Not Even a Bridesmaid

I have nothing to say about the Democratic debate, really. Neither does any other education blogger, though Steven Singer covers it as well as it needs to be covered. "Near silence" indeed.

So this is how it's going to be. The GOP is going to have a cartoon discussion about education, focusing on how to use charters to dismantle public ed and on how to find wacky ways to pretend that we're not havin' that Common Core stuff. And the Democratic line on public ed? The Clinton campaign locked in on their line months ago-- stick to the safe-and-easy topics of universal pre-K and accessible, cheaper-somehow college education.

That mantra is comfortable and easy. Plain folks can listen to it and hear, "Aww, more pre-school for those precious cute little kids, and a chance for young Americans to make something of themselves," while corporate backers, thirsty hedge funders, and ambitious reformsters can hear, "Expanding markets! Ka-ching!!"

The $64.50 question is, "Would education be on the front burner if Clinton had not already locked up the AFT and NEA endorsements?" Because as it is, we aren't on the front burner, the back burner, the bunsen burner, or anywhere near the stove. Well, hey-- Lily Eskelsen-Garcia suggested that once we were all in with the campaign, Clinton would be more inclined to hear our message and pay attention to it. What did Eskelsen-Garcia have to say about the debate last night?

Education must be part of the convo. We want to hear about universal pre-k, college affordability & opportunity for all students #DemDebate

— Lily Eskelsen García (@Lily_NEA) October 14, 2015

Really? We don't want to hear anything about the disastrous policies of the last twelve years that have systematically broken down and dismantled American public education and the teaching profession? Dang, but I could have sworn we wanted to hear about that. But I guess now that the union is on Team Clinton, our job is not to hold her feet to the fire so much as it is to give them a little massage and carry some baggage for her so that she can save her strength for other issues. Important issues. Issues that aren't US public education.

Sanders, with his focus on how the rich have commandeered so many parts of our democratic society, is so close to making useful statements about the education debates, but it just doesn't happen. And I'm not sure how somebody helps it happen at this point. And those other guys? Generic Candidates #3-5? I don't know what they think about education, but I suppose now that the education vote is supposedly locked up by Clinton, they won't feel the need to go there.

Bottom line-- US public education, despite the assorted crises associated with it (both fictional and non-fictional) is shaping up to be a non-issue once again in Presidential politics. I would say always a bridesmaid, never a bride, but it's more like always the person hired for a couple of hours to help direct the car parking in the field back behind the reception hall. Or maybe the person who cleans up the reception hall after the bridal party has danced off happily into the night.

If I was harboring any dreams, any spark of hope that maybe this would be our year, that maybe, given everything that has happened, this might be the year that public education somehow became a real campaign issue, that spark has been extinguished, buried, stomped on and drowned in a bucket of tears.

Worst of all-- and this really galls me-- I might owe Campbell Brown an apology. I wrote earlier that no Democratic candidates (and almost no important GOP ones) came to her education summit because they found her irrelevant. And while I'm comfortable with that assessment of her role in education policy debates, there is one other possibility-- when it comes to public education in this country, none of the candidates actually gives a shit. I could believe that nobody went to Brown's parties because they didn't think her summits would be a good setting for a serious discussion about public education. But last night the Democrats had a chance to hold that serious discussion, and they walked right by it.

Politico: Wrong about Common Core

Politico scored a coup yesterday by declaring that the war is over, and Common Core won it. One can only assume that Kim Hefling's piece "How Common Core Quietly Won the War" bumped equally hard-hitting pieces such as "The Earth-- Actually Flat After All" or "The Presidential Wisdom of Harold Stassen."

Hefling's main point is that Common Core is now everywhere, so it won. But this would be tantamount to saying that Kleenex has cornered 100% of the facial tissue market because all citizens wipe their noses on something that they call "Kleenex."

Sure, there's something called Common Core almost everywhere in education. But which Common Core Ish thing would we like to talk about?

State standards? Many states have changed the name and little else, but many states have further fiddled with the everyone-forgets-their-copyrighted standards, so that none particularly match any more.

Testing standards? A variety of Common Core based Big Standardized Tests are out there, and -- for now-- every state has to have one. But what those tests cover does not in any case correspond fully with the Common Core standards as originally written (for extreme instance, speaking and listening standards are not and likely never will be tested). And in many, if not most, school districts, curriculum and instruction are driven by the test, not the standards.

Curriculum standards? Most districts have "aligned" their curricula to the Common Core-- but that process looks a lot like taking what you already do anyway and assigning various standards to it until your paperwork looks good.

Textbook standards? One of the biggest effects of Common Core was the huge windfall for textbook publishers as schools rushed to get textbook programs with "Common Core ready" stamped on them somewhere. But every publisher has their own idea about what the standards look like when interpreted on the textbook level-- and absolutely nobody is in position to check their work, leading many analysts to conclude that many textbooks are not particularly "Common Core" at all.

Classroom standards? The final editor of all these programs is the teacher, who retains (in most districts) the ability to say, "While the Common Core Textbook/Curriculum/Script says to teach it this way, I'm looking at these kids and my professional judgment says we're doing something else, instead."

Add to these the consultants, college ed profs, and clueless politicians who all think they are talking about Common Core and you have a brand that has absolutely lost its identity. You remember the blind men touching the tail, leg and trunk of the elephant? Well, in Common Core land they're touching the leg of the elephant, a Victorian living room sofa, and a plastic grocery bag filled with steamed cockroaches.

Hefling tries to skirt the issue by not really addressing what the success of Common Core was supposed to look like. She refers to CCSS as "the math and English standards designed to develop critical thinking" which is A) baloney and B) unnecessary. Show me the CCSS standards that require critical thinking, and then explain to me why anybody needed CCSS to promote critical thinking in the first place.

She also references the idea that Common Core allows teachers to share ideas, as if that was somehow impossible before. She includes a testimonial from a Florida principal who provides the six zillionth iteration of the "Before we had the Common Core, we didn't know how the hell to do our jobs" narrative.

If the picture of success was supposed to be that everyone in the public education system (not the private schools! never the private schools!) had to deal with something that had the words "Common Core" attached to it, then yes, CCSS has won.

But if, as was actually the case, the goal was to have identical standards pursued and measured in every public classroom in the country, with teachers working in virtual lockstep to pursue exactly the same goals-- then, no-- the Common Core lost. It failed. It was a sledgehammer that was supposed to beat open the brick wall of US schooling, and instead shattered into a million different bits.

And Hefling doesn't even talk about the other promise of the Core-- that all students would be college and career ready. We supposedly have several years' worth of Common Core grads out there now-- how are they doing? Are colleges reporting an uptick in well-prepared freshmen? Are businesses reporting a drop in their training needs? Hefling and her Core-adoring sources don't address that at all. Can you guess why?

John King's Problem

The Washington Post put Lindsey Layton and Emma Brown together to create a profile of John King, former NY Ed Chieftain and future US Ed Department Temporary Faux Secretary. It's worth reading as a compendium of what many sources have already said about King.

There is apparently some sort of federal regulation saying that if one writes about King, one must treat his personal story as The Central Thing To Know about John King, and Brown, Layton, and the headine writer have observed that law assiduously. They also repeat some of the success claims for King's Uncommon School charters uncritically, but the profile is worth reading. I just want to focus on two quotes from it because they capture perfectly what I find so weirdly disconnected about King.

First, King's oft-mentioned reference to teachers saving his life as a boy:

One of them was Alan Osterweil at P.S. 276 in Brooklyn, who encouraged King to read the New York Times and Shakespeare in elementary school. “He was sort of a crazy guy — an ex-hippie who wore two-inch platform shoes,” King wrote in the Huffington Post in 2009. “But he was an amazing teacher.”

King was in Mr. Osterweil’s fourth-grade class when his mother, a Puerto Rico native and public school teacher, died of a heart attack. “The next morning, the only thing I insisted I wanted to do was go to school, your classroom,” King told Osterweil in an interview for the oral history project StoryCorps. “It felt like the most comfortable place to be.”

And now, looking at his implementation of standards and tests in New York:

Teachers said they didn’t have the training or materials to teach what children needed to know. They also felt pressure to raise scores to protect their jobs, and parents said that their children were bearing the brunt of that pressure as schools devoted more time and resources to test prep...

He also refused to slow down, saying that the pace of change was warranted given the numbers of children who were graduating without the skills they needed, or were not graduating at all.

This is what I find incomprehensible about King-- how he completely fails to make a connection between a formative experience that shaped him, and the experiences that he is shaping for students today. How could Mr. Osterweil's classroom possibly have survived Adult John King's reforms? I have no doubt that New York is still filled with teachers who would accommodate, welcome, and care for a small child whose mother had died just last night-- but for them it would have to be an act of rebellion to say, "Screw the pacing guide and the standards requirement and the canned test prep. Let's just make sure this classroom is a safe, welcoming, and supportive place."

I imagine Young John King arriving at the classroom where Adult John King stands behind Mr. Osterweil saying, "You can't slow down. You must maintain pace."

I just don't get it. And I don't get how John King doesn't get it, either.

Dancing Straw Men Reformster Video Festival

Now and then, amidst the noise and mess of the education debates, you will see a moment where people from several sides are able to find a means of engaging in dialogue based on nuanced looks into the issues and an honest attempt to understand the ideas and positions that motiva-- OH MY DEAR GOD IN HEAVEN!What the hell is that!!??

What the hell that is, is a new music video from Bob Bowden and his crew at Choice Media. It's called "We Don't Want School Choice," and it just totally skewers the living daylights out of a whole bunch of anti-choice positions that nobody on planet earth actually supports. But it has singing and dancing and a monster, so you know this is serious business. I'll embed this special slice of video hell further down the page so you can check my work, but I have watched so you don't have to, and really, that might be best.

It opens with a little text down in the lower left corner, just like a real video on MTV back in 1987. We pan through empty school halls and rooms while the mocking echos of the parent voices at which we're about to shake our satirical scepter. And then the beat kicks in and this jam is off and running.

Cut to five hip hoppy dancers busting moves in front of a plain white background, while the beat drops and the chorus of "We don't want school choice, no, we don't want school choice" pops in.

And now, cut to five pissed off parents. This is a well-selected group, with one Black mom, one Hispanic mom, one Ethnic dad, and a white mom and dad. And we will proceed to meet each of them pretending to present the arguments that the writers will pretend pro public education supporters present. Yes, it's all very meta and satirical.

Black mom is wearing a sweater in a well-appointed kitchen and says, "Though our public schools are losin' we still got no business choosin'" and Hispanic mom, on a comfy high-backed sofa says, "Scholarship to private school? Don't let me pick. I'm just a fool." So right off the bat, the writers will insult parents far more than any public school advocate ever did. Yes, yes-- they are saying that this is exactly what PSA's are saying to parents. But the first statement is a non-sequitor. Do the writers mean that parents should only have business choosin' if public schools are losin'? Because that would support my old point-- families don't want school choice nearly as much as they want a good school. And if a private school wants to give scholarships to families, aka find ways to pay that student's ride themselves instead of sucking public tax dollars out of public schools, I say "Hooray!"

And it just gets weirder.

Ethnic dad says, "Even if our kids got smarter, we don't want the choice of charter," and-- really? Charter schools are now promising to make kids smarter? That's pretty amazing. Those must be different charters from the ones that want to make kids more compliant and obedient, or the ones that want to just raise some test scores. But smartify them-- that would be something.

White mom is-- seriously? White mom is the cartoony one, sitting at a kitchen table with sad looking children, e-devices in hand, while white mom has her hair in curlers in a bandana, just one wardrobe choice short of looking like a Hee Haw sketch. But this is a fun device because the charter-boosting writers can insult parents all they want and just say, "Well, that's what PSA's say about you!" Anyway, white mom says "Public schools are all the same, but it's okay, my kids are lame," and I'm not even sure what the point is here. Public schools are different so we should have choice? Cool, non-lame kids don't want to go to public school? So, go to charter school-- it's what the cool kids are doing? That is some serious marketing mojo there.

And now, as angry parents bust a move, we introduce some new characters.

Did I say white mom was almost a cartoon? Well, meet Scary Schoolmarm-- high-necked blouse, jacket, hair severely pulled back, rising up from behind her wooden beaten-up desk to threaten us with a ruler. Because, I guess, every child should have the choice to not attend the same school that Archie Andrews attended in the fifties. She looks over her glasses at us. And because this character does not exist in real life anywhere on the planet, we appear to have hired an actor-model-dancer to play her, so that she looks vaguely like the too-strict teacher who's going to eventually let down her hair and turn out to be hot later in the video. I will look forward hopefully to that part.

Oh! Here comes the monster!! Descending a computer-inserted tunnel, it's the "Educational Options" monster. I wonder if he is going to eat the Scary Schoolmarm before she can turn hot? I assume he's supposed to represent what PSA's see in the "monster" of school choice, but he looks kind of fun and furry, like a steroid-addled Fraggle. Also, he's an inaccurate representation of the school choice monster; he should be knocking down public school kids and stealing their lunch (or art or phys ed) money.

But back to our points, such as they are. "Families with cash" can make all sorts of choices, "but we shouldn't choose, cause we're too poor" say white mom and dad, who are pretty much Hee Haw characters now (she smacks him in the head). This is a hilarious, nuanced look at the role of poverty in education, particularly appropriate in a video that looks as if it cost enough money to give many poor children scholarships to private schools. But I guess the parents don't want a good school for their child or for the rich folks to bear a fair share of the tax burden so that their local school can be wellfunded and fully supported. They aren't asking for a good school-- they just want to be able to have a choice.

Black mom says that since she's middle class, it's good that "smarter people protect us, so it's for our own good that they dis-respect us." The disrespect is illustrated by an as-yet-not-introduced character who knocks down charter schools, religious schools, other charter schools and chases children, with his bulldozer, into "one-size-fits-all" school. I am not sure who, exactly, is knocking down religious schools, unless it's maybe Mr. Constitution bringing up that damn no public tax dollars for religious institutions business again. This part is confusing because "smarter people than us will tell us what to do without actually involving us" sounds like a pretty common charter-choice policy model to me. I have to assume that black mom is not from, say, Newark or Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood.

Now, as the wacky chorus plays (is this song going to have a bridge soon?), we see an example of why choice is good-- a store's shelves lined with boxes of Burlap Flakes. Then the dancers hold up signs-- "Tell us what to do" (Oh-- here's the bridge). We will hammer this home, because if there's one thing about public schools run by elected school boards that operate under laws requiring transparency, it's that they are far more dictatorial than a charter school run by an unelected board that doesn't answer to anyone (except, sometimes, investors) and doesn't even meet people who attend the school.

And now we have five kids, also dancing.

Now meet Snotty Rich Lady (she is also Unnaturally Large Ears Lady, but I don't think that's part of the point). She says, "We rich should pick our schools, but the poor should clean our pools," and now I'm confused, because maybe she is Eva Moskowitz or a No Excuses school operator who thinks poor kids should be trained to be compliant. It's hard to tell, because this over-the-top cartoon person isn't a good representation of any human living on the planet. But the point is, again, I guess, to say that choice is a privilege that the privileged are trying to deny the poor, except for the privileged few who are responsible for running the charter schools that they would never send  their own kids to because they don't care about having choice, they just want their kid in a good school, and you can see how the nuances of this cartoon video get kind of twisted up in the hammerhanded pointmaking.

But if you want to know who the video makers really hate, here comes the guy who was driving the bulldozer. Big, bearded, smoking a cigar, wearing a fancy suit, and talking with a gruff monster accent-- it's Teachers Union! He even has a "World's Okayest Boss" mug on his desk. He hates charters because they would cause a drop in dues. Rich lady throws in "And if their schools are failing, well, then tell them to go sailing," which I have to admit is a nice writing. But I am starting to wonder-- who exactly does Rich Lady represent? Where do we find this enclave of wealthy folks who are so carefully aligned against school choice? It sure as hell isn't me or the other folks who blog about the issue. We are not the ones who spent $12 or $4 million on a website, or whatever large pile of change was dropped on this video. I didn't see any filthy rich people starving themselves for Dyett High or walking out with students in Newark. Exactly who are these rich people bent on killing school choice? Where are the hedge fund managers announcing, "We could make a fast buck by getting into the charter school biz, but that would be wrong." Name some names!

Another example of no choice being bad-- Evil Union Guy opens a menu and sees only Stewed Liver. It's a cute move, but as with the shelves of Burlap Flakes, one has to ask-- how would this play if the choice was awesome? If the one choice on the shelves was "Golden Awesome Flakes" or the menu offering was "Best Meal Ever." Would we say, "Bring me more choices?" Where's the scene where a guy walks into his home, sees that he's only got one wife to choose from and makes a sad frowny face while the wacky chorus goes on? Do you want me to say it again? People don't want choices-- they want what they want. Choices are only appealing because they increase the odds that you'll be able to get what you want. But our focus is never on having choices-- it's on having the what we want. And if one choice is enough to get that, we're happy.

But I digress. Evil Union Guy knocks over a tripod holding a "Choice" sign, by far the least clever moment in the whole video. One of the dancers holds up a sign that says "Oh My God" and another holds up a sign that says "Tell my agent to get me a decent gig soon." Ha. Just kidding about the second sign.

The writers have been pretty canny in not trying to speak for children, but instead tell this little parable. Ed Choice Monster breaks onto the set and scares away all the grownups, and it walks away, head down, in the Charlie Brown Loser walk, but the children run up and give it hugs. Apparently they do not have the scene where the school choice monster pushes some of the kids away and says, "No, sorry. You can't be my friend." and when they cry and complain says, "Look. Choice means that I get to choose, not you." That would have been a fun scene to include.

One final shot-- everyone dances to the beat in a red wash of light (except Evil Union Guy who just stands there, arms folded, because evil) and then hits a pose on the last note.

So what do we have here. Well, on the one hand, this is well-produced. People with skills either donated valuable time or were well-paid to create this thing. Bob Bowden has a real background in television production and writing (on top of his engineering degrees from Purdue and Stanford), and while his qualifications in the education field may be, technically, non-existent, he's been playing at the charter-choice game for a while. So, like much of the charter movement, money is talking loudly here.

On the other hand, what it's saying is ridiculous. Not since the classic (and now unavailable) Cranky Idiot Grampa Complains About Common Core video have we seen such a ham-handed nuance-free straw man attack. Non-existent characters espousing non-existent arguments boil down to "The rich folks and teachers unions don't want you to have choice, so you should get it" and that just omits so many uncomforable facts and inconvenient truths that it hardly seems worth the bother (or the money they dumped on this). I would rather go back and watch the classic Petrilli and the Fordhams dance to their version of What Does the Fox Say, which at least had the home-made look of people enjoying themselves.

Also, Scary Schoolteacher never turned hot.

Here's the linkage. While I don't want to encourage them with actual views, you still might want to stop over and share your views about the video. The comments section is, so far, wide open.

On Childlike Faith in Tests

Some blog post titles just demand your attention. Yesterday, my attention was grabbed by this one: "Tests are inhuman-- and that is what so good about them." Yes, there's an 's missing from that title, but there's a lot more than that missing from the post itself.

The writer is arguing for the value of the impartial, unbiased test. And part of her argument is solid. Teaching is most often done by human beings, and human beings are biased. Therefor it will come as no surprise that A) teachers have biases and B) if they're not careful, teachers will let those biases bleed over into their evaluation of students. This is inarguably true.

It may seem, the writer says, that teacher evaluation is nicer, more humane, but in fact the intrusion of bias can make teacher evaluation the most unkind at all, denying some students credit for their achievements and being inherently unfair. Also true.

If you want fairness, progress, equality and reliability, then human judgment may not be the best method.

Um, wait.

What other judgment is there?

Okay. You might say Judgment of God, but I believe there's a special day set for that judgment, and it's coming later. I don't think it's a significant factor in, say, ninth grade algebra.

This is what I don't get about some test devotees-- this belief that tests somehow descend from heaven on a fluffy cloud, free from human contact and cleansed of all human frailty. Impartial, perfect, and as divinely sourceless as an angel or Santa Claus.

But no. I'm pretty sure that tests are written by human beings. Imperfect, biased, judgment-making human beings.

That's fine. Making judgments is one of the most fundamental, and fundamentally necessary, human activities. We can't talk about not making judgments at all, but we can and must talk about making good judgments and about being aware of our biases as we make those judgments. That is part of what makes a teacher a professional-- an awareness of the many biases at play in a specific classroom and an ability correct for those. The "specific" part matters because context matters-- "Draw a picture of your father working?" can seem like a perfectly harmless question unless you know that Pat's father is dead and Chris's father is in prison.

In another post, this writer makes this extraordinary claim:

 I don’t think you can improve equity, teacher quality and a love of learning without some form of reliable feedback – and exams are basically the best and most accurate method of gathering feedback that we have.

Oddly enough, that in itself is a bias that would affect a classroom. Imagine a student who brings up a drawing of a butterfly and says, "How do you like this?" And the teacher replies, "Sit down, Pat. We'll have to run it through the color spectrum analysis scanner to see how you did."

A reliance on testing means that we make judgments about what behaviors, knowledge and skill is worth measuring. A belief in the perfect awesomeness of standardized tests leads us quickly to the conclusion that only things that can be measured by standardized tests are worth knowing or doing. That's baloney. And it's a huge bias.

And that's just if the tests we're discussing are reasonably decent tests. If we get to tests such as the current crop of Big Standardized Tests that ask questions requiring students to identify the single "correct" author's purpose, or select the single "correct" most effective sentence, we have now thrown in more bias about the content itself.

Sure, testing can provide useful info of some sorts on some occasion. But we are not exposing students to some perfect, bias-free, inhuman judgment. Rather, we are allowing someone else's judgment and bias into our classroom, which is perfectly okay and not a bad way to balance out our own biases-- as long as we recognize that's what we're doing.

The best way to deal with bias is to put a bell on it, acknowledge it, hear it coming, and factor it out. To try to hide it behind claims of perfect inhuman judgment is to give that bias enormous power that it does not deserve to have, and that's what writers like the blogger in question propose to do.

ICYMI: Some Edubloggery Highlights

The Common Core Can't Speed up Child Development

The Baltimore Sun ran this piece last summer, but it's a good reminder now that we're entering test results season. Students are not getting dumber.

NEA PAC vote breakdown

If you're still cranky about the Clinton endorsement, here's the breakdown of who voted which way-- and why the abstentions from the two biggest states made a difference,

Five Questions To Ask a CEO Before a District Take Over

The always-reasonable Peter DeWitt takes a look at Undercover Boss, the Youngstown Schools takeover, and the questions that should be on a school CEO interview.

Bill Gates Education Speech Detached from Reality

There were plenty of reactions to the Bill Gates State of the Education Speech, but this was one of my favorites, looking at some of the specific areas in which Gates was a bit off the mark

Jersey Jazzman Trifecta

If you aren't following Jersey Jazzman, then what's wrong with you? Get to it. His work is always indispensable and, unlike certain other bloggists, based on actual facts and data and stuff. This week he had three must-reads--

John King Is the King of Suspension

Many folks scratched their heads over the anointing of failed New York Ed Head John King as Sort-of-Secretary of Education, but the Jazzman had a very thorough explanation of just what in King's record suggests he's not the man for the job (and why his touted charter "success" is just baloney).

Who Tanked Campbell Brown's Forum?

A look at how Brown failed to set herself up as an arbiter of education stuff.

Chris Cerf Sees the Light

How do you get a reformster to stop saying, "Money doesn't make any difference and school districts shouldn't get any more." You put him in charge of a school district, where he can discover he doesn't have enough money to do his job.

The Social Justice Argument

Charter and choice fans continue to refine their argument about charters as a tool of social justice, as exemplified by an exchange with charter fan Dmitri Melhorn that quickly expanded to a conversation still puttering along this morning. Melhorn started in the reformster biz at McKinsey and Co, and moved on to co-found StudentsFirst, but his day job is venture capitalist. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to simply dismiss this argument (shared by many reformy folks) out of hand. Tne first part of their argument is solid; the second part is shot full of holes.

The First Part 

The linkage between real estate and schools has resulted in public schools that are crippled by the effects of racism and poverty. We can talk about patterns of forced settlement as in Chicago, where blacks coming north during the Great Migration were herded into certain neighborhoods. We can talk about white flight in the 50s and 60s, and we can talk about the negative and segregating effects of public housing. In Our Children, Robert Putnam notes that the sorting of America has continued until today, pushing the non-wealthy and the non-white into neighborhoods that are mired in poverty and its effects, while the rich escape to gated communities, where the poor literally cannot follow them.

Housing costs, available jobs, patterns of open and subtle racism-- there's a whole lifetime of research there, but the end results is a highly heterogeneous pattern of settling in America, and since we have tied school attendance and funding to geography, schools are doomed reflect the socio-economic reality of the neighborhoods to which they are tied.

The argument says that we have school choice, but it is choice that is directly linked to wealth-- if you are rich enough to buy whatever house you like in whatever neighborhood you like, then you can, by choosing a house, choose a school. Put another way, escaping a bad school is often synonymous with escaping a bad neighborhood.

The Second Part

Reformsters start here with the premise that non-wealthy non-white students must be rescued from the terrible schools that are inextricably tied to poor support, poor resources, poor staffing, poor neighborhoods, and the lousy local control that leads to all of these poor inputs.

They see local control as an obstacle because particularly in large urban districts, "local control" means "control by board of rich jerks who don't give a rat's ass about schools in poor neighborhoods." They see "fix the school and fund it properly" as not-an-option because the schools are too broken, and because the teacher union stands in the way-- the union just wants more money for the school so that they can pay more terrible teachers. They would like to see all the terrible teachers fired, because they believe terrible teachers are at the root of terrible schools, but That Damned Union won't let them do it.

Because so many of these guys come from the corporate and financial investment world, they tend not just to believe that the system is broken, but that it is built wrong in the first place. Teacher lockstep pay and its lack of ties to performance data, funding based on what you want to do instead of how well you've done it, the utter tying of management's hands by government regulation and union agreements, the lack of enlightened profit-and-loss motivation anywhere in the system-- these things don't bother the reformsters merely in their particulars, but because, to them, these are just terrible ways to run a business in the first place. For them, it is like watching someone try to build a car with square tires and a rubber-band engine-- there's just no way anyone could ever succeed trying to what those guys are doing!

So their main impulse remains to scrap the square wheel system and replace it with one that follows the rules they know and understand. And that gets us to charters and choice. Charters will free students from their zip codes, bust up the tyranny of geography so that families who can't afford to live in East Gotrox can still send their kids to an East Gotrox calibre school.

The newest nuance to the choice argument is to point out that vouchers and voucher-like programs provide non-wealthy families the same kind of choice that wealthy folks can exercise by choosing where to buy a house. They believe that a free market in education will exert a cleansing influence, that competition will create excellence.

Reformsters are not very good at articulating why charters should be a good idea because they neither know nor speak the language of educators, nor do they really feel a need to-- after all, those are the people who tried to build the square-wheel car. To bridge that gap, they've tried through every means from Teach for America to the Broad Academy of Fake School Administration to create educators who speak the language of business and investment.

But when educators and reformsters try to talk about schools, certain points of contention always emerge.

Public education supporters-- sometimes angrily-- point out that charter schools and choice systems seriously damage the public systems to which they are attached. Reformsters observe-- sometimes angrily-- ask if poor students are supposed to simply sit and wait in crumbling, failing schools while public ed advocates try to tinker their system back to health. If they can save even a few students, isn't that worthwhile?

And let's not forget to have the argument about educational transformation. Reformsters routinely charge that public school supporters use poverty as an excuse for not teaching poor kids well; public school supporters charge that reformsters believe that happy, positive thoughts will somehow overcome real educational challenges.

A Mystery

In some cases, reformsters end up charging that public ed folks are denying Part One of this argument. But I think most people who are serious about these issues all see Part One pretty clearly. The big disconnects come when we get to Part Two-- the What Do We Do About All This part. Reformsters are inclined to argue that since the problems are real problems, their solutions must be real solutions. They are wrong.

So let me lay out where I think they get things wrong.

Local Control

I have to point out up front that we supporters of public education can sometimes fetishize local control just as badly as reformsters fetishize the Free Market.

Local control can be disastrous. The story of how five Pinellas County, Florida elementary schools in black neighborhoods were turned into the worst in the state in just eight years is one more reminder that elected school boards can do horrible, stupid, racist things. Elections do not turn racist asshats into crusaders for social justice.

Of course, the free market does not guarantee action for social justice, either-- anybody is free to open Racist Asshat Academy, or a charter school where students learn to follow orders, stay in line, and never speak unless given permission.

Any system can be used for or against the interests of social justice by people who want to fight for or against those interests. The difference is that a public school system must answer to the public. They are not allowed to meet in secret, keep their financial dealings secret, or make major decisions in secret. When they make decisions that the taxpayers don't like, they are required to sit there and listen to people complain to them (yes, many boards are trying to get rid of this feature of meetings, but they have to fight the laws about public comment, while charter operators can just go ahead and ignore the public at will).

The Pinellas County school board is going to have to deal with the voters and answer to the taxpayers. Eva Moskowitz doesn't have to answer to anybody.

Do People Want Choice?

Do you want a good marriage, or do you want a bunch of possible partners to choose from? Do you want a good meal for lunch, or do you want the choice of a bunch of lunches?

People don't want choice. They want a good school. The distinction is important for many reasons, not the least of which is economic-- do we need to prepare and maintain five possible school seats for Chris, or just one good one? Because one is cheaper than five. 

Charter Quality

Are students actually escaping poor neighborhoods for high quality schools. The research says, mostly not. Or maybe sometimes. Mostly what the research says is that we could use some research done by somebody who wasn't, say, paid by the charter industry. There's very little research that looks at charter schools that are working with identical student populations as the local public schools.

The better question would be, how do we know? Virtually all of the studies of the question center on Big Standardized Test scores, and that's a terrible measure of school quality-- especially when we're focusing on social justice. Privileged kids don't get their privilege by scoring well on BS Tests, and nobody ever escaped poverty by getting really good at taking standardized tests. I don't notice any ivy league schools saying, "We're looking to reach out to some non-white non-wealthy students with good PARCC scores."

The focus on testing in US education has been toxic in the extreme, and the people who have the wealth and privilege to make educational choices for kids choose to move their kids to schools where nobody worries about the PARCC. Conversely, when folks are talking about how terrible a notoriously failing school is, "And their SBA scores are so low!!" does not come at the top of the list. But charters are perhaps even more vulnerable to the toxic testing plague because right now, when it comes to "proving" that you are a high-quality schools, the only game in town is BS Test scores. A charter that starts drilling test prep in November is not a high quality school, regardless of what the test scores indicate. We need to stop perpetuating the fiction that good PARCC or SBA scores are the doorway to a successful life.

So I'm calling the relative quality question a non-starter, because we still don't know how to measure school quality. Charter fans will cite demand as a measure of how great a school is, but waiting lists have been repeatedly debunked, and they provide no measure of what families are running from or toward.

Stability

One of the biggest problems with free market ideology in education is that the free market sorts businesses into winners and losers. That may be fine for coffee shops, but it's not okay for schools. Between 2000 and 2013, 2,500 charters closed. That represents a huge number of students whose education was uprooted and destabilized-- and it just keeps happening.

Students in East Gotrox don't just benefit from having a great school. They benefit from having a great school in their neighborhood that they attend with their friends and neighbors and which they know without question will be open every day of every school year.

Robert Putnam in Our Children talks about how important stabilizing influences are, how a stable setting helps them build the social capital that will help make them successful. Schools that will come and go and may or may not survive or which have good advertising to mask incompetent leadership-- these are exactly the wrong solution for non-wealthy students, who very much need something dependable and reliable.

The Zero-Sum Problem

"Well, isn't it worth it if we can rescue even a few students from a failing school?"

I'd agree-- if "rescuing" the handful of students didn't make things worse for the students left behind. But because policy makers want to have school choice without paying for it, we have a huge problem.

The biggest fallacy of school choice and charter systems is that we can have multiple school systems for the price of one. This is just insane. Let's say you have 100 students to educate. Which is cheaper? Educating them in ten different separately-administered and separately managed facilities, or educating all 100 in a single building?

The notion that the per-capita cost of a student is money that belongs to that student is an absurdist fiction, both in the notion of computing such a figure and in transforming it from taxpayer money into a student grant. But if 5% of the students leave a school, that school does not become 5% less costly to run. For that matter, the money that moves out with the charter students isn't enough to operate the charter, either-- hence the need for contributions from well-heeled donors and big-ticket fundraisers.

This problem is even more damaging in schools that are already underfunded and under-resourced. Losing money to charter-choice systems just makes the troubled school that much more financially distressed. So to "rescue" these ten kids, we are going to make things even worse for the ones left behind.

Let's say we have ten starving children, faced with a small, meager meal. So we take some food away from nine of them so that the tenth one can have a full plate. Does that feel like social justice? Not to me.

Free Market Motivations

There's a difference between asking "How do we solve this problem of social justice" and asking "How do we make money addressing this problem of social justice." 

So What's The Solution Today?

"So, what," choice fans will say. "Are we supposed to let all ten of them keep starving while we wait for someone to fix the food supply system?"

There's a selective urgency that comes with the charter argument-- things are dire and we must act right now, but charter schools deserve three or five years to prove themselves and we have to wait for the market to sort itself out. I agree there's some urgency here-- a child's childhood goes past quickly. But to me urgency means being careful, because we have limited slack to work with (this too, is one of the differences between poverty and wealth-- wealthy folks can make mistakes and recover, while the poor make one false move and pay for it forever).

So I don't want to let failing schools fail a minute longer than we have to-- but I don't want to see us bulldoze the system in haste and then realize we can't build anything decent to replace it after all. And while the massive issues of poverty are a definite obstacle to better education for the poor, I don't want to wait for those to be solved, either.

So What's The Solution Ever?

We already know most of what works. Charters have, ironically, "discovered" many things we already knew-- plenty of resources and support applied to the right assortment of students gets results. We know that letting buildings fall down around students is Not Good or Helpful. We know that filling a building with beginning teachers doesn't help. We know that getting good leaders into schools matters. We know that having strong connections to the community matters, and is, in fact, part of the point. I love this quote from Andre Perry:

Our goal is not to improve a school in spite of the community. Our goal is to improve a community using schools.

Of course, in order to do that, we would have to involve the community in the development and growth of schools. We would have to stop conceiving social justice and education as gifts bestowed by drive-by do-gooders. It can't happen as something we do to people; it has to be done with them. And that is a problem for folks on both sides of this debate, but especially so for schools-should-be-run-like-a-business charter CEO's.

In short, we don't have a problem of knowledge. We have a problem of money and political will. We have states currently under court orders to fund their schools properly-- and they aren't doing it. Attracting and retaining top teachers is also Not A Mystery-- but all attempts to do so are done on the cheap, and many locations have simply abandoned the attempt, believing that we can have a system in which any warm body will work in a classroom. Hell, a working charter-choice system is not impossible-- it would just require more regulation and more money.

I know none of it is instantaneous or sexy, but here's the thing about the charter-choice approach-- it isn't working, isn't set up to work, and will likely never work. It can't do the things that its supporters want it to do. Unless your idea of social justice is a handful of families saying, "Well, I got mine, Jack. Good luck to the rest of you," this is not how you get social justice.

The charter-choice system, as currently conceived and executed, promises a possible maybe rescue for some students while making the vast majority of non-white non-wealthy students pay for it, while simultaneously lulling policy makers into thinking that the problem is actually being solved, all in a system that allows charter operators to conduct business without being answerable to anyone. 

The problem (see First Part) is real. The solution being inflicted on public education is making things worse, not better. It is making some folks rich and providing excellent ROI for hedge funders, but neither of those outcomes exactly equals a leap forward in social justice. There's a whole argument to be had about charter booster motives; I figure that some are in it because they believe it will work better and some are in it because they believe it's the last great untapped well-spring of tax dollars. Ultimately, their motivation isn't as important as this: their solution will not actually solve anything.

No, Seriously. Solutions?

Warren Buffet actually suggested one of the best solutions that will never happen-- No Choice At All.

If the only choice we had was public schools, we'd have better public schools.

The point is valid. Far too much of reformsterism looks like an attempt to weasel out of having to pay for education for Those People. If the rich were trapped in schools with Those People, we would have so many resources focused on public school that it would make a scholar's head swim. If charter operators focused all their energy and resources on demanding that public schools be fully funded and completely supported, we'd be in a different situation. Some would most likely say that such solutions are not possible because entrenched bureaucracies and teacher unions and the Big Institutional Blob stand in their way, and as someone who has spent his adult life within just a small-town version of that BIB, I won't pretend that public education doesn't suffer from all sorts of bureaucratically generated nonsense inertia.

But what the reformsters are also complaining about is that when they walk into the room and say, "This is what you should do," the folks in education don't slap their heads and yell, "My God, you're right! We've been so foolish. Here, inexperienced amateur, please tell us what to do!"

They are so absolutely certain that they are right, and that people working in the education field should just listen to them, right now. And that certainty in their own righteous rightness has also stopped progress on the pursuit of social justice.

As rich and powerful people with an interest in education and social justice, they could have gathered together summits of stakeholders, talked to educational experts, brought together people who have worked on these problems their whole lives-- and then listened to all of those folks. They didn't. And now they've largely lost the ability to tell the difference between factors that are part of the actual problem, and factors that just piss off the wealthy and well-connected by thwarting their will.

Yes, the army is losing the battle for educational social justice on many fronts. The solution is not to try to raise an entirely new army, but to support and supply the army you already have in the field. That doesn't mean you just encourage them to keep doing what hasn't worked, but you have to talk to them to understand what's really happening and what they really need.

I'm a high school English teacher. I'm not wise enough to know the solution for an educational social justice solution in this country, and I'm not powerful enough to gather together all the people who could help work it all out. But I know enough to know that A) an increasing gap between rich and poor has exacerbated existing problems of social justice in our country, with those problems being reflected, expressed and sometimes amplified in our schools and that B) the charter choice system currently being foisted on many parts of the country doesn't fix any of those problems.

To charter choice advocates: Your problem is a real problem, but your solution is not a solution. Whether you're blinded by devotion to your ideology or your intent to make a buck or just your lack of understanding, your vision is impaired. You need to clean your glasses, take a step back, and look again.