schools, "scaling" schools, getting teachers (this includes pumping up TFA and Relay), recruiting principals, organizing and advocacfy, and fund management (because you don't just stick $500 million in a desk drawer somewhere).
I am now really curious about what outside investors are spending on LA charters right now, but clearly, LA will be one more place where the effect charter schools will be to raise the total cost of the complete school system a whole hell of a lot. I'll say it again-- only charter school operators believe you can live in two homes for the cost of one.
They have many hopes, including parent groups, CCSA, and Emma Bloomberg's new Big Data group, Murmuration-- plus the United Way and other community groups who will, apparently, contribute to replacing a public school system with private profiteering.
Okay, "replace" is too strong a word. Fifty percent of LA students will be allowed to stay in the public schools, or whatever is left of them after the charters have sucked them dry. But don't worry-- I'm sure that the charters will call first dibs on the most challenging, difficult, expensive students in the system, taking on the challenges of students with special needs, English language learners, and the most vulnerable students, leaving the public school with the strongest, most capable, most resilient students in the city.
Bottom Line
I am absolutely bowled over at the magnitude of this power grab. Imagine if Broad and his friends said, "We're not happy with the LAPD, so we're going to hire and train our own police force, answerable to nobody but us, to cover some parts of the city. Also, the taxpayers have to foot the bill." Or if they decided to get their own army? Or their own mayor?
Who does this? Who says, "We can't get enough control over the elected officials in this branch of government, so we will just shove them out of the way and replace them with our own guys, who won't bug us by answering to Those People."
This is not just about educational quality (or lack thereof), or just about how to turn education into a cash cow for a few high rollers-- this is about a hamhanded effort to circumvent democracy in a major American city. There's nothing in this plan about listening to the parents or community- only about what is going to be done to them by men with power and money. This just sucks a lot.
The confirmation comes by way of an extraordinary document-- the Great Public Schools Now Initiative. It's nothing short of amazing-- a plan to do away with democratically controlled, publicly accountable education in LA.
Granted, LA schools have never been short of people willing to just go ahead and impose their will on the school district. It was just last week the Times ran the news that a group of "concerned citizens" had gotten a meeting with LAUSD school board president Steven Zimmer to tell him what they think he should do about filling the superintendent spot. How cool is that?! I think I will call the mayor of my town and tell him I want to meet to discuss my recommendations for how to make a budget. In fact, speaking of budgets, maybe I'll just summon my state's governor and some key legislators to a meeting where I'll tell them what they should do about the budget impasse. Because, you know, representative democracy is for suckers and little people-- People Who Matter just pick up the phone and tell elected officials what's what.
But the Great Public Schools Now Initiative puts the "aud" in "audacious" and the "balls" in "holy schneikes but you have a big brass pair on you!" It's forty-four pages of How To Completely Circumvent the Public School System For Fun and Profit.
The Times coverage hits some special highlights, so I am going to skate across this pond of barely frozen pig poo as quickly as possible. But just in case you think some of what you're seeing about this plan involves scrutinous depalabration (my new term for close reading-- patent pending), here are the goals of the plan in the plain executive summary English:
This effort will be structured over an eight-year period from 2016 to 2023 with the following objectives: (1) to create 260 new high-quality charter schools, (2) to generate 130,000 high-quality charter seats, and (3) to reach 50 percent charter market share.
That is, not incidentally, almost doubling the current charter capacity in LA. But the creators of this plan say that "the opportunity is ripe for a significant expansion" of charter baloney in LA.
Big Ripe LA Dreams
GPSN thinks that LA is redolent with potential, positively fecund with charter possibilities, because reasons. [Insert Chamber of Commerce boilerplate here.]
But the dream is not just to tap into the huge market of students trapped in failing blah blah blah waiting for their chance for high-quality seats (and, man, I would love to see one of these seats, sit in one of these seats, visit the High Quality Seat Factory and see how these seats are made) blah blah blah.
No, the dream is to "create a national proof point for other states and cities seeking to dramatically improve K-12 education." GPSN wants LA to be the new New Orleans, the exemplar for charter champions everywhere, as they head out to double down, buckle up, and cash in. Gosh, let's see what kind of program they have in mind, because I'm sure it won't turn out to be a hollow, costly, unscaleable, irreproduceable, unsustainable plan at all.
But first...
Background: LA Schools Suck
Urban minority students trapped in zip codes blah blah blah no change in last years blah blah blah. Poor minority students have potential for success, and that potential goes untapped because of schools and not at all because of systemic racism and poverty. Nuh-uh. Just bad schools. Which, incidentally we keep throwing money at, but they don't get any better. Also, achievement gap.
Charter Schools Fix Everything While Riding Unicorns Across Rainbows
LA is filled with parent demand for charters, plus the suckiness of LAUSD. Oddly enough, the Deasy-loving tablet-pushing reformsters behind GPSN are not going to pause to consider their own role in the LAUSD suckness. But it doesn't matter because they have the biggest charter sector in the world, and it's awesome.
Charters "have maintained impressive growth" and now show a "total market share" of almost twenty-five percent. This is because of "the success of charters to push past environmental and political factors and achieve sustainable growth over time." So success = more of them, It's almost as if we're discussing an investment business, and not a school. And indeed, we go on to discuss charter unit growth and enrollment trends.
We will also discuss student achievement, relying on API (Academic Performance Index) scores, and we don't have time right now to discuss how much baloney is stuffed into this mostly-standardized-test-scores measure. But GPSN wants you to know that the charters do better at the API stuff, mostly, pretty much. The state also has a special sauce for setting predictions of outcomes, and while I'm not super-familiar, it sounds like one more variation on "We're going to compare your students to other imaginary students over here that are more or less the same even if they are imaginary."
At any rate, charters are awesome. This report does not address the possibility that charters are creaming and skimming, nor does it discuss the value in regular, intense test prep. Charter are awesome. Awesome! And CREDO, a group that exists primarily to promote charters, says so, too, so it must be true. So many days of learning (whatever the hell that is) are added.
Waitlists
If you believe that waitlists actually provide meaningful data, we have some charts for you. Everyone else can just move on. Unless you want to look at the map that highlights some great market opportunities.
Things We'll Need Our Friendly Elected Officials To Do
The California Charter School Association has helpfully dragged the LAUSD into court so that judges can 'splain to them that they have to give us whatever we want. Kewl, because we're going to need space for all those super seats.
We made some headway on the last school board elections. We just need to get more people involved in the elected school board who will roll over and let us stomp them in the head.
The public support is growing. As proof, they offer a picture of a rally. You know, the kind where charter operators get all their parents to come, or else. The data point GPSN likes? There are now more charter parents than unionized teachers.
Any Obstacles?
GPSN spots a few.
Real estate and builders are needed to get enough snazzy charters built and filled. But the state's tax-exempt bond market is opening up to charter operators, so that's a plus.
Human capital. Yes, that's what they call it. They are going to need many, many teachers, even as the teacher pipeline in California is choking and sputtering (teacher ed program enrollment down 53%). The charters will have to compete with LAUSD for both quantity and quality (And--update-- as commenter Jack Covey notes below, the LAUSD actually got back in the game by actually giving teachers a raise, and free marketeers never want to apply the free market to teacher salaries). Charters look to "high quality providers," by which they mean TFA and Relay Academy, so it's possible they have some different definition of "high-quality"-- anyway, TFA is tanking and Relay hasn't arrived in LA yet, so charters are stuck trying to hire actual teachers with actual training. Of course, some charter outfits like Aspire are creating their own fake teaching credentials, but those don't serve the larger cause.
Also, finding principals will be a real bear.
GPSN wants to double the charter market in eight years, but by gum, they just won't sacrifice quality to do it. So funding. And closing down crappy charters that don't belong to the Right People.
Let's Talk Money
Speaking of sustainability.
Remember when a charter's selling point was that it could do more with less. That was apparently not in LA, where, if I'm reading these charts correctly, GPSN will need almost a half a billion-with-a-b dollars of outside money over the next eight years to pull this off (excluding any potential overruns, which I'm sure won't be an issue when building a few hundred new schools). In fact, late in this report, it starts to become clear that this is, in part, an investors prospectus.
That half-a-billion includes funds for building schools, "scaling" schools, getting teachers (this includes pumping up TFA and Relay), recruiting principals, organizing and advocacfy, and fund management (because you don't just stick $500 million in a desk drawer somewhere).
I am now really curious about what outside investors are spending on LA charters right now, but clearly, LA will be one more place where the effect charter schools will be to raise the total cost of the complete school system a whole hell of a lot. I'll say it again-- only charter school operators believe you can live in two homes for the cost of one.
They have many hopes, including parent groups, CCSA, and Emma Bloomberg's new Big Data group, Murmuration-- plus the United Way and other community groups who will, apparently, contribute to replacing a public school system with private profiteering.
Okay, "replace" is too strong a word. Fifty percent of LA students will be allowed to stay in the public schools, or whatever is left of them after the charters have sucked them dry. But don't worry-- I'm sure that the charters will call first dibs on the most challenging, difficult, expensive students in the system, taking on the challenges of students with special needs, English language learners, and the most vulnerable students, leaving the public school with the strongest, most capable, most resilient students in the city.
Bottom Line
I am absolutely bowled over at the magnitude of this power grab. Imagine if Broad and his friends said, "We're not happy with the LAPD, so we're going to hire and train our own police force, answerable to nobody but us, to cover some parts of the city. Also, the taxpayers have to foot the bill." Or if they decided to get their own army? Or their own mayor?
Who does this? Who says, "We can't get enough control over the elected officials in this branch of government, so we will just shove them out of the way and replace them with our own guys, who won't bug us by answering to Those People."
This is not just about educational quality (or lack thereof), or just about how to turn education into a cash cow for a few high rollers-- this is about a hamhanded effort to circumvent democracy in a major American city. There's nothing in this plan about listening to the parents or community- only about what is going to be done to them by men with power and money. This just sucks a lot.
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