What Happens After You Blow It All Up

At the Center for Media and Democracy's PR Watch last week, Jonas Persson unearthed some footage from a panel in New Orleans posted last June, sponsored by the American Federation for Children, a group associated with Betsy DeVos.

Persson's coverage zeroed in on a minute's worth of talk-noises from Rebecca Sibilia from EdBuild, in which Sibilia appears to rather gleefully celebrate just how awesome the bankruptcy of major school districts would be, allowing the new operators to dump legacy debts like building and pension costs.

Sibilia charges that the post "blatantly (and bizarrely) mischarecterizes" what EdBuild is about, and so I figured, what the hell, I'll just watch the whole thing and see if her somewhat awful comments improve with context.

The clip has not been played much (fifty times when I got there), but it's actually pretty good viewing, featuring some familiar reformy names like Andy Smarick, Mike McShane and moderator Derrell Bradford, plus some folks I didn't know, like Jaime Casap and Katie Beck. We have thirty-five minutes of discussion to get through, and much of it requires some thoughtful consideration, so if you were hoping for a short blog post, you should probably just abandon hope here. So here we go (the whole clip is at the bottom, in case you want to check my work).

Knocking It Out and Tone

The actual title of the panel is "Knocking Out Yesterday's Education Models," though Persson reports that Bradford makes a joke about the working title being "What Happens After You Blow It All Up." If you watch it, I will warn you that the most disconcerting thing about the whole discussion is the jaunty, breezy, jolly, jokey tone of the whole business. As a teacher, it is beyond disconcerting about watching people discuss blowing up the work that you've devoted your life to while they laugh and smile and yuk it up like the whole destruction of traditional public education is hi-larious.

I am trying hard not to hold it against them. I've been around enough to get it-- you're in a room where "we're all friends here" and it's a fun conference in a fun place and you're seeing a lot of friends you don't always get to see and it's easy to forget the grimmer reality of what you're talking about. However, some of the jokes that get cracked tell us a bit about where these folks are coming from.

Mostly the panelists go one at a time, so we'll take this person by person.

Andy Smarick

Bradford teases Smarick about the terrible acronym associated with his work in urban schools of the future, then notes his history of working in government. I've tweeted and written back and forth with Smarick many times, but this is the first time I've seen him in action, and he has a sort of corn-fed aw-shucks quality that suits him well.

Bradford asks a pretty direct question: "What lives and what dies in a system of choice schools? More importantly, why should anything live" in the transition to a system of "disperse governance driven by parent choice." And I think that's a good question, but I also think that the notion that a choice system would be driven by parent choice is either naive or disingenuous, like insisting that the soft drink industry or fast food biz are driven purely by customer choice. But we'll go there another day.

Smarick, after some banter, has to stop and think, saying "I've never thought of it in those terms before." So.

What should live? Democratic control. "It's something we think too little about...with systems of choice." But Smarick believes there's some way that the community at large should be able to "control the contours of the system." It probably should not look like a traditional school board (that owns and operates all the stuff), but there should be something that gives the locals control. Well said, Andy!

What should die? The notion of a school existing in perpetuity, and the right of government to tell parents where to send their kids based on where they live. Assigning low income families to neighborhood schools, even if they suck, "has got to go away." We should be agnostic about who runs schools as long as they're good.

For 100 years, we had a single provider system, and we told students where to go to school based on where they live--bzzt! This is what I think reformsters get wrong, over and over. In Smarick's narrative, one would think the federal and state government started schools. But community schools were started by communities, just as communities started their own police and fire departments. Schools had geographical boundaries for the same reason that when there's a fire in the Bronx, they don't call the fire department in Newark.

You can watch the same thing happening in homeschool co-ops. Groups of homeschoolers go in together, set up a meeting place, buy/hire resources, and use them for their kids in their community. That's how schools grow-- not by the feds saying, "We're going to open a bunch of schools and tell you which ones you have to go to." I think there's a discussion to be had about how state and federal gummint got more and more entwined in this, but the narrative of top-down school creation is fundamentally flawed.

But Smarick is still going, and saying better things. We broke the old system, he says, and now we have to buy it. And the old choice fan notion that we could just set up charters and give parents choice and let them go and everything would be awesome-- it's much more complicated than that. He rattles off some nuts and bolts issues-- who owns the building, who runs the registration, what about backfilling. It's more fun to talk about empowering parents, but the detaily tech wonky stuff matters. Which we haven't addressed enough.

Michael Q. McShane

The Q is for Quentin, because chatty buds. McShane is a research fellow at AEI, and snappily dressed. He is also, as I've always seen him, tightly wound and intense, like a guy who's had his twenty cups of coffee, but hasn't yet run his daily ten miles to take the edge off. Bradford hits him with a much vaguer question about what the outcomes of choice kind of look like.

So McShane starts on free markets and thinking about supply and demand. McShane has focusd more on supply-- how to encourage more new better schools. McShane thinks choice has three mechanisms for the ultimate goal of "getting a child a seat in a high quality school." Anyway, what can the market do-- 1) it can fill space in existing high quality schools, 2) encourage HQS to scale up, and 3) actually create new HSQ. McShane argues that 1 is going great, 2 and 3 not so much, because of "choke points" in the marketplace. I would argue maybe not so much "choke points" as "nobody in the reformy business really has any idea how to do 2 or 3." And maybe McShane sort of agrees because he says the choke points are in the "pipeline of human capital." Then blah blah something about understanding what they're doing and why.

Bradford follows up by tossing out a McShanian "bon mot"-- "institutional isomorphism" which is his phrase for the tendency of the new thing to look like the old thing, which is a really valid idea. For free, I will offer McShane the observation that movies initially just recorded staged plays and records initially captured live performances, and it took a while for them to start capturing things that could only be captured in the new medium.

So McShane talks about charter school authorizers and references one of his papers which I addressed at the time. McShane starts talking about the many weird things that charter authorizers require, which causes this exchange:

McShane: To operate a charter school in Colorado, you have to demonstrate you know what's going to happen if a child forgets his or her lunch-

Bradord: (interrupting jokily): They get hungry.

In a crowd of people who regularly deal with plenty of poor kids who "forget" lunch or lunch money all the time, this would not be particularly hilarious, and it does not get a big laugh here. But it does tell us something about the setting.

Anyway, McShane wants to observe that filling out the applications can be daunting, and that the requirements of the application can shape the school. Which is kind of the same way student applications for charter schools affect what students get in. McShane notes that authorizers have an absolute duty to make sure that charlatans don't operate schools (wake up, Ohio).

Jaime Casap

This guy is the chief "education evangelist" for Google. He gets "What's the internet's role in all this?"


Casap starts with the importance of where you were born in your academic success. He notes that he was born in Hell's Kitchen, and he wants you to know he means the scary, ugly Hell's Kitchen of the seventies and not the breezy upscale version of today, thereby driving right past the issue of gentrification and how neighborhoods "improve" themselves by chasing out poor people and bringing in not-poor people. Because when you blow that system up, you also throw away the people that inhabited it and replace them with "better" people. Could we talk about how that relates to the charter movement? Probably not. I'm not trying to pick, but there's a theme running through discussion of a strange disconnect between these swell ideas and how peoples' lives are actually connected to them.

He was a "typical urban kid" who grew up on food stamps and welfare (and non-English speaking). The Columbus library was his big source of information, cue story about how research sucked back then (preach it). But now we have the internet, but classrooms look the same. Don't use technology just to make "bad education...faster and more efficient."

Casap says there are three things happening with technology. 1) We have evidence about what learning can look like (autonomy + purpose + mastery) and technology can help us do that. Somehow? 2) Technology has wrapped itself around the core of our own lives. 3) Kids who "don't know any better." They take tech for granted and they don't know to think that tech doesn't belong in education.

Now he goes way wrong. "Nobody looks at a great work of architecture and wonders what hammer they used." Well, no-- unless they are a builder or an architect. Casap wants to focus on outcomes, which is great if you're an amateur and a consumer. But I'll bet Google pays plenty of attention to how they do what they do. Technique and tools can and probably should be invisible-- but not to the people who are trying to get the job done.

Katie Beck

COO of 4.0 Schools, Beck has a Teach for America pedigree, and went through the Harvard College. She gets "how do you turn education into a more entrepreneurial space" as a question, so I guess we're skipping over "why the hell would you want to do that?"

Her outfit likes to work with people who are "obsessed" with a problem and who want to make money from the solution. Okay, I'm paraphrasing, but I'm not loving her message, and she does that thing where every sentence ends like a question? Anyway, her term for institutional isomorphism is "the hairball" because, you know, traditional public school is just a disgusting mess. So, for instance, instead of starting with a charter that will spend $2 million and look like "an iteration of" existing schools, they help little boutique start-ups. Because anything that looks like the old way is obviously bad. I had the hardest time wading through Beck, who is so clearly focused on developing business without much interest in the education side of things. All of her ideas deal with the best way to get a business started up, with no concern expressed for the students who become the guinea pigs for these start-ups.

Bradford asks if for-profit people are any different to work with that the other altruistic folks. But she doesn't work with "bad actors" who are in it to make a buck. And being for-profit helps those people keep themselves honest because when you're obsessed with solving a problem, you have to ask "is this solving it enough that someone's willing to pay for it." Which I wouldn't call "keeping honest" so much as "missing the entire point of running a school."

Rebecca Sibilia

So here comes the lady who's quote got us interested in this panel in the first place. If we want all of her comments will it, as she suggests, make her sound better. Well, no. The whole thing is even worse than the quoted portion, which tells us a little something about how she sees herself.

Bradford asks her how we pay for all this innovation. And she opens with, "The problem is, we can't." Which is a remarkably honest answer [insert my usual complaint about trying to run charter systems without being honest about the true cost.] She will now break down the three problems that EdBuild is trying to solve.

First, the way that we're funding schools is "largely arbitrary" and "doesn't make any sense." And Sibilia seems far too smart to believe that baloney, but just in case, here goes: People set up schools in their community, for the students who live in their community, so they funded them by collecting money from everyone who lives in the community. Later on, state governments got involved in trying to even out the differences in funding inherent in a local-based system. There are lots of things to hate about how this is all playing out, but it's silly to pretend that the system just fell from the sky for no reason at all. Her criticism about uneven funding outcomes seems to be that by favoring one district over another financially, you're creating an artificial market bias. One might complain that some students are getting fewer resources than they deserve, but that doesn't seem to be her concern. It;s the savage and unwarranted abuse of the free market that's the issue.

Second, she doesn't like the borders that are created by property taxes, which seems exactly backwards. Municipal borders exist, and folks who live within them are taxed. Not the other way around. She thinks this leads to a mistake-- trying to get resources into those borders instead of "focusing on how we can break those borders" which is a less objectionable way to say "how we can get some students out." Because "breaking the borders" instead of "getting resources into the borders" has to mean that we are going to just let some areas collapse in unmitigated poverty. Which, as we'll see, is exactly her plan.

See, many states fund schools with property taxes, and in many states property taxes can't go to schools of choice. "We've had charter schools for a quarter of a century, but we're still treating them like an experiment. And so that's a problem and we have to fix it."

So, there is a ton of Wrong packed into that. First of all, the modern corporate charters these guys are talking about haven't been around for twenty-five years. Second, they are experiments, and not very successful ones, at that, having not yet figured out how to stop some charters from being Ohio-style nests of incompetence and corruption. Third, charters have used their fledgling nature as part of their excuse to avoid the same oversight and accountability that public schools enjoy. Every time a charter wants to set up a new rule for itself, its argument is, "We're a charter. We should be free to experiment and Try Stuff."

Sibilia's argument is that charters should get lots of sweet, sweet public tax money. Neither she nor other charter advocates make a convincing case for that.

But she's going on about the evils of property taxes being linked to public schools, and she and Bradford share a laugh at how it's still called millage, which apparently proves that it's just so antiquated and uncool. Har. And she goes on to try to make a point that funding is based on the teacher, and not the student and their needs, but somehow property tax locks this in, and so places where the charters are getting a new teacher corps (young? cheap? unprofessional? she doesn't explain the critical differences) are locked in. But until we can bust up the whole funding system (she also does not say what she wants to replace it with), none of the cool reforms being discussed here will be sustainable. And that much is probably true.

Bradford sets up her next bit by observing that some school districts are in trouble and he would argue most can't afford to stay open, and that would be awesome, and I say, you know what would help with that? What would help is to stop allowing charters to suck the blood out of the public system. And all that brings us to the quote that has circulated, where she envisions bankruptcy as a great way to blow up a district, specifically getting rid of all its "legacy debt" so that they no longer have to pay for like buildings and pensions, which is totally cool because having a school district go bankrupt is no problem for students, just the adults. Which is just-- I mean, I imagine that students would notice that their district is collapsing financially and cutting programs and teachers and resources with a chainsaw. "Bankruptcy is not a problem for kids," is a statement that in the best of contexts is still grossly tone-deaf and reality-impaired. In the context of Sibilia's discussion of how to blow up  public schools so we can has charters, it's even more tone-deaf and reality-impaired.

And while the tone of the whole panel is, as I said, disturbingly light and happy, Sibilia is just so thoroughly gleeful about the prospect of districts becoming bankrupt, their pensions zeroed out and their teaching staff scrubbed. I have seen people less excited about getting engaged to the eprson of their dreams.

Andy Smarick

And here's why you should watch the whole clip-- because now Andy Smarick steps in to represent, as he frequently does, the point of view of an actual conservative. What he offers next is a welcome balance to the panel's delighted contemplation of destruction and ruin. Also, you have to love an answer that works in "Burkean conservative" and "accretion of policies."

What he says is, yes, we've got an old hide-bound system, and we might want to blow it up and replace it, but when you do that you break a lot of systems and policies that are tied to it. "When you tug on that thread, you see a lot of the fabric start to warp. This is not to say we shouldn't pull on that thread--"

But.

There is a downside to all this that should not be ignored. And he brings up Chesterton's fence. Which is an old British notion that you don't take down a fence until you understand why it was put up in the first place.

So, some of the worst changes to the revolutionary evolutionary point are when we, with great hubris, with great certainty, look at something and we think is messy, untidy, inefficient, and we don't see the wisdom, we don't see the long-standing virtue, value, that is in it that has been tested over time, that has evolved, and we technocratically with great brilliance the best and brightest among us decide we're going to change that thing.

He tells a story about forest management and mistakes made in the name of commoditized lumber. Or knocking down swamps and then discovering we'd made a mess. Or the human social capital destroyed with high rise public housing. So, he says, as we tinker with all the pieces parts of schools, "let's at least have a little humility and recognize that with that change comes a casualty." And that those casualties often are the least advantaged.

So, first time I ever wanted to give a certified reformster a round of applause. And I'll add that I've known actual conservatives my whole life, and as I have watched ed reform unfold, I don't understand why more alleged conservatives do not share Smarick's point of view.

Last Bits

Casap wants to add something about poor kids. He throws out the question of whether kids should want to go to college or not and tosses off a joke about how that question is usually brought up by people whose kids did go to college, which, no, not in my neck of the woods. But basically he says that Smarick is full of it and current systems don't need to be safeguarded- just bulldozed.

Smarick replies that he's been on this for fifteen years, paid his revolutionary dues, and he is torn on the subject. He doesn't want to be at the revolutionary commemorative picnic in thirty years as they look back on their revolutionary changes and say, "Oh my God, what did we do!"

We jump past the Q&A portion. Bradford gets in two more cents, including the notion that democratic control is a lie and people think that by having school board elections they have some control, but they don't. "They're not in control of anything" and he lands on "anything" hard, like the whole idea really pisses him off. The whole business is just a "ruse." He did not elaborate, though this sounds a little like the old line that teacher unions really control school boards. Sure. Either unions or the illuminati.

Bottom Line

There's a great deal to unpack here, and I've already gone on and on. But it's worth seeing what these folks are thinking, which in some cases is all about money and business models and conceiving of schools as bloodless systems rather than a web of relationships between live human beings. In some cases, this panel presents disaster capitalism at its most distasteful, demonstrating a real joy in the destruction of the traditional public school system. Only Smarick displays a real sense of the serious nature of what's being discussed.

For folks whose stock in trade is all about how schools should be about student concerns, there was remarkably little talk about what can be done to keep students from becoming collateral damage after traditional public are all blown up. That's unfortunate, because one of the hugest problem with charters so far is that when disaster strikes, they only save some students and leave the rest behind in the middle of a disaster that the charters themselves have made even worse.

And because it's long already, I'll avoid touring the festival of unquestioned assumptions contained. But could we please ask "should we" before we ask "how do we"?

Finally, the video left me wishing that Andy Smarick were named King of the Reformsters, because while I disagree with many of his reformy ideas, I salute his respect for tradition and history, and I really, really wish that reformsters were hearing him on the whole hubris thing. If reformsters wonder why those of us in traditional public schools don't give them more respect, here's one reason-- while they have learned some lessons here and there, every single lesson has been a thing that we already knew, but they are so steadfastly certain of their rightness, they feel no need to listen (e.g Chris Barbic leaving the Tennessee Achievement School District with the insight that teaching poor children is hard). It wouldn't hurt them a bit to pause before blowing up Chesterton's fence.

RI: This Is Why Tenure Is Necessary, Part 32,871,299

William Ashton is in trouble again.

Ashton is an English teacher in Rhode Island. If you remember his name, it's because last spring, the Jacqueline Walsh School for the Performing Arts suspended him for allegedly badmouthing the PARCC. The "badmouthing" was the process of correcting student misconceptions about how an under-95% testing rate would affect the school; to put it another way, he contradicted the standard state-generated propaganda about why students "must" take the Big Standardized Test.

The suspension spurred student protests, including old-school (picketing) and new-school (facebook page). And ultimately, Ashton was back in his classroom. That was last March.

Now, Ashton is in trouble again.

This time, he appears to have answered a question about birth control in the time of the Pilgrims. And now the student is back out on the sidewalk, picketing and protesting that her teacher is in trouble for answering her question.

Pawtucket Superintendent Patti DiCenso has seized this teachable moment by dragging the students out of class to scold them, informing them that "they were being inappropriate and shouldn't be protesting." DiCenso, in what I can only assume is a bid to model how grown-up professionals deal with disagreement, has blocked one of the students from the superintendent's twitter page (@PawtuckSup, just in case you want to say hi).

DiCenso told Norton and Roberts that they were being bullies because they were demanding the return of their teacher and threatening to peacefully protest if he wasn’t reinstated, they said.

Now, we are only getting the students' version of this meeting, so I'm going to hope that this is a big of hyperbole on their part and not their superintendent of schools saying foolish, foolish things. DiCenso's office will not confirm the identity of the suspended teacher nor discuss the situation, which is an appropriate response at this point.

Is Ashton on the chopping block again because his bosses are still steamed about last spring? Is this a district prone to over-reaction? I don't know.

What I do know is that this is just one more example of why tenure is a good idea. Remember-- Ashton's current problems are because he answered a student's question.

DiCenso told the students that Ashton had “strayed from the curriculum” but Long [a student] asked, “Does the curriculum say what questions we are allowed to ask?”

Because that is kind of the point. A teacher can't control what questions a student might ask, but a teacher can certainly create a classroom atmosphere in which students understand that questions-- particularly questions of a remotely controversial nature-- are not welcome. Nothing like a simple, "I won't answer that question because it could cost me my job, and please, students, never ask a question like that ever again or else I will send you to the office to make sure it's clear that I in now way condone that kind of job-threatening talk in my classroom" to really kick off some valuable classroom discussion that opens the doors of learning.

In an atmosphere like this, a teacher has to view each student as a ticking time bomb, ready to go off with some question at any moment. That's no way to run a school.

Students Should Be Able To Show What They Know

Students should be able to show what they know.

Many folks take this as a self-evident truth. Arne Duncan has said it more than a few times, and heads nod as if this is one of those reasonable-sounding things that Duncan says from time to time.

But I think it demands closer examination.

Because possessing a skill or piece of knowledge is not the same thing as being able to demonstrate it. This problem lies at the heart of public education; it is one of our largest, most fundamental, and yet most commonly unexamined issues.

Ask your students. This is why many smart young people hate school. Understanding, figuring out, getting a handle on a piece of knowledge is really exciting-- but having to prove to somebody else that you understand is a big fat pain in the ass.

Finding proof of student learning is a huge part of the teacher's job, and whether it is done poorly or not makes all the difference in that teacher's effectiveness. The challenge starts from the very moment you formulate the problem. There is a huge difference between "How do I figure out of this student understands" and "How do I make this student prove to me he gets it." The first is a valuable approach; the second is the first step on the road toward wasting everybody's time.

Consider a manager in a workplace. A figuring out manager finds ways to unobtrusively monitor a worker who is on the job to see how that worker is doing without interfering with the actual Doing. Meanwhile, the prove it manager calls the employee in for a hour-long meeting in the office every day to be grilled about job performance, leaving the employee acting as if one of his main jobs is to prepare for and sit in meetings, while the actual Doing now takes up far less of his day.

Or, since learning is far more internal and personal than job performance, consider the question of love, and the eternal question, "Does this person love me?" You could look at the person, pay attention , watch for signs, learn to interpret the person's behavior and words. Or you could demand that the person prove their love by passing some test you set. You might do this in the privacy of your own head, thinking, "Anybody who really loves another person will call that person every day." Or you could create an explicit test. "If you love me, you'll wear purple every day." Or, "If you love me, you'll say you love me."

And there's the problem. If I set the performance standard for love at an easy-to-perform task like saying "I love you," a woman who is just after my vast wealth can just perform that easily-faked task without actually caring about me at all.

The performance task is separate from the actual competence. The showing and the knowing are two different things.

The more we demand that students put on a show to prove to us that they Know Stuff, the more we will design artificial tasks that demand a set of skills and knowledge entirely different from the skills and knowledge we really want to measure.

If you want to find out if a student can write, you give her the opportunity to write and take a look at what she's done. You don't give her a multiple-choice test or a canned task for which she'll be judged on how close she comes to the ideal "correct" essay for the task.

Admittedly, emphasizing knowing over showing is hard on teachers. Much student learning happens inside their heads, where we cannot see. And our method of organizing students into groups means we tend to expect individuals to learn on our schedule, and not their own. Consequently, there will always be a slightly artificial element in even our most authentic assessments.

But if we start with the assumption that a student who knows must be able to demonstrate that knowledge to our satisfaction on whatever cockamamie assessment somebody whips up, we will be traveling down the wrong road. As a classroom teacher, I have to remember that the burden is on me to find a way to see what my students know; the burden is not on them to put on whatever trained monkey show I design for my own ease and convenience. This is one more reason the business of writing objectives on the board is silly; usually, we are not doing anything more than telling what trick the students have to perform in order to reinforce the fiction that they may have learned something.

Thomas Newkirk, in his exceptional essay about Common Core, tells the parable of the drunk and the car keys:

It all comes down to the parable of the drunk and his keys, an old joke that goes like this: A drunk is fumbling along under a streetlight when a policeman comes up and asks him what he doing. The drunk explains he is looking for his keys. “Do you think you lost them there?” the policeman asks.

“No. But the light is better here.”

We have here a parable of standardized assessment. There is the learning we hope to evaluate (the keys) and the instruments we have to assess that learning (the streetlight). The central question of assessment is whether our instruments help us see what we should be looking for—or are we like the drunk, simply looking where the light is better? 

It may not be the worst thing ever to say, "Students should be able to show what they know." But I think it's far more useful to say, "Teachers should be able to discover what students know."

NY: Cuomo's New Common Core Faux Commission

My absolute favorite part of Gov. Amdrew Cuomo's announcement about the Common Core Task Force is this stock art student on the front page

This is a face that says, "Yeah, like that shit's gonna happen."

The task force has been charged "with comprehensively reviewing and making recommendations to overhaul the current Common Core system and the way we test our students." It features several return appearances by members of the governor's "successful" NY Education Reform Commission-- you remember their big hit, the edu-improving report of January 2014.

So who do you get to head up a group that is going to re-examine and possibly rewrite the baseline education standards for an entire state? A top educator? A leading expert in educational standards? An experienced educational scholar?

Ha! Of course not, you dope. You get a financial master of the universe like Richard Parsons, former chairman of the board at Citigroup and a top advisor at Providence Equity Partners, Inc. Parsons is happy to have this opportunity  "to fix New York's education standards and improve the lives and learning outcomes of students across the state." Does that not seem like a big enough helping of edubaloney. Try this:

By performing an in-depth review of everything from curriculum to testing, we can lay out exactly what needs to be done to fix the Common Core.

So they are going to examine everything and fix everything. Wow. They must have a whole bunch of education heavy hitters on this task force. Ha, again. Here's what we've got in addition to Parson's.

Heather Buskirk, ten year science teacher, instructional coach, Master Teacher, and member of TeachNY advisory council.

Geoffrey Canada, past president of the Harlem Children's Zone, "thought leader and passionate advocate for education reform," president of Promise Academy board, and a co-chair of Bloomberg's commission for reducing poverty (remember when NYC reduced all the poverty?).

Carol Conklin-Spillane, principal of Sleepy Hollow High, school district consultant.

MaryEllen Elia, ed commissioner and fired from leadership of Hillsborough Schools in Florida.

Constance Evelyn, superintendent of Valley Stream School District for the last three months. She comes to administration by way of special ed.

Catalina Fortino, VP of NYSUT. I prefer not to touch the thorny internal politics of NY teacher unions with a ten foot pole.

Kishayan Hazlewood, 10th year third grade teacher at a Community Learning school in Brooklyn.

Tim Kremer, executive director of NY State School Boards Association since 1998.

Senator Carl Marcellino, chair of Senate Education Committee. He represents part of Long Island.

Assemblywoman Catherin Nolan, chair of Assembly Education Committee. From Queens.

Samuel Radford III, president of District Parent Coordinating Council of Buffalo, former marine.

Carrie Remis, founder of the Parent Power Project from the Rochester area, administrator at Eastman School of Music.

Randi Weingarten, head of AFT.

Nancy Zimpher, Chancellor at SUNY.

In addition to these august representatives of the education world, the Task Force has also set up a website for soliciting and collecting input from the general public.

So, to get this diverse group of very busy people together to review all the standards, all the testing programs, all the alignments between them, all the state's "curriculum guidance," make sure teachers will receive all the support and training they need to implement, and "complete a top to bottom review"-- to do all that while weighing input from each team member plus the information from the public. How long do you figure that would take? To set up standards and testing for the entire state of New York, to give thorough oversight and thought from these people from varied backgrounds and interests, while all these people are still busy at their actual jobs-- what do you figure? Six months? A year?

Ha! The report is due by the end of the year. Roughly twelve weeks. Twelve weeks to get from, "Okay, let's get started" to "Oh, look. The report just came back from the printers!" Oh-- and do it all without a place at the table for any of the people who spearheaded the opt-out movement that forced Cuomo's hand in the first place.

To do all that and end up with a system that has any sort of educational validity, that really addresses the state's concerns and is not just an exercise in empty rebranding-- in twelve weeks.

NY: Turning Screws on Opt Out

If you are a struggling school in New York, congratulations-- you've been drafted to fight against the state's burgeoning opt out movement.

As reported yesterday at Politico, one new requirement for struggling and persistently struggling schools to avoid a state takeover is to get their participation on the Big Standardized Test above 95%.

Those of you who are living above ground may recall that last year upwards of 200,000 New York students refused to take the BS Test. This prompted a variety of reactions. The feds made veiled threats. Governor Andrew Cuomo and chancellor Merryl Tisch reaffirmed their belief in a parent's right to choose. New education commissioner MaryEllen Elia was a bit more stern. 

But when life hands you lemons, say reformsters, you can always make one more mechanism for privatizing schools, and right now NY Ed department has figured out how to turn Opt Out into Win Win.

Elia's position remains that NY parents just don't understand how awesomely wonderful the tests are. Asked for a comment on the new takeover participation requirement, the department of ed told Politico:

We encourage and support the efforts of all schools and districts to explain to parents the benefits that parents, students, teachers, schools, and district and state policymakers derive from student participation in state assessments.

In other words, struggling school districts are welcome to get stuffed or start working for us in pushing the damn test.

It really is a win win-- either the school district really bears down on recalcitrant parents, squelches opt out, and gets the state (and its pet test manufacturers) the kind of test numbers they want, or the district fails to do so and the state gets to confiscate the school district and hand it over to the top privatizer do jour.

Meanwhile, Cuomo has announced his hot new commission to "review" Common Core, composed of well-placed amateurs, who, I predict, will determine that Common Core needs a serious rebranding with no meaningful change of substance.

It's a win-win-win-win-win for everybody except folks in New York who care about public education.

USED: Accountability for Public Schools Only

Arne Duncan today held a press chat to announce that USED would be throwing more money ($157 million) at charter schools. 

Throwing money at public schools is, you may recall, anathema to reformsters, who are concerned that while money has been thrown higgledy piggledy at public schools, it appears that insufficient amounts of the money have struck students in the test-taking parts of their brains.

Throwing money at public schools is bad, because we are just certain that they are wasting it and that the taxpayers are not getting a sufficient bang-to-buckage ratio.

But throwing money at charter schools is awesome, because we have no idea where the hell it's going.

The department's inspector general issued a report in 2012 that Lyndsey Layton calls "scathing." The report suggests that the feds have been throwing that money at charters with blindfolds on. The Center for Media and Democracy has a more recent, more scathing report on the vast piles of money that has been thrown into charter black holes. "Gosh," say the feds. "That's a state problem. It's up to them to exercise oversight. Not our problem." Although, just in case you think USED is providing no oversight at all, I am happy to report they did send states a strongly worded letter, exhorting them to be more oversighty.

With all that, you'll be unsurprised to discover that the top winner in the charter change chunking festival is the state of Ohio. Yes, that Ohio. The Ohio where hundreds of charters have failed in just about every way a charter can fail, the Ohio where the husband of the governor's campaign manager had to resign from his ed department job because he was caught cooking the books to make charters look better (including some belonging to some political money throwers, proving that throwing money at politicians can also work well). That Ohio gets another $32.5 million to throw at charters. Even the journalists listening to Duncan's news apparently felt the urge to question that decision, but USED assistant deputy secretary Nadya Dabby responded:

“Ohio has a pretty good mechanism in place to improve overall quality and oversight,” said Dabby, although she could not provide details. “We believe Ohio has put practices in place, although there ‘s always room for them to grow.”

So, they hear that probably stuff happening to lead to considering some things that could maybe get better, they think. I feel better already.

This festival of federal financial largesse will not at all remind you of the administration's position on Title I portability when it came up during the ESEA rewrite discussions. The administration hated this idea a great deal, concerned that it would take, for instance, $7 million out of poor schools in Mississippi. That money can't just go wandering any old place-- the feds want to know exactly where it's being thrown.

Still, if they are concerned about where money might go that could have been spent on public schools, they might try paying attention to where the grants to charter schools are going. If $7 mill of Title I money is enough to get bent out of shape, surely $32.5 million is enough to actually keep tabs on in Ohio with more than wishes and fairy dust. (And that's before we even get to the amount of money that charters suck out of public schools through various money-follows-the-child gymnastics.)

The double standard remains the same. Public schools must account for every penny, including federal bucks that must be spent only as Uncle Sugar demands. Public schools must keep open records always available to the taxpayers. Public schools must even hire employees whose only job is to monitor and report on the money-- all the money. Meanwhile, charter schools just get money thrown at them with no requirement to do anything except, I suppose, have a nice day.

Charters Are Not Common Schools

Charter boosters continue trying to muster some sort of argument against the decision in Washington State that the charter laws there violate the state constitution. So far, none of the attempts really sing.

Over at Campbell Brown's PR site, the 74, Andrew Rotherham (Bellwether) and Richard Whitmire (general reformsterism) make the argument that charter opponents are "on the wrong side of history" and that charter schools are the true common schools. You will not be surprised to read that I disagree.

In truth, the ideal of the common school is one the country has never lived up to. While we romanticize the common school, people too frequently forget that those schools were at different times not open to blacks, religious minorities, or, until the 1970s, students with special needs and disabilities. 

Despite serving those groups today, the continuing trend of segregated housing  and the staggeringly uneven performance of different public schools prompts this question: What exactly is all that common about the common school anyway?

First, it's important to recognize the True Parts of what they are saying-- ever since this country latched onto the idea of a common school and public education, we have struggled with living up to that ideal. This is not surprising-- as public institutions under public control, schools have reflected and expressed every twist and turn, every shameful lapse and every difficult step forward in the public life of this country. Public schools have not always delivered on their promise, and in some places, are still not delivering on it today. 

So when I oppose modern charters, I don't do so with the insistence that public schools have no problems. They have plenty of problems (just like, and because of, the problems in the country as a whole). Those problems are real. But charter boosters are not proposing solutions to them.

Take "segregated housing," which is having a moment as a reformster buzzword. I'll view it as something more than a rhetorical trick when it is accompanied by a discussion of how to address that issue directly, or a spirited stand against trends such as gentrification in which rich folks are allowed to drive poor folks out of their neighborhoods. Of course, some critics argue that charter schools are in fact tools of gentrification. So this point will carry more weight where charters are proposed as a part of the solution and not part of the problem. Show me a charter that promises to take every single student from its home neighborhood-- every single one, without exception. Show me charter operators who stand up for their poor customers and advocate for housing regulations that protect those poor citizens from being pushed out. 

How else do the writers advocate for charters as the new common school?

Rotherham and Whitmire argue that charters are getting results, that they are hothouses for growing innovation. But after all these years, charters still have nothing to teach public school. Not one pedagogical technique, not one educational innovation to point at that has spread into public education. What charters have "discovered" is what public schools have always known-- if you don't have to accept every single student in your neighborhood, without exception, without excuse, AND if you have ample funding and facilities, AND if you can also narrowly define "success" (as, say, a pair of scores on a single standardized test)-- then you can do much better than schools that don't have all those advantages. None of this is news to anybody.

In other words, where charters can point to anything like success, it is precisely because they are NOT common schools, fully and equally open to all students within their reach. 

Rotherham and Whitmire also argue about accountability, but these are arguments hold no water at all. None.

That accountability starts with parents who choose those schools, or don’t, which is the ultimate accountability.

That is not even close to the ultimate accountability. The ultimate accountability is a school board that must stand for election, and which must answer to parents and community members who show up at public meetings to speak their mind. Accountability is parents and taxpayers who may see a schools financial records any time they want to. Accountability is parents and taxpayers who can call a school at any time to question what goes on within those walls. Are there school districts that try to weasel their way around all of these things? Absolutely-- and they do it to avoid accountability, and they have to weasel around to do so because no public school can simply say, as Eva Moskowitz did to the entire state of New York, "We're a private corporation and you have no right to look at our books."

"Voting with your feet" is a lousy form of accountability. If you walk out of a restaurant and never come back, those owners have no idea of what to improve, and the restaurant just closes-- still unsure of why. It does no good for schools to close repeatedly. It does not serve student interests to be shunted about from failed charter to failed charter.

Charter advocates have taken to saying that the closing of charter schools (at least 2,500 in the last fifteen years) is a sign of a healthy system, a feature the public system ought to emulate. But why? Why treat schools as disposable pop-up businesses? Students and communities benefit from stability-- not constant churn and burn.

Charter schools are not common schools. They don't take on all students in a community. They are not accountable to citizens in that community.

Some public schools may well be disastrous messes, but charter operators propose to save just some of the students, and in the process make matters far worse for the students they leave behind. I would give charter fans points at least for consistency if they said, "Public schools are failing, so we'd like to replace the whole system." But they don't. They say, "Public schools are failing, so we'd like to replace just some parts of the system-- the profitable parts."

Rotherham and Whitmire salt their argument with talking points that simply aren't true. They cite The Prize including Russakoff's incorrect data about costs in Newark-- you can get the truth here and here. They praise New Orleans for having "toughest public oversight," despite NOLA's scattered and uncoordinated charter non-system having no accountability for knowing where students are.

And Rotherham and Whitmire pull up the old refrain of union's and "adult interests," suggesting that the Washington decision was all about the teachers' unions. And having made their case, they summarize:

So which school better serves the common good, the traditional school that barely keeps its head above water and is awash in the politics of the various adult interests or the high-performing charter that can use its autonomy to focus on students?

Again-- let's acknowledge the true parts. Public schools are awash in the politics of various adult interests, because there are many, many, many interests that intersect at schools. Parents. Teachers. Taxpayers. Business. Vendors. Anybody anywhere in the community. All of these people have interests in the school, including those like parents and teachers who also speak on behalf of the interests of children.

What Rotherham and Whitmire are suggesting is that education is better served by silencing ALL of those people, and substituting the wisdom of the charter operator, who is not "awash" in all those interests because he is free to ignore any interests he feels like ignoring. What they call "autonomy" is a lack of accountability, a freedom to ignore taxpayers who pay the bills but have no school-age children, parents who don't fit the charter's vision, elected officials who are accountable to the citizens, and, yes, those terrible awful teachers and their unions. It's true: democracy is messy, and sometimes you don't get your own way.

Just shut up, they say, and watch how well we make the trains run on time.

Charter boosters are next going to argue, "So, what? We're supposed to abandon students in those failing public schools?"

It's a fair question, but I have to point out that every charter does, in fact, abandon a whole bunch of students in schools that have had resources stripped by charters, making it harder to help those abandoned students. But no-- we're not supposed to abandon anybody.

So what should we do?

Take care of the true common schools.

Fully fund each and every one. Keep the elected board awash in politics, which is just another way of saying that the community should keep pressure on for what they want. In fact, state government's also need to be awash in politics so that states like Washington will stop ignoring their obligation to fully fund each and every school. Improve teacher training, and take steps to make the profession more attractive. Roll back the idiocy of Common Core and the Big Standardized Test and let teachers teach. And make a larger national effort to address poverty in both its causes and effects.

Charter fans dismiss and write off "failing" public schools, but they have never put half the effort into improving existing schools that they have thrown into creating new ones from the ground up. I watch the huge amounts of money and activism and money and influence-peddling and money that the charteristas sink into promoting and creating and funding and advertising charters, and I think about how much we could help public schools with that sort of concentrated effort. Think of what could be accomplished with so many resources focused on the common good, and not just return on investment.