The Charter Bond Time Bomb

Inspired by the stunning NEPC report on just how deeply and thoroughly charter schools are used as a mechanism for sucking public tax dollars into private pockets, I've been trying to read up on this stuff, in particular by looking through the work of one of the reports co-authors, Bruce Baker (Rutgers University). Baker operates the blog School Finance 101, and it's an excellent resource for those trying to make sense out of the arcane world of, well, school finance.

I'm dipping into Baker's work to lay out one simple progression that takes charters from vexing to terrifying in just a few steps of property acquisition, in the process setting a ticking time bomb. I'm going to try to lay this out in my own words, mainly as an exercise for myself (one of my personal and professional principles of learning is this: want to really understand something? try to write about it), but I recommend you follow the links and read the full originals. (Also, any mistakes in what follows are mine, not Baker's).

STEP ONE: Double Purchase and Zero Ownership

In this piece, Baker explains how the taxpayer buys the same property twice, and ends up with no control over it. Here's how I think it works.

I buy a house. Well, I take out a mortgage on the house. But now I'm on the hook financially for the house. I make my payments. I may even pay it off.

Then Chris comes along and proposes to buy the house from me. And Chris's proposal is that I take out a mortgage for Chris, but give Chris the deed to the property.

So now I have taken out two mortgages on the same piece of property. I have bought it twice. And it now belongs to Chris.

STEP TWO: Kick the Can and Light the (Very Long) Fuse

With schools, the device used for getting yourself in debt isn't a mortgage, but a bond.

A bond works like this: I loan you some money, and you promise to pay me regular interest on it. You also promise to eventually pay me back the principal when the bond "matures." That's why the highest-rated, most secure bonds are loans to things like municipalities-- organizations that nobody expects to vanish and skip out before the bond matures and the principal is due. That's important, because a bond is different from stock: when you buy stock, you own a piece of the company, but bondholders own nothing except the bonds.

Here is the scariest chart from Baker's recent piece on Subprime Chartering.

That's right. Billions of dollars in debt is out there, and it doesn't come due for decades-- well after the time that charter businesses have to decide whether or not to stay in the business. If I were an unscrupulous charter operator, I could float my charter on an ocean of bond money, use a variety of devices (see that NEPC report) to shovel that money into my pocket and then, when my renewal time came around, just not even apply to have my charter renewed. The possibilities are mind-boggling and remind me of nothing so much as Bialystock and Bloom in The Producers.

And even if I'm a moderately- or highly-scrupled charter operator, maybe I will do what many charter operators do-- decide that the business just isn't producing the kind of returns I need to make it worth my while, so I'm going to fold up my tent and go.  

Remember that much of this debt was not run up by the charters, but "on behalf of charters." So who's left holding the bag, and how many of those bag holders eventually discover that they are holding a bag of air, that the investment has vanished.

Set the whole host of educational issues aside-- is the continued proliferation of charters creating another financial time bomb? Are investors and bankers and venture capitalists and hedge funders creating a future financial catastrophe?

Probably not. I mean, those guys are knowledgable financiers who know what they're doing. Surely the investors and bankers and capitalists would never do something so foolish, reckless and short-sighted that it would pose a serious risk to the nation's economic health.

Can Principals Turn Around Rural Schools

Rural schools are often left out of discussions of ed reform and public schools and all the rest. I'm acutely aware of this because I teach in a rural district, centered in a small town of around 7,000 people, but spread across many townships. We don't think of ourselves this way, but if you look at the map, we are on the northern end of Appalachia, and many of the issues that are stirring the educational pot across the country play out far differently here.

So when the School Turnaround Learning Community ran a piece about rural school leadership, I was interested.

The School Turnaround Learning Community is run by the Center on School Turnaround, which in turn is "at" WestEd, an educational "research, development and service organization" that won the job of running school turnaround stuff for the US Department of Education. Its leadership ranks are loaded with professional bureaucrats and policy researchy types, so it's that kind of official government reformy thing. And they are probably scrambling a bit because managing School Improvement Grants seems to have been part of their bread and butter, and those grants have gone-- well, if not away, at least somewhere under ESSA.

This brief piece was written by Caitlin Scott, who works at Education Northwest doing researchy evaluation things on government contracts as well.

Scott has spent most of her career looking at SIG affects; you may recall that SIG were supposed to turn around schools in the bottom 5%. You might not recall that because after years of various attempts to turn around schools in the bottom 5%, not a single government bureaucrat nor reformy wonkster has shown how such a feat can be accomplished.  But Scott has some ideas about why SIGs failed in rural settings (as opposed to all the other places they failed).

First-- and full marks for Scott on this-- the SIG program declared that failing schools must be turned around using one of the four permitted federal models, and those models all centered on either firing the principal or allowing students to flee to alternative schools.

Well, in rural areas, there aren't that many other schools to flee to (nor, might I add, are they necessarily loaded with the capacity to take on extra students in the first place). So rural turnaround schools tended to go with the principal replacement option.

Scott has published a study showing the difficulties in replacing principals (especially rural ones). The short form is that replacing principals rarely moves the needle. While Scott's interviews with various leaders suggest that rural schools lack the resources to attract and retain "highly effective principals who have the ability to turn around schools," my personal experience and research suggests that Scott is only half right.

Attracting and retaining principals in rural areas is hard. You have to be someone who finds this country and small town lifestyle appealing, and you have to be someone who doesn't want to make much money. Fun fact: the assistant principal in my building makes less than many of the teachers-- and that's before you factor in her longer work year. So attracting and retaining-- definitely an issue.

At the same time, Scott is on a unicorn hunt. She looks at the research and says, "Wow, almost nobody can find a principal with the magical power to turn a school around (i.e. raise student scores)." I look at her research and say, "Look! Proof that a principal cannot singlehandedly turn schools around (i.e. raise test scores)."

I would also argue that the very practice of moving principals in and out, whether by design or by inability to attract and retain, makes it less likely that a principal can change anything. If your principal has been there two years and your staff have mostly been there ten-to-thirty years, the principal is not the one setting the tone and culture of the school, and teachers are unlikely to budge much for the tourist who's just passing through, unless he institutes really earth-shattering changes.

Plus-- rural principals largely run their schools singlehandedly, without the big fancy staff of an urban district. That means the principal takes care of everything, including all the pop-up daily jobs (the kid who punched another kid at lunch, the water pipe that broke in the back hall, the angry parent who just came to complain to Someone In Charge). Rural principals often start with every intention of being hands on and in regular contact with their teaching staff, but it's not always humanly possible. "Instructional leader" often gets crowded off the top of the job description list.

Scott gets this:

Personally, I believe that school leadership does not reside in the principal alone. Instead, I believe leadership is, and should be, distributed among all the adults working at a school. In rural schools, distributed leadership may be particularly important, because these schools often have smaller numbers of staff members than urban and suburban schools. This requires many adults to take on multiple roles and shoulder greater responsibility for school success.

Scott favors an approach that turns all adults in the building into Keepers of the Turnaround Flame, and offers as an example Northwest Rural Innovation and Student Engagement Network (NW RISE). I do not share the enthusiasm for a group that "supports" rural educators in "implementing Common Core State Standards, with the goal of improving student engagement and achievement in rural areas." There's nothing to be gained from another Common Core booster shot, unless we're talking about the brand of CCSS that is essentially test prep for the Core Big Standardized Tests-- and I see no educational, student-centered reason to care about BS Test results.

However, Scott does get one other thing right-- no turnaround model that requires rural schools to follow a one-size-fits-all cookie-cutter procedure developed for urban schools is ever going to do any rural school any good (particularly since there's no evidence it does urban schools any good, either).

We will see if educrat think leaders like Scott can convince states to use some of their newly-ESSA-fied slack to develop models for helping rural schools that are actually helpful.

NY: Cuomo's Common Core Nothing Sundae

They said it couldn't be done, but today NY Governor Andrew Cuomo's Common Core Task Force delivered a big old report in less time than it takes my students to complete their major research project. And it's a big ole Nothing Sundae with a few scoops of Fluff on the side, with a cherry on top.

The announcement came with the same stock photo student we've seen before, and I want with all my heart to believe that his expression of, "Heh. Yeah, this is some ridiculous baloney" is the blow struck by whatever intern had to cobble this together. But the nothing in this announcement announces its nothingness right off the bat. Here's the head of the Task Force, Richard Parsons, Senior Advisor, Providence Equity Partners, LLC and former Chairman of Citigroup (because when you want to look at education policy, you call a banker):

While adoption of the Common Core was extremely well intentioned, its implementation has caused confusion and upheaval in classrooms across New York State. We believe that these recommendations, once acted on, provide a means to put things back on the right track and ensure high quality standards that meet the needs of New York’s kids. The recommendations will provide the foundation to restore public trust in the education system in New York and build on the long history of excellence that preceded this period.

So there you have it-- the purpose of the report is "to restore public trust." Which is a little different than "meet educational needs."

But that's the PR. How does the report look? Let's just see.

Getting Started 

The report kicks off with a the short summary (for those who want to skip straight to the highlights) and a recap of what the Common Core is (spoiler alert: it's exactly what all the PR from Common Core says it is, apparently, so you already know this part). From there we move to the bulk of the report, which is the findings and twenty-one recommendations. Let's see what the task force came up with, shall we? The recommendations are grouped by specific issues.

Issue One: Establish New High Quality New York Standards

Well, if you had any doubts about how deeply the task force was going to dig and how carefully they were going to probe to reach heretofore undiscovered frontiers of understanding, just look at this sentence:

The Task Force has learned that New York educators had limited input into the Common Core before their formal adoption in New York.

Stay tuned for the moment in which the Task Force learns that the sun does not revolve around the sun.

The Task Force accepted input for a whole month and heard from 10,500 respondents.But they single out the Council for a Strong America, the New York State Business Council, and an unnamed NY higher education administrator. Many people are unhappy, yet somehow there is widespread agreement that the goals of CCSS are all swell.

Recommendation One: Adopt some high quality NY standards with all stakeholders in a transparent process.

Mind you, they need to be high standards that promote college and career readiness. And they shouldn't just be a name change, and they should be New Yorky.

But-- the changes should include all the "key instructional shifts set forth in the Common Core Standards." So they should be totally different from the Core, but they should do exactly what the Core does. Got that? NY will rewrite the standards without questioning any of the foundation or goals of the standards. So, more than a name change-- there will also be wording changes. Probably fine changes, too. Just no changes to the actual goals and substance of the standards, Which will make it hard to do

Recommendation Two: Fix the early grade standards.

Well, not fix exactly. The Task Force doesn't want to lower the standards, but recognizing that children develop at different rates, they recommend "banding" to give teachers a wider time range in which to drag tony students across the finish line. They're talking Pre-K through 2. Up through grade 2, everyone can move more or less at their own pace, but by grade 3 the little slackers should be on point and meeting those one-size-fits-all standards. So what we'd like to take those special moments where live humans meet incorrectly written standards and just sort of move them to a later point in the students' lives.

Recommendation Three: Some kind of flexibility for special populations.

Basically, let's make sure that students with disabilities and ELL have more than just the option of vocational certificates instead of a regents diploma. But every student should be prepared to succeed after high school. Convene some experts and figure something out.

Recommendation Four: Ensure standards do not lead to the narrowing of the curriculum or diminish the love of reading and joy of learning.

The Task Force hasn't the foggiest notion how to actually do this, but they recognize it's an issue to many people. So they recommend that the new standards just kind of do this, somehow. It does not occur to them, for instance, that focusing all measurement of schools, teachers, and students on the results of a couple of standardized tests might have the effect of narrowing the curriculum. Nope. Like Arne Duncan, they have no idea how this happened, but they recommend that it stop happening, right now.

Recommendation Five: Establish transparent review and revision process for standards.

It's a mark of just how far the Common Core has driven us down the Crazyland Turnpike that this idea-- that there should be a way to review the standards and change what needs to be changed-- qualifies as a new recommendation. No, David Coleman saw his Creation, and he saw that it was Good, and he decreed that nobody could or should ever change it. The Task Force is not wrong, but the state of New York and a whole lot of other folks are dopes for having waiting till the end of 2015 to come up with this.

Issue Two: Develop Better Curriculum Guidance and Resources

Bzzzzt!! Wrong "issue." The issue is not, "how can the state do a better job of micromanaging classroom teachers." The issue is, "how can the state back itself up and let teachers do their jobs." But the closest the Task Force can come is acknowledging that "teachers develop and select elements of curriculum within the context of student learning goals and objectives established by state and local authorities." So while in their straightjackets, teachers are free to wiggle their noses and roll their eyes.

The Task Force also notes that EngageNY is being used as mandated curriculum in many districts, even though NYSED swears up and down it told people not to do that. Also, many people think the EngageNY modules and website suck.

Also, the Task Force is one more group that is fuzzy on the difference between standards and curriculum. For all these reasons, the following recommendations pretty much miss the point.

Recommendation Six: Educators and local districts should be free to develop and tailor curriculum to the standards.

And you can get a Model T in any color, as long as it's black. The TF actually notes that high-performing schools give teachers autonomy. And yet, somehow the recommendation "Give teachers autonomy" does not make it onto the list.

Recommendation Seven: Release New! Improved! curriculum resources.

Make a new, more better EngageNY. Oh, and occasionally collect feedback on it, just in case it's not more betterer enough.

Recommendation Eight: Set up a digital platform for teacher sharing.

Another moment of candor breaks out. "Teachers and students are not one-size-fit-all. So why are our modules?" Yeah! So let's see if teachers want to fill in the huge gaps in our materials offerings, for free. Let's see if teachers and schools want to give away materials that might help other teachers and schools beat them in the stack rankings. Using the interwebs!

Recommendation Nine: More better Professional Development 

Responding to the complaint that the Core were implemented without enough explanation of How To Do It, the TF suggests that lots of super-duper PD be deployed so that people will totally know how to do it the next time. Because implementation is always the explanation. Hey, question. Do you think anybody out there is researching better ways to spread cholera? Or could it be that some things can't be implemented well because they are inherently flawed and un-implementable?

Issue Three: Significantly Reducing Testing Time and Blah Blah Blahdy Blah

Tests are inevitable and universal, we say. People apparently have complained about Common Core testing. A lot. Who knew? (Oh, wait-- everybody who's read that at least 250,000 students in NY refused to take the test). The Task Force is aware that Pearson has been replaced and that the education chief has launched an initiative to get test compliance back up, complete with a hilariously handy propaganda kit. The Task Force is aware that nobody thinks they're getting useful information from the tests. Of course, the Task Force also accepts NYSED's estimate of how much time any of this testification sucks up, and they think that the President's Test Action Plan actually said something useful and meaningful.

Of course, the way to significantly reduce testing time, a goal everyone allegedly supports, would have been for the ESSA to NOT require the same amount of standardized testing as previously mandated. But under ESSA, states that really wanted to do something about the testing juggernaut could push the boundaries of what the tests are and what they are used for (because test prep would be less prevalent if everybody's future weren't riding on test results). But (spoiler alert) the Task Force is not going to recommend any of these obvious means of achieving their alleged goal. They are like a spouse who, caught cheating with somebody they picked up in a bar, promises not to go to that particular bar on Wednesdays.

Recommendation Ten: Involve all sorts of stakeholders in reviewing the state standardized tests.

Interesting. Does this mean that teachers and other stakeholders will actually be allowed to see test questions? I don't think this recommendation will make it past the test manufacturing lobby.

Recommendation Eleven: Gather student feedback on tests.

Good idea. I suggest checking twitter starting roughly five minutes after the test is handed out.

Recommendation Twelve: Provide ongoing transparency,

They call for releasing test items (good luck with that), the standards weighting and more detail in student scores. I'd suggest adding to the list how the tests are scored, how the test items were validated (if at all), and how the cut scores are set.

Recommendation Thirteen: Reduce number of days and duration for standardized tests

Sure. Good idea. Next, reduce punitive uses of test results so that nobody feels compelled to spend half the year doing test prep.

Recommendation Fourteen: Provide teacher flexibility to use authentic formative assessment.

What?! Trust teachers to do their jobs??!! That's crazy talk, Task Force. Unless.... Uh-oh.

The State and local school districts must support the use of standards-based formative assessments and authentic assessments woven into the routine curriculum along with periodic diagnostic and benchmark testing. The goal of these assessments is to monitor student learning to provide ongoing feedback throughout the school year that teachers can use to improve instruction and students can use to improve learning.

Okay. That could mean "let teachers teach" or it could mean "bring on the highly profitable Competency Based Education."

Recommendation Fifteen: Check out an untimed approach

Another surprising finding. When you give students a high stakes test with a time limit, they get anxious.

Recommendation Sixteen: Provide flexibility for students with disabilities.

Recommendation Seventeen: Protect and enforce accommodations for students with disabilities.

Recommendation Eighteen: Explore alternative options to assess the most severely disabled students.

These are aimed directly at the feds, who, as part of their ongoing program to make all disabilities to vanish by just expecting real hard, denied New York's request to make testing accommodations for students with disabilities. It's hard to predict how hard Acting Pretend Secretary of Education John King (whose previous job, you may recall, was making a hash of education policy in New York) may push back on this, and the real battle will come down to the future Secretary of Ed.

Recommendation Nineteen: Prevent students from being stuck in academic intervention based on one test.

Once again, we are mystified by how anybody ever put sooooo much emphasis on one standardized test. How did such a thing happen? It;s a puzzlement. But a student definitely shouldn't be automatically put in a remediation just because she did poorly on the test used to rate schools and teachers. A more holistic approach is called for, with parents and teachers working together to determine what is in the best interests of the child. And nobody should ever tell a student that the student is too unsatisfactory a student based on just one test (unless it's the state making that determination based on one test, in which case it's totes okee dokee).

Recommendation Twenty: Eliminate double testing for ELL students

New York has an exam for English Language Learners to take. The feds only give a one-year exemption for ELL students, leaving ELL students often taking double tests-- during the years that they have not yet shown English proficiency. The Task Force thinks this is dumb. They are correct.

Issue Four and Recommendation Twenty-One

"The implementation of the Common Core in New York was rushed and flawed," says the task force, which does not go one to say, "because the Common Core were the rushed, flawed work of amateurs, and you can't do a good job of implementing a bad policy." So they have this half right.

But they recommend that "until the new system is fully phased in" (which will be determined how, exactly?) test results should only be advisory and not used for any teacher or student evaluating. They are assuming it will take till 2019-2020 to get everything up to speed, which is pretty awesome, because that gives many governors, many legislatures, and many various policymakers and lobbyists ample time to do God knows what in the meantime. Might as well pick any old year, since nobody knows how long such an undertaking should, would or has taken ever.

Bottom line?

So the Task Force has basically hit three areas. They have lots of ideas to clean up the administration of testing, but nothing that addresses the fundamental problems with the testing. They have several ideas for trying to clean up the curriculum and pedagogy tied to the standards, but nothing that addresses the incorrect assumptions and ideas underlying the state's approach. And they have an idea about rewriting new standards, but nothing that would address any of the foundational problems and incorrect assumptions underlying the Common Core.

So, change without change. We'll keep the same twisted frame and try to drape it with pretty new cloth. It's a big bowl of nothing, and it's not even a new bowl.

Eight Years Under the Ax

While the rest of the world was celebrating the passage of an ESEA (only eight years or so late! yay!) or looking at NEPC's brutal-but-necessary report on the charter gravy train, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities was releasing the results of its three-month study of state funding for education over the last almost-decade. 

The first part of the story is familiar. Back around 2008, the Great Recession hit. Although, let's not say "hit" and give it a fancy name as if it were some random act of nature and not a predictable and avoidable economic collapse caused by reckless greedheads on Wall Street. Instead of a Great Recession that somehow happened, maybe we could instead refer to that time that Wall Street screwed over every American in a series of criminal and stupid acts so huge that they have yet to be paid for their misbehavior in the slightest. Let's call it that.

But I digress. Wall Street tanked the economy, resulting in a big bunch of cutbacks as every state tried to deal with a sudden lack of money. That part of the story we already knew.

The second part of the story, which you may have suspected, is that once states got in the habit of slashing education budgets, the just kept on doing it even after the economy began to recover. CBPP does not bury the lede on this one:

Most states provide less support per student for elementary and secondary schools — in some cases, much less — than before the Great Recession.

The report breaks it down. 31 states provide less funding in 2014 than they did in 2008. In at least 15 states, the difference is 10% or greater.

In at least 18 states, local funding fell as well. In at least 27 states, local spending rose, but not enough to offset state level cuts.

The champs are Arizona and Alabama, where state education funding dropped by more than 20%. North Dakota increased education spending by a whopping 90%. And while the report is useful, more digging could be done-- Pennsylvania has raised school funding since 2008 as reported, but that's because 2008 represents a huge drop from 2007.

"Well, " you may say. "Could this precipitous and widespread droppage be influenced by enrollment. Maybe Arizona and Alabama cut spending because those states no longer have all that many young 'uns."

The report is way ahead of you, breaking numbers down by Per Student dollars as well and-- whoops! Sorry, Arizona and Alabama. You are still numbers 2 and 3 on the education budget slashing list. Oklahom was in the top ten on general cutting, but leaps to number one when we price it all out by students. And some states (lookin' at you, Kansas) have made their funding formulas so obtuse that a completely clear comparison across the years is difficult.

Why the drop in funding? The report suggests five reasons.

1) States have been slow to recover
2) States used budget cuts to fix their recession problems
3) The feds have cut aid to states
4) Costs are rising
5) Some states have slashed taxes big time.

In fact, number 5 is pretty powerful. Of the five top spending cut states, four have also cut income taxes (Oklahoma, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Idaho). So schools may be starving for support, but at least rich people got to keep more of their money (because after forty years or so of hopelessly waiting, we're still sure that trickle-down economics will start working any day now).

The report concludes by stating the blindingly obvious (it must be blindingly obvious, because so many policy makers in states fail to see it)-- when you slash education spending, bad things happen and a bunch of good things don't happen.

The report is worth a look, and you'll want to see how your own state stacks up. Check it out, and on this Happy ESSA Day, contemplate how states have been slowly flushing their schools down the financial toilet while Congress has been trying to pass an education bill.

NEPC: How Charter$ Ca$h In

Today the National Education Policy Center released a new report, "The Business of Charter Schooling: Understanding the Policies That Charter Operators Use for Financial Benefit."

In other words, what policies are helping charter operators cash in, and how?

The report, by Bruce Baker (Rutgers University) and Gary Miron (Western Michigan University) is a valuable and useful read, filled with actual scholarly research (unlike, say, a typical blog post). The findings are not surprising, but they are stark and clear. This is a resource that will be invaluable in a thousand little charter skirmishes across the country. I'm going to just hit some highlights here, but I strongly recommend you read the whole thing.

The paper opens with a good pocket history of charters and the charter movement.This leads to an examination of the structural and governance differences of charters, and that leads to a discussion of how charters finance themselves. Baker and Miron that charters can only "find" money one of two ways-- either by revenue enhancement strategies, or by cutting costs.

The paper is rich with detail, data, and illustrative examples. The four basic concerns they express are:

1) Much of the money intended for educating children never makes it to the classroom. Instead, somebody is making money.

Charters can only make more money by increasing revenue or cutting costs. Revenue enhancement techniques include private donations and in-kind "donations" from parents. Revenue can also be enhanced by paying special attention to enrollment and watching things like enrolling students who are labeled special needs, but whose needs are not that large (aka costly to take care of). Chester Upland in PA is a great example of a school that actually earned negative state support because charters were draining them with large payments for low-cost students with special needs. Baker and Miron also note that one reason not to take new students in January is that students added mid-year don't count toward the money the charter gets from the state.

Charters can cut costs by hiring low-cost inexperienced teachers and not keeping them long.

But all that money the charter "finds" doesn't end up in classrooms. Instead, charters pump the money into big administrative costs, including hiring both personnel and services. Charters also invest heavily in capital assets. And all of this expense is hugely inefficient as it duplicates work. IOW, when ten charter students leave a hundred-student public school, we end up with two principals and two buildings where one was previously enough.

2) Public assets are being transferred to private hands at public expense.

The public starts out owning a school building and facilities inside. Before anybody knows it (literally) the public's building has become property of a charter, with public tax dollars being spent to facilitate the transfer. Predatory leasing is rampant in the charter industry. The authors also refer to the infamous White Hat case in Ohio, where the school had to buy back its own equipment and facilities from the charter management company it had just fired.

The world of charter real estate is bizarre, counter-intuitive, and a real explanation of why so many investors are interested in the charter biz. This paper does an exemplary job of explaining how it all works.

3) Charters are building their own little kingdoms, self-serving and self-perpetuating and "derived from lucrative management fees and rent extraction."

4) Charters operate under such a shroud of secrecy and tangle of management levels which make it unlikely that make it unlikely that "any related legal violations, ethical concerns, or merely bad policies and practices are not realized until clever investigative reporting, whistleblowers or litigation brings them to light."

A great deal of money and property are moved around, changing hands between people who may or may not be connected in inappropriate, barely legal, or just plain illegal ways, and yet the charter industry is so opaque and charter regulations in some states (looking at you, Ohio) are so weak and ineffectual, that the public never gets to know what is happening to its tax dollars. Charter fans love to say that the money belongs to the students, and that is likely in part because students, unlike taxpayers, are unlikely to say, "What the hell did you do with my money?"

There are numerous examples of charter arrangements where the right hand leases property from the left hand, and the paper offers several. The lack of transparency is a problem.

Important Theme

There's a great deal of detail and support in this study, and it deserves to be revisited many times. But there is one theme that runs through it that is perhaps not entirely obvious, but is extremely important.

These abuses of the financial support system for school have a potentially disastrous outcome, because on the one hand, the draining of public tax dollars from the public education system is having the effect of weakening, and in some cases destroying, the institution of public schooling. At the same time, that money is being used to create a system that is chaotic, unstable, and unsustainable.

What happens if it all collapses?

What, for instance, would happen if every major charter operator decided to pull out of New Orleans, concluding that it just wasn't a viable business option any more? The public school system has already been dismantled-- what would happen next? After all-- the charter operators are just business people who don't have to run a school in New Orleans if they don't feel like it. They can't be compelled to stay. So what would happen next? With all the system needed to run a school district already erased, what would New Orleans do with its children?

That's the supreme danger of charter systems-- the destruction, disruption, and destabilization of an old system to be replaced with a system that is unsustainable and which has no commitment to serve all or any students.

This phrase appears several times in the report-- "risking the future provision of public education." There's lots to absorb in the study, and a good list of recommendations as well. But it is that phrase-- risking the future provision of public education" that will stay with me, because the current charter system is doing no less than that-- risking the future provision of public education.

ESSA: All New Baloney!

ESSA has just cleared Congress, and the Department of Education is already giving us a look at the freshly sliced baloney that they will be serving at the Ed Reform Buffet. From Twitter, just now:

Let's count all the ways this is wrong, because it helps us understand just how USED's vision is messed up.

Holds all students to high academic standards?

The federal government cannot hold all students to a high academic standard. The mind boggles at even attempting to imagine how that would work. John King, Acting Pretend Secretary of ED, will stop by my classroom and go over my students' work with them? He'll engage in spirited motivational speeches to get my students to try extra hard.

The federal government is a dozen layers of management removed from interacting with students. They cannot "hold them" to anything. The most they can do is to try to force those of us who actually deal with students to prove, somehow, that we're holding the students to high standards, and then either carrot or stick us for what they think they know.

But the feds don't have any idea how to do that, just as they don't have any idea what "high standards" would really look like, and just like they no evidence that a high standardy system improves student learning or national security or the price of tea in China.

Prepares all students for success in college and career?

Again, federal law will not do this. But then, USED and Congress and the rest have no idea what "college and career ready" either looks like or means. On this point, we are right where we've been for fifteen years.

Provides more kids access to high quality pre-school?

I would be more excited about this if I thought USED had a clue what a high-quality pre-school looks like, but there is no indication that they do, and every indication that they think that four year olds doing worksheets is higher quality than four year old playing. Which is backwards.

Guarantees steps are taken to help students, and their schools, improve?

Again-- what does anyone at USED know about how to help a student learn? And the feds have been "helping schools improve" for fifteen years, with absolutely nothing to show for it. School Improvement Grants were a bust, takeover and turnaround districts have failed to get results, and charters have taught us what we already knew-- that if you have a select group of students in a well-supported fully-resourced school, they might maybe do a little better than the regular pubic school. The jury is still out on how much damage you do to the social capital and stability of neighborhoods when you take their neighborhood school away.

Guarantee steps? You can't even say what the steps would be.

Reduces the burden of testinga ,mwxkjwvin,s

Sorry. My fingers literally refused to type this baloney. ESSA could have reduced the burden of testing and it very carefully and deliberately refused to do so. The burden of testing has not been reduced, and I defy any USED employee to point to a place where the law makes any meaningful attempt to do so. It's the same old Big Standardized Tests-- plus the opportunity for daily "assessments in a can" to suck even more education out of school and pubic education dollars out of the public education system.

Promotes local innovation and invests in what works?

This is a new USED talking point, so I've been trying to unravel it. It appears to mean "We will find new excuses to funnel public tax dollars to private entities like charters and test manufacturers and alternate certification groups like TFA, because we can declare anything a Local Success that we want to. Watch us make it rain, baby."

So this is the new baloney, much like the old baloney. They have missed the one useful feature of ESSA-- a reduced opportunity for USED to inflict its delusions directly on state departments of education. We can only hope that little bit of air between the feds and the states comes into play in the years ahead, because this little bullet list shows the USED has a Grand Canyon's worth of air between itself and pubic education reality.

TeachStrong Gathers More Anti-Teacher Moss

Just a few weeks ago, TeachStrong burst upon the scene, declaring itself ready to lift up the teaching profession with its nine steps of teacher swellness.

TS represented an odd assortment of groups, apparently led by the Center for American Progress and including such strange bedfellows as NEA and TFA, AFT and EducationPost. What could these groups answer together? How should we train teachers? Do we love public schools? In fact the whole thing had a random, cobbled-together look right up to the point that any observer asked, "Which of you groups would like to back Hillary Clinton for President" at which point a new spirit of unanimity entered the room.

Well, it's only getting weirder. CAP announced that ten more groups have signed on, including DFER and Education Reform Now (two arms of the same nominally-Dem reformy octopus), the Albert Shanker Institute,  and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.

DFER is the most surprising entry, as DFER and their head honcho Whitney Tilson have not been subtle in their belief that teachers generally suck more than ever before and that evil, stinky teachers unions are a huge obstacle to making schools great. (You can find both ideas in this slide show and peppered throughout Tilson's blog).

Remember that scene in Captain America: The Winter Soldier where Cap is in an elevator, and as it stops at each floor, it fills up with more and more people who are there to kick his ass? I wonder if the wise union leaders who signed us up for TeachStrong are starting to feel like that yet.

I do not know what TeachStrong's actual agenda is, other than pushing a blandly vague education-flavored agenda that it hopes to inject into the election (by way of any particular candidate, do you think?) But whatever it's about, it becomes increasingly obvious that NEA and AFT have no reason and no excuse to be involved. If they can team up with CAP and DFER while prematurely endorsing Clinton, it would seem that there is absolutely nobody that the unions would call out for destructive anti-public ed, anti-teacher, anti-teacher union policies-- as long as those people call themselves Democrats.