It was an odd juxtaposition. There on my twitter feed, side by side, a link to an article arguing against homework, and a link to an argument favoring the flipped classroom.
The arguments against homework are many-- as many as there are different types of homework. Students don't really benefit from it. Students don't really do it. And those are just educator arguments-- my students will also argue that after they leave the school building, that time is their time, for work, for family, for whatever pursuits they choose to pursue. That's the point of view that leads commenters to say that homework is bad for the whole child.
And yet what is a flipped classroom except a classroom that runs on huge amounts of homework.
I have no strong feelings about the flipped classroom-- I've been doing it my whole career, only instead of saying "Go home and watch this video," I've been saying "Go home and read this book." I don't do a lot of traditional homework beyond some occasionally "Go forth and practice this skill on your own." But my honors students in particular are expected to do the readings and write the papers primarily on their own time.
I read teachers who have success flipping, and I have encountered the following conversation among students many times as well:
Chris: Did you watch that video last night?
Pat: Nah. He's just going to have to explain it all in class anyway.
I have found technology useful for extending the classroom. Back when my school district still used Moodle, I could run entire units as on-line segments, which made a nice way to compensate for the class time that I was losing. This year I have a class of students who are required to blog, sometimes on prompts related to classwork, sometimes to other prompts, and always on other topics of their own choosing. And I've found on-line elements can be a good way to do units that involve "Go figure out what this is and then explain it to me in your own words with either created or found examples" (e.g. logical fallacies). Those then become part of the tool box that I expect them to be able to use in class work.
So am I good teacher because I'm using technology to extend the learning experience beyond the temporal and physical boundaries of my classroom, or am I terrible teacher because I still give homework?
Fortunately for my professional peace of mind, I follow this rule: I neither accept or reject tools and techniques as a matter of policy, but use my best professional judgment to use activities and techniques that advance student learning and growth, and to avoid activities and techniques that do not. This, it should be noted, has to be decided on a case by case, class by class basis.
It's a perfect example of exactly why the solution to educational issues is not for the state or federal government decide for me how I should do my job and then mandate either the use or avoidance of particular pedagogy. I do not need a government regulation telling me I must always or never assign homework. At most, I may be well-served by a knowledgeable administrator who sits me down to say, "Here's where it looks like you're not hitting the mark right now."
But in the meantime, while I will continue to keep myself informed about the issues and viewpoints involved, I have no interest in the Great Homework Debate or the Great Flipping Push, and even less interest in having policymakers decide either discussion. I'd like to just do my job, thanks, and that includes using my informed professional judgment to make the best instructional decisions for my students. Just let me teach.
Wednesday, December 16, 2015
Tuesday, December 15, 2015
PA: Budget Fluffernuttery Threatens Schools
We have a budget problem in Pennsylvania. You could call it a budget "crisis," but that makes it sound like it just sort of happened, like a hurricane or male pattern baldness. You could call it a budget "impasse," but that suggests two grown up sides that can't find a compromise. Perhaps budget "screwup" or budget "failure so stupid it is raising the collective blood pressure of the entire state."
If it seems like we've been budget fiasco for a long time, that's because we have. Today is Day 168 of the ongoing budget not-done-on-time event.
There was a time when I would have agreed with a bi-partisan assessment. In the early stages, the GOP controlled PA House and Senate wanted to act as if the previous GOP governor had not been decisively kicked to the curb. Newly-elected Governor Tom Wolf, whose previous work experience is running a successful family business, did not initially seem to grasp that he is not a CEO who can order the legislature around as if they are his minions.
But many of the parties got on a learning curve and seemed to make progress.
At first it seemed like a manageable catastrophe. After all, we're used to this-- we've had five late budgets in ten years.
True, there was fallout. You may remember that the Chester Upland school district, underfunded by the state and sucked dry by charters, had to ask its teachers to work for free when the state missed its first subsidy payment. Ha. Those were the days, when the budget baloney was only fifty days old.
Meanwhile, many other districts turned to loans, lines of credit, or simply ate up whatever savings they had in the banks.
As the clock ticked, Wolf and the Senate GOP worked out a deal. Each gave up some features that they had wanted in the budget, but that's what happens when grown-ups negotiate. But as that budget gathered steam, it became evident there was still a major obstacle-- the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. Noted for their lack of leadership, the House GOP could not get its act together. Or, I should say, cannot get its act together, because as of today, their act is still not together.
By this time, the state should have paid out almost all of its school support money. At this point, it has paid out $0.00. The school districts of Pennsylvania are collectively billions of dollars short.
They can get parts of their act together, including the part that allows them to double take-over some more Philly schools. Philadelphia schools were taken over by the state decades ago, but the state has incredibly failed to magically transform them, so the state would now like to take them over from the state (you can read more about that foolishness here).
Now some schools, including a few districts just up the road from me, have decided they may just stay closed after Christmas break rather than borrow more money and incur more fees and interest.
Only--ha!-- the joke is on them because the Associated Press now reports that Pennsylvania's budget snafu is so spectacular that school districts may not be able to borrow money even if they want to!
"While we consider school aid to be a priority state expenditure, the budget stalemate has led us to conclude that Pennsylvania's state aid payments are no longer a reliable and stable source of funds," Standard and Poor's wrote.
The final icing on the cake? Believe it or not, it is now time for school districts to begin working on their budgets for 2016-2017. Yes, the state's convoluted system requires school districts to declare soon if they want to raise taxes above the index, although that presumes funding based on property taxes, which is one of the bones of contention in the budget and of course schools right now as I type this have no idea how much money they're eventually getting from the state for THIS year, let alone where they will stand going into NEXT year.
Will the House budge? At last count the House GOP was about half a billion dollars and a few ideological points away from the Senate GOP, and while many Pennsylvanians are ready to move past wringing hands to wringing necks, there are also folks cheering the House on for "standing firm." Note that Pennsylvania is a spectacularly gerrymandered state, to the point that while Democrats win more votes, Republicans win more seats. But gerrymandering invariably means that politicians must play to their base, and many House Republicans are doing just that.
It is hard to follow the unfolding mess because so much of the action takes place in back rooms. But there is literally no sign that this is going to be resolved any time soon. In the meantime, however, there is the real possibility that the incompetence of House politicians may actually bring education in Pennsylvania to a stumbling, gut-wrenching, collapsed-in-a-heap halt.
If it seems like we've been budget fiasco for a long time, that's because we have. Today is Day 168 of the ongoing budget not-done-on-time event.
There was a time when I would have agreed with a bi-partisan assessment. In the early stages, the GOP controlled PA House and Senate wanted to act as if the previous GOP governor had not been decisively kicked to the curb. Newly-elected Governor Tom Wolf, whose previous work experience is running a successful family business, did not initially seem to grasp that he is not a CEO who can order the legislature around as if they are his minions.
But many of the parties got on a learning curve and seemed to make progress.
At first it seemed like a manageable catastrophe. After all, we're used to this-- we've had five late budgets in ten years.
True, there was fallout. You may remember that the Chester Upland school district, underfunded by the state and sucked dry by charters, had to ask its teachers to work for free when the state missed its first subsidy payment. Ha. Those were the days, when the budget baloney was only fifty days old.
Meanwhile, many other districts turned to loans, lines of credit, or simply ate up whatever savings they had in the banks.
As the clock ticked, Wolf and the Senate GOP worked out a deal. Each gave up some features that they had wanted in the budget, but that's what happens when grown-ups negotiate. But as that budget gathered steam, it became evident there was still a major obstacle-- the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. Noted for their lack of leadership, the House GOP could not get its act together. Or, I should say, cannot get its act together, because as of today, their act is still not together.
By this time, the state should have paid out almost all of its school support money. At this point, it has paid out $0.00. The school districts of Pennsylvania are collectively billions of dollars short.
They can get parts of their act together, including the part that allows them to double take-over some more Philly schools. Philadelphia schools were taken over by the state decades ago, but the state has incredibly failed to magically transform them, so the state would now like to take them over from the state (you can read more about that foolishness here).
Now some schools, including a few districts just up the road from me, have decided they may just stay closed after Christmas break rather than borrow more money and incur more fees and interest.
Only--ha!-- the joke is on them because the Associated Press now reports that Pennsylvania's budget snafu is so spectacular that school districts may not be able to borrow money even if they want to!
"While we consider school aid to be a priority state expenditure, the budget stalemate has led us to conclude that Pennsylvania's state aid payments are no longer a reliable and stable source of funds," Standard and Poor's wrote.
The final icing on the cake? Believe it or not, it is now time for school districts to begin working on their budgets for 2016-2017. Yes, the state's convoluted system requires school districts to declare soon if they want to raise taxes above the index, although that presumes funding based on property taxes, which is one of the bones of contention in the budget and of course schools right now as I type this have no idea how much money they're eventually getting from the state for THIS year, let alone where they will stand going into NEXT year.
Will the House budge? At last count the House GOP was about half a billion dollars and a few ideological points away from the Senate GOP, and while many Pennsylvanians are ready to move past wringing hands to wringing necks, there are also folks cheering the House on for "standing firm." Note that Pennsylvania is a spectacularly gerrymandered state, to the point that while Democrats win more votes, Republicans win more seats. But gerrymandering invariably means that politicians must play to their base, and many House Republicans are doing just that.
It is hard to follow the unfolding mess because so much of the action takes place in back rooms. But there is literally no sign that this is going to be resolved any time soon. In the meantime, however, there is the real possibility that the incompetence of House politicians may actually bring education in Pennsylvania to a stumbling, gut-wrenching, collapsed-in-a-heap halt.
Monday, December 14, 2015
Arts and Community
My output will likely be down a bit this week because I have rehearsals every night and a performance Friday evening. I'm singing in a community chorus about 100 people who get together every other year to perform a big chunk of Handel's Messiah along with some other seasonal stuff.
We are all volunteers who have real jobs doing other things. I sing in a section with my doctor, a couple of students, my father-in-law, a psychologist-counselor, a few retired folks, including some who used to work building coal mining machinery. We'll be accompanied in performance by a small pick-up orchestra.
We'll perform in the town's one theater, a performance space that was purchased and reconditioned by the local community theater group about twenty years ago. If this goes like most years, the concert will be close to selling out.
For most of the people involved, this is a typical use of spare time. Many of the singers also sing in their church choir. For me, this is how I spend much of my off-duty time. I play in a 159-year-old town band-- concerts on the bandstand in the city park and everything-- that is also filled entirely by non-professional amateurs. And I work with community theater, also loaded with people who have a real job, but who somehow seek out artistic activities in their lives.
Arts and music are under attack in many school systems. This is not new. They have always been under attack. It's just a little worse now that the forces of reformsterism have been busy stripping public schools of resources; when the budget gets tight, the arts always look like an easy target for destruction.
The arts matter. We spend a lot of time trying to defend how they matter to individual students, how they enhance the school life of children throughout the system. But the arts matter more than that.
I live in a small place, a not-particularly-wealthy place. We don't have a paid symphony orchestra, a paid chorus, a paid regional theater.Sure, we can travel, or pop in a recording, or watch a video.
But the life of this community is also enriched by people who sing and play and perform and create, and do it all right here. This Friday we are not going to present the best rendering ever of the Messiah, but it will be damn good, and it will be live, and it will be here. Live matters in the arts. It always matters. Anybody who says differently should try kissing a picture of their beloved.
There is a richness and depth to the arts, live and in person and especially produced by members of your own community, that cannot be found anywhere else. The arts are good for students because students who have grown up in the arts are good for their communities, for their families, for their friends. The world is a better place for students who have grown up with understanding and abilities in the arts.
So stand up for the arts in your school system, not just because they are good for your students and your school, but because they are good for your entire community, for the world you live in. Reflect on that as the holiday season advances and we search for meaning in it the best way we know how-- not just through words or essays or speeches, but through the kind of deep and true expression that best comes through the arts.
We are all volunteers who have real jobs doing other things. I sing in a section with my doctor, a couple of students, my father-in-law, a psychologist-counselor, a few retired folks, including some who used to work building coal mining machinery. We'll be accompanied in performance by a small pick-up orchestra.
We'll perform in the town's one theater, a performance space that was purchased and reconditioned by the local community theater group about twenty years ago. If this goes like most years, the concert will be close to selling out.
For most of the people involved, this is a typical use of spare time. Many of the singers also sing in their church choir. For me, this is how I spend much of my off-duty time. I play in a 159-year-old town band-- concerts on the bandstand in the city park and everything-- that is also filled entirely by non-professional amateurs. And I work with community theater, also loaded with people who have a real job, but who somehow seek out artistic activities in their lives.
Arts and music are under attack in many school systems. This is not new. They have always been under attack. It's just a little worse now that the forces of reformsterism have been busy stripping public schools of resources; when the budget gets tight, the arts always look like an easy target for destruction.
The arts matter. We spend a lot of time trying to defend how they matter to individual students, how they enhance the school life of children throughout the system. But the arts matter more than that.
I live in a small place, a not-particularly-wealthy place. We don't have a paid symphony orchestra, a paid chorus, a paid regional theater.Sure, we can travel, or pop in a recording, or watch a video.
But the life of this community is also enriched by people who sing and play and perform and create, and do it all right here. This Friday we are not going to present the best rendering ever of the Messiah, but it will be damn good, and it will be live, and it will be here. Live matters in the arts. It always matters. Anybody who says differently should try kissing a picture of their beloved.
There is a richness and depth to the arts, live and in person and especially produced by members of your own community, that cannot be found anywhere else. The arts are good for students because students who have grown up in the arts are good for their communities, for their families, for their friends. The world is a better place for students who have grown up with understanding and abilities in the arts.
So stand up for the arts in your school system, not just because they are good for your students and your school, but because they are good for your entire community, for the world you live in. Reflect on that as the holiday season advances and we search for meaning in it the best way we know how-- not just through words or essays or speeches, but through the kind of deep and true expression that best comes through the arts.
KY: Considering Charters
Kentucky has never jumped on the charter bandwagon. Some folks have been trying for years, but the legislature has always had trouble getting a bill passed, and so the charter sector has been dying on the vine. But the new governor would like to change that.
Matt Bevin, the new governor whose previous job was investment management, has repeatedly stated his intention to expand school choice through charter school expansion in Kentucky. Bevin seems to believe in the power of competition. Here he is in an interview laying out his thoughts:
There is a lot of concern about academic competition; competition is good, and for those who are quick to say that this is somehow going to come at the expense of public education – we need strong public education. That is where the vast majority of our students are getting their education and will continue to get their education, and we have to be able to support the teachers and administrators that are a part of it. So we don’t want to turn the whole thing upside down. But we have schools that have been failing for generations now. So let’s start with public charter schools. The students going there are public students, the funding comes in a similar manner, everyone will be better for this.
For Kentuckians who haven't had a lot of exposure to the issues that come with charters, this must sound pretty reasonable (Bevin buried his opponent pretty decisively). This post is for them.
Dear Kentuckians-- here are some things you may want to keep an eye on if you decide to jump into the charter end of the pool.
Transparency
Despite the use of the word "school," a charter school is much more like a private business than a public institution. You can't walk into the kitchen at McDonalds and demand to see how the special sauce is made, and you can't demand a tour of a Ford assembly plant. Likewise, charters tend to assert their right to be opaque and secretive. In one of the more famous examples, the Success Charter chain in New York went to court to prevent the state auditor from looking at their books to see what they were doing with the tax dollars the state was giving them.
You're being told that the way it works is that the state contracts with the charter operator-- the state hands over a pile of money and the charter promises to hit certain benchmarks. Are you sure that's all you want to know? Is there any other time you can think of when it would be okay for a public institution paid for with your tax dollars to refuse to tell you what they were doing with those dollars?
Local Control
Currently you are entitled to know how your district spends every cent, and while some may not be great at meeting that letter of the law, if you're unhappy with what your school is doing, you are entitled to attend a school board meeting where you are legally entitled to hear everything that goes into making decisions about your schools. If you don't like what you hear, you can say so by speaking formally or hollering informally. You can fight for the election of board members that you support.
But with a charter-- you can do nothing. You are not entitled to attend a board meeting, and nobody who runs the school is required to take your call, talk to you, or explain anything to you. They do not answer to the taxpayers, and they do not stand for election.
"I'll just pull my child out of school if I object strongly," you say? What if you don't have a child in school? Are you upset that your tax dollars are going to support a school that teaches communism is great or runs on a Sharia Law model? Too bad. Nobody has to listen to you. And if you are a parent arguing with the school after Counting Day (the day on which official enrollment is tallied), they will be happy to see you go, because the money associated with your child is already in the school's bank account.
Piles of Wasted Money
Do you think you could own and operate two homes for the same total cost as one home? No, me neither. But a charter system duplicates buildings, administrators, and a host of services that could be more efficiently in one building. Opening charters automatically must increase the total cost of education in your community.
Sucking Public Schools Dry
The classic simple charter funding model is to just have the per-pupil cost follow the pupil wherever she goes. If 5% of your high school students leave for a charter, 5% of your funding goes with them. Here's the problem-- if your school population drops by 5%, do your costs drop by 5% as well?No. You don't have 5% fewer buildings, 5% fewer buses or 5% fewer light and heating bills. You don't have 5% fewer administrators. You probably won't lose, say, an entire classroom's worth of third graders, so when you need to cut teachers to help make the budget, it's more likely to be an art or music teacher. Maybe a librarian.
And because charters are usually set up to help students "escape" the worst public schools, it is the most challenged and troubled schools that will lose the most resources. Unless your legislature decides to fully fund charters without simply moving money from the public system, this is a zero sum game where the public system must lose. And it's awfully hard to "compete" when someone keeps taking away the resources you need to be competitive.
Who Is Served?
Charter schools won't have room for everybody. Any kind of application process will favor families that understand the system and have the motivation to jump through the hoops. Even where all students have the possibility of entry into the charter, charters have many techniques for pushing out students-- particularly those with special needs.
Success?
Does any of the above really matter if charters get results? It's a fair question-- should we favor public schools out of tradition if charters can serve our children better?
Kentuckians are being told about great charter successes in New Orleans and other charter hubs around the country. These stories are exaggerations at best. Study after study finds little evidence that charters do any better than public schools. Where there are signs of success, we find that the charters are serving fewer students with greater disabilities and fewer English Language Learners. "Successful" charters also often have extra resources from private sponsors and contributors. In other words, the secret of charter success-- more resources, and only the more easily taught students-- is no secret, and could easily be applied to existing public schools-- if we were willig to change the mission of pblic education.
You should also examine the definition of success. Some charters define success very simply-- the students will score well on the Big Standardized Test. These schools maintain a tightly disciplined focus on a culture of compliance and endless test prep.
The "achievement gap" and "student achievement" refer to only one thing-- scores on standardized tests that cover math and reading. That is far too narrow a definition of success, and certainly does not represent "college and career readiness." ("We'd like to hire you because you take standardized tests really well," said no employer ever).
Stability
Charter schools are businesses, and they make decisions for business reasons. This does not make them evil, but it does mean that they are not going to keep an unprofitable school open in your neighborhood just because it's a nice thing to do. A public school cannot say, "You know what? It's just too hard to keep working at education in this community with such a tiny revenue stream, so we're just going to close up shop." A charter school can say such things-- and they often do. As of last fall, 200 charter schools had closed up shop in Ohio.
Follow the Money
The amount of money wrapped up in the education sector is huge, and charter schools have become a powerful tool for unlocking much of that. The largest chunk of investment in charter schools is not from educators or school-related industries, but from hedge fund managers looking for good return on investment. And just because a charter school operators is "non-profit" doesn't mean it's not making big money. Some charter school operators are scrupulous and ethical; some are not. And some practices are legal but eyebrow raising, like paying charter school chiefs nearly a half-million dollars, or leasing buildings from yourself.
This report from the National Education Policy Center shows the many ways in which charter schools can be used to funnel money to places it doesn't belong. Some states have instituted some stricter oversight, but states like Ohio show just how widespread scandal, fraud and waste can become when nobody is minding the money-saturated store at all (go ahead-- google "Ohio charter school scandal" and see what pops up).
The amount of money at stake means you need to be wary of people who are trying to sell you something. When a car salesman tells you that the 2016 Superwheels will change your life and make your family smart and beautiful, you would be wise to take it with a few hundred grains of salt. The money trail is often more tricky to trace when it comes to charter schools, but it is worth your while to trace it.
Watch the Big Picture
Ultimately, how Kentucky manages public education and the charter business is about more than just money (though it is certainly about that).
Kentucky is one of the states that has watched the farm industry turn into a factory model business. Farmers are now technicians who are simply meant to take orders from their corporate masters. Animals are now just product to be mass-produced with no concern for anything except their ability to be turned into meat. And the system is kept tilted in favor of the big corporations by a revolving door between corporate and government offices.
Modern education reform is an attempt to apply those same transformations to schools. Teachers are just to follow instructions and deliver pre-packaged lessons. Students are there to produce good-looking test results; their other concerns are unimportant. Charter schools are a leading edge of these transformations.
Charters represent a seismic shift. From he idea of public education as a shared good, a service provided by the community for every single one of its students, we move to the idea that schools are a consumer good, provided for a select few, and primarily serving the business interests of their investors. If you aren't careful, when you install charters, you change the very idea of what schools are for.
Can it be done?
Charter schools can potentially be a great addition to a school system, but only under the right conditions. Kentucky is in a unique position to set the rules up right from day one. If I were the Kentucky legislature, and I were dead set on starting up with charter schools, here's what I would do.
* Fund them fully. Rather than trying to run several parallel systems with the same money that previously only ran one, I would make sure that both the public and the charter systems were fully funded. That means the cost of schooling will go up for the taxpayers. If you really believe in charters, sell the idea.
* Complete transparency. Charters must operate with the same transparency and accountability as public schools. They must account for every cent they spend. They must do their decision-making in public. They must be completely and fully accountable to the taxpayers.
* Locally controlled. The people who run the charter school in the community must be there, in that community. Do not allow charter schools that are run by a board of directors in some other state.
* Fully open. The charter must be prepared to accept and serve any student who lives in that community. No creating barriers to entry or push-outs once in the school.
* Professionally staffed. Charters have often pushed for the option of putting any warm (cheap) body in a classroom. That's not okay.
* Regulated to avoid financial shenanigans. There are too many scams out there that have demonstrated all the ways in which a charter school can be nothing more than someone's get rich quick scheme. Regulators (using the complete transparency from above) should be clear and tough when it comes to making sure that charter school dollars go toward educating students and not making someone rich.
With all these in place, go ahead and set up charters where teachers and education leaders can try new, innovative and free-from-the-usual-rules educational approaches. But make sure that you are running a school and not a business. Charter boosters are going to sell, and sell hard, but if Kentuckians aren't careful, they'll find they've purchased imaginary benefits at far-too-high a cost.
Matt Bevin, the new governor whose previous job was investment management, has repeatedly stated his intention to expand school choice through charter school expansion in Kentucky. Bevin seems to believe in the power of competition. Here he is in an interview laying out his thoughts:
There is a lot of concern about academic competition; competition is good, and for those who are quick to say that this is somehow going to come at the expense of public education – we need strong public education. That is where the vast majority of our students are getting their education and will continue to get their education, and we have to be able to support the teachers and administrators that are a part of it. So we don’t want to turn the whole thing upside down. But we have schools that have been failing for generations now. So let’s start with public charter schools. The students going there are public students, the funding comes in a similar manner, everyone will be better for this.
For Kentuckians who haven't had a lot of exposure to the issues that come with charters, this must sound pretty reasonable (Bevin buried his opponent pretty decisively). This post is for them.
Dear Kentuckians-- here are some things you may want to keep an eye on if you decide to jump into the charter end of the pool.
Transparency
Despite the use of the word "school," a charter school is much more like a private business than a public institution. You can't walk into the kitchen at McDonalds and demand to see how the special sauce is made, and you can't demand a tour of a Ford assembly plant. Likewise, charters tend to assert their right to be opaque and secretive. In one of the more famous examples, the Success Charter chain in New York went to court to prevent the state auditor from looking at their books to see what they were doing with the tax dollars the state was giving them.
You're being told that the way it works is that the state contracts with the charter operator-- the state hands over a pile of money and the charter promises to hit certain benchmarks. Are you sure that's all you want to know? Is there any other time you can think of when it would be okay for a public institution paid for with your tax dollars to refuse to tell you what they were doing with those dollars?
Local Control
Currently you are entitled to know how your district spends every cent, and while some may not be great at meeting that letter of the law, if you're unhappy with what your school is doing, you are entitled to attend a school board meeting where you are legally entitled to hear everything that goes into making decisions about your schools. If you don't like what you hear, you can say so by speaking formally or hollering informally. You can fight for the election of board members that you support.
But with a charter-- you can do nothing. You are not entitled to attend a board meeting, and nobody who runs the school is required to take your call, talk to you, or explain anything to you. They do not answer to the taxpayers, and they do not stand for election.
"I'll just pull my child out of school if I object strongly," you say? What if you don't have a child in school? Are you upset that your tax dollars are going to support a school that teaches communism is great or runs on a Sharia Law model? Too bad. Nobody has to listen to you. And if you are a parent arguing with the school after Counting Day (the day on which official enrollment is tallied), they will be happy to see you go, because the money associated with your child is already in the school's bank account.
Piles of Wasted Money
Do you think you could own and operate two homes for the same total cost as one home? No, me neither. But a charter system duplicates buildings, administrators, and a host of services that could be more efficiently in one building. Opening charters automatically must increase the total cost of education in your community.
Sucking Public Schools Dry
The classic simple charter funding model is to just have the per-pupil cost follow the pupil wherever she goes. If 5% of your high school students leave for a charter, 5% of your funding goes with them. Here's the problem-- if your school population drops by 5%, do your costs drop by 5% as well?No. You don't have 5% fewer buildings, 5% fewer buses or 5% fewer light and heating bills. You don't have 5% fewer administrators. You probably won't lose, say, an entire classroom's worth of third graders, so when you need to cut teachers to help make the budget, it's more likely to be an art or music teacher. Maybe a librarian.
And because charters are usually set up to help students "escape" the worst public schools, it is the most challenged and troubled schools that will lose the most resources. Unless your legislature decides to fully fund charters without simply moving money from the public system, this is a zero sum game where the public system must lose. And it's awfully hard to "compete" when someone keeps taking away the resources you need to be competitive.
Who Is Served?
Charter schools won't have room for everybody. Any kind of application process will favor families that understand the system and have the motivation to jump through the hoops. Even where all students have the possibility of entry into the charter, charters have many techniques for pushing out students-- particularly those with special needs.
Success?
Does any of the above really matter if charters get results? It's a fair question-- should we favor public schools out of tradition if charters can serve our children better?
Kentuckians are being told about great charter successes in New Orleans and other charter hubs around the country. These stories are exaggerations at best. Study after study finds little evidence that charters do any better than public schools. Where there are signs of success, we find that the charters are serving fewer students with greater disabilities and fewer English Language Learners. "Successful" charters also often have extra resources from private sponsors and contributors. In other words, the secret of charter success-- more resources, and only the more easily taught students-- is no secret, and could easily be applied to existing public schools-- if we were willig to change the mission of pblic education.
You should also examine the definition of success. Some charters define success very simply-- the students will score well on the Big Standardized Test. These schools maintain a tightly disciplined focus on a culture of compliance and endless test prep.
The "achievement gap" and "student achievement" refer to only one thing-- scores on standardized tests that cover math and reading. That is far too narrow a definition of success, and certainly does not represent "college and career readiness." ("We'd like to hire you because you take standardized tests really well," said no employer ever).
Stability
Charter schools are businesses, and they make decisions for business reasons. This does not make them evil, but it does mean that they are not going to keep an unprofitable school open in your neighborhood just because it's a nice thing to do. A public school cannot say, "You know what? It's just too hard to keep working at education in this community with such a tiny revenue stream, so we're just going to close up shop." A charter school can say such things-- and they often do. As of last fall, 200 charter schools had closed up shop in Ohio.
Follow the Money
The amount of money wrapped up in the education sector is huge, and charter schools have become a powerful tool for unlocking much of that. The largest chunk of investment in charter schools is not from educators or school-related industries, but from hedge fund managers looking for good return on investment. And just because a charter school operators is "non-profit" doesn't mean it's not making big money. Some charter school operators are scrupulous and ethical; some are not. And some practices are legal but eyebrow raising, like paying charter school chiefs nearly a half-million dollars, or leasing buildings from yourself.
This report from the National Education Policy Center shows the many ways in which charter schools can be used to funnel money to places it doesn't belong. Some states have instituted some stricter oversight, but states like Ohio show just how widespread scandal, fraud and waste can become when nobody is minding the money-saturated store at all (go ahead-- google "Ohio charter school scandal" and see what pops up).
The amount of money at stake means you need to be wary of people who are trying to sell you something. When a car salesman tells you that the 2016 Superwheels will change your life and make your family smart and beautiful, you would be wise to take it with a few hundred grains of salt. The money trail is often more tricky to trace when it comes to charter schools, but it is worth your while to trace it.
Watch the Big Picture
Ultimately, how Kentucky manages public education and the charter business is about more than just money (though it is certainly about that).
Kentucky is one of the states that has watched the farm industry turn into a factory model business. Farmers are now technicians who are simply meant to take orders from their corporate masters. Animals are now just product to be mass-produced with no concern for anything except their ability to be turned into meat. And the system is kept tilted in favor of the big corporations by a revolving door between corporate and government offices.
Modern education reform is an attempt to apply those same transformations to schools. Teachers are just to follow instructions and deliver pre-packaged lessons. Students are there to produce good-looking test results; their other concerns are unimportant. Charter schools are a leading edge of these transformations.
Charters represent a seismic shift. From he idea of public education as a shared good, a service provided by the community for every single one of its students, we move to the idea that schools are a consumer good, provided for a select few, and primarily serving the business interests of their investors. If you aren't careful, when you install charters, you change the very idea of what schools are for.
Can it be done?
Charter schools can potentially be a great addition to a school system, but only under the right conditions. Kentucky is in a unique position to set the rules up right from day one. If I were the Kentucky legislature, and I were dead set on starting up with charter schools, here's what I would do.
* Fund them fully. Rather than trying to run several parallel systems with the same money that previously only ran one, I would make sure that both the public and the charter systems were fully funded. That means the cost of schooling will go up for the taxpayers. If you really believe in charters, sell the idea.
* Complete transparency. Charters must operate with the same transparency and accountability as public schools. They must account for every cent they spend. They must do their decision-making in public. They must be completely and fully accountable to the taxpayers.
* Locally controlled. The people who run the charter school in the community must be there, in that community. Do not allow charter schools that are run by a board of directors in some other state.
* Fully open. The charter must be prepared to accept and serve any student who lives in that community. No creating barriers to entry or push-outs once in the school.
* Professionally staffed. Charters have often pushed for the option of putting any warm (cheap) body in a classroom. That's not okay.
* Regulated to avoid financial shenanigans. There are too many scams out there that have demonstrated all the ways in which a charter school can be nothing more than someone's get rich quick scheme. Regulators (using the complete transparency from above) should be clear and tough when it comes to making sure that charter school dollars go toward educating students and not making someone rich.
With all these in place, go ahead and set up charters where teachers and education leaders can try new, innovative and free-from-the-usual-rules educational approaches. But make sure that you are running a school and not a business. Charter boosters are going to sell, and sell hard, but if Kentuckians aren't careful, they'll find they've purchased imaginary benefits at far-too-high a cost.
Sunday, December 13, 2015
ICYMI (December 13)
Time for that Sunday reading list!
What's Your Purpose
Rob Miller has one of those posts that is great for refocusing and gearing up for the week to come-- plus a cool diagram
Shaming the Devil
Man. My hat is off-- way off-- to this blogger who decided to call out Steve Perry, the crowd-pleasing, money-grabing, self-aggrandizing reformster. Quite a tale here.
Testifying before Cuomo's Common Core Task Force
This is a throwback, but since Cuomo's Task Force offered up their recommendations this week, it seems like the perfect time to revisit Critical Classroom's account of testifying before the Task Force five weeks ago.
EdTweak
Some I had up till now missed this little diversion-- a short faux journal published every now and then in the style of everybody's favorite education news publication. Check out articles like "Reformers Address Deficiencies in Children's Screen Time."
Ex-Star Principal Tells of Her Downfall
Depressing. If you want a picture of how a principal can get caught up in culture of graft and corruption, read this Detroit Free Press article about one of the school officials caught in the federal investigation of misbehavior in Detroit.
Progressive Public School Shakedown
I've been remiss in not bringing this up sooner. The Progressive magazine has assembled a group f twelve fellows to cover education reform news for the magazine. The group includes top drawer folks like Jose Luis Vilson, Xian Barrett, Jennifer Berkshire, and Sabrina Stevens (and full disclosure-- I have also snuck into the group somehow). You can follow the project on twitter under @Progressive4Ed; the fellows offer up a new piece at least once weekly, and even those of you who may not consider yourselves in tune with the overall agenda of the magazine will find the Progressive Fellow pieces informative and useful.
What's Your Purpose
Rob Miller has one of those posts that is great for refocusing and gearing up for the week to come-- plus a cool diagram
Shaming the Devil
Man. My hat is off-- way off-- to this blogger who decided to call out Steve Perry, the crowd-pleasing, money-grabing, self-aggrandizing reformster. Quite a tale here.
Testifying before Cuomo's Common Core Task Force
This is a throwback, but since Cuomo's Task Force offered up their recommendations this week, it seems like the perfect time to revisit Critical Classroom's account of testifying before the Task Force five weeks ago.
EdTweak
Some I had up till now missed this little diversion-- a short faux journal published every now and then in the style of everybody's favorite education news publication. Check out articles like "Reformers Address Deficiencies in Children's Screen Time."
Ex-Star Principal Tells of Her Downfall
Depressing. If you want a picture of how a principal can get caught up in culture of graft and corruption, read this Detroit Free Press article about one of the school officials caught in the federal investigation of misbehavior in Detroit.
Progressive Public School Shakedown
I've been remiss in not bringing this up sooner. The Progressive magazine has assembled a group f twelve fellows to cover education reform news for the magazine. The group includes top drawer folks like Jose Luis Vilson, Xian Barrett, Jennifer Berkshire, and Sabrina Stevens (and full disclosure-- I have also snuck into the group somehow). You can follow the project on twitter under @Progressive4Ed; the fellows offer up a new piece at least once weekly, and even those of you who may not consider yourselves in tune with the overall agenda of the magazine will find the Progressive Fellow pieces informative and useful.
TFA Is Rescued!
Teach for America continues to take shellacking from people who think to ask questions like "How do you prepare someone to be a teacher in five weeks?" or "Why aren't wealthy, white districts lined up to take advantage of this awesome program?" or "How exactly does it help a high needs school to have an endless parade of untrained amateurs wandering through classrooms for just a couple of years at a time?"
But TFA fits the reformster narrative in many ways (Some people are just better than others, so they should make great teachers-- certainly better than those dopes who are in teaching as a career. Poor schools are failing because the Right People aren't there, so we'll put the Right People there and that will fix everything!), and it has allowed many people to put "teacher" on their resume as they move onto their real careers as bureaucrats, lobbyists and political appointees, so that TFA has become a multi-million dollar operation with plenty of friends in high places. Still, they also participate in another popular reformster narrative-- "Even though we are Better People and we're doing Great Things, people keep popping up to say mean things about us, and that makes us sad."
And so periodically reformsters try to fight back, and we get the bizarre spectacle of millions of dollars being spent to outfits like the $12 million Education Post or the $4 million per year the74 to combat a bunch of people who blog for little or no money.
Now TFA is joining the party. As reported by Lyndsey Layton in the Washington Post, NYCAN (part of a network of pro-charter, anti-public school, anti-teacher union reformsters) has set up a Big Fat PR engine to combat TFA criticism. Why would NYCAN do that for TFA? Well, most likely because they are all interconnected and run by the same folks.
NYCAN has put up $500,000 to run the Corps Knowledge campaign. They have a nifty website, where they lay out their goals to rally alumni, combat misinformation, and provide a platform for alumni to share stories. Of course, that can be tricky because much of the criticism of TFA comes from its own alumni, like Gary Rubinstein, a TFA alum and critic that CK tried to take down.
And although Layton is just writing about Corps Knowledge now, they've been kicking around for a few months. Back in September they posted about the Badass Women of TFA and were unhappy to attract the attention of the Badass Teachers Association; they turned off comments and scrubbed responses (though they saved a few to mount a counter-attack).
That was back in September, and it underlines a lesson that TFA and friends have had a hard time absorbing: it's a lot easier to attack the establishment than to be the establishment, and coming up on their twenty-five year anniversary, TFA can no longer claim to be upstarts or outsiders. far better funded than any pro-public ed group and so well-wired into the reformster establishment that they can it will mount a $500 PR campaign on their behalf just because, TFA is part of the status quo. And after this many years, their track record is too well-known to be washed away by PR. They don't provide sufficient preparation for entering a classroom. The vast majority of their people don't enter into a teaching career, and by and large don't intend to. And as much as they like to claim success while being a group that "doesn’t need to tear down another group to affirm that success," their premise has been and continues to be that "regular" teachers just aren't up to the task of educating American students, but TFA recruits will fix it.
TFA has reinvented itself many times, and Layton's article contains a pretty straightforward admission of the core mission: "The program is designed not so much to groom career teachers as to inspire recruits to work on the larger issues of urban education in varied ways."
Darrell Bradford, NYCAN executive director, has one point to make that is fair, albeit ironic:
“Some of the best people I’ve ever known have worked for TFA — great, caring, smart — and it’s tough to see your friends get dragged through the mud,” said Bradford, who has $500,000 for the campaign and is aiming to raise an additional $1 million to expand it.
It's a useful insight, and one that Bradford, who is no dummy, might apply to understading the people who resist NYCAN's agenda in general and TFA in particular. Some of the best, smartest people I know are public school teachers, and it is hard to watch them get dragged through the mud by reformsters who insist that teachers are so bad that it's better to replace them with five-week-trained fresh college grads who don't even particularly want to teach. And we don't have a million bucks lying around to fight back with.
But TFA fits the reformster narrative in many ways (Some people are just better than others, so they should make great teachers-- certainly better than those dopes who are in teaching as a career. Poor schools are failing because the Right People aren't there, so we'll put the Right People there and that will fix everything!), and it has allowed many people to put "teacher" on their resume as they move onto their real careers as bureaucrats, lobbyists and political appointees, so that TFA has become a multi-million dollar operation with plenty of friends in high places. Still, they also participate in another popular reformster narrative-- "Even though we are Better People and we're doing Great Things, people keep popping up to say mean things about us, and that makes us sad."
And so periodically reformsters try to fight back, and we get the bizarre spectacle of millions of dollars being spent to outfits like the $12 million Education Post or the $4 million per year the74 to combat a bunch of people who blog for little or no money.
Now TFA is joining the party. As reported by Lyndsey Layton in the Washington Post, NYCAN (part of a network of pro-charter, anti-public school, anti-teacher union reformsters) has set up a Big Fat PR engine to combat TFA criticism. Why would NYCAN do that for TFA? Well, most likely because they are all interconnected and run by the same folks.
NYCAN has put up $500,000 to run the Corps Knowledge campaign. They have a nifty website, where they lay out their goals to rally alumni, combat misinformation, and provide a platform for alumni to share stories. Of course, that can be tricky because much of the criticism of TFA comes from its own alumni, like Gary Rubinstein, a TFA alum and critic that CK tried to take down.
And although Layton is just writing about Corps Knowledge now, they've been kicking around for a few months. Back in September they posted about the Badass Women of TFA and were unhappy to attract the attention of the Badass Teachers Association; they turned off comments and scrubbed responses (though they saved a few to mount a counter-attack).
That was back in September, and it underlines a lesson that TFA and friends have had a hard time absorbing: it's a lot easier to attack the establishment than to be the establishment, and coming up on their twenty-five year anniversary, TFA can no longer claim to be upstarts or outsiders. far better funded than any pro-public ed group and so well-wired into the reformster establishment that they can it will mount a $500 PR campaign on their behalf just because, TFA is part of the status quo. And after this many years, their track record is too well-known to be washed away by PR. They don't provide sufficient preparation for entering a classroom. The vast majority of their people don't enter into a teaching career, and by and large don't intend to. And as much as they like to claim success while being a group that "doesn’t need to tear down another group to affirm that success," their premise has been and continues to be that "regular" teachers just aren't up to the task of educating American students, but TFA recruits will fix it.
TFA has reinvented itself many times, and Layton's article contains a pretty straightforward admission of the core mission: "The program is designed not so much to groom career teachers as to inspire recruits to work on the larger issues of urban education in varied ways."
Darrell Bradford, NYCAN executive director, has one point to make that is fair, albeit ironic:
“Some of the best people I’ve ever known have worked for TFA — great, caring, smart — and it’s tough to see your friends get dragged through the mud,” said Bradford, who has $500,000 for the campaign and is aiming to raise an additional $1 million to expand it.
It's a useful insight, and one that Bradford, who is no dummy, might apply to understading the people who resist NYCAN's agenda in general and TFA in particular. Some of the best, smartest people I know are public school teachers, and it is hard to watch them get dragged through the mud by reformsters who insist that teachers are so bad that it's better to replace them with five-week-trained fresh college grads who don't even particularly want to teach. And we don't have a million bucks lying around to fight back with.
Saturday, December 12, 2015
NCLB Revisionism
Well, that didn't take long.
Some folks are already getting misty-eyed over the halcyon days of No Child Left Behind and grumbling about what has been lost in the newly-minted Every Student Succeeds Or Else Act. The problem with getting misty-eyed is that it seriously impairs your vision.
Take Chad Aldeman (Bellwether Education Partners) in yesterday's Washington Post, who wants us to know what wonderful things we've lost now that No Child Left Behind has been left behind.
In Aldeman's story, NCLB put pressure on schools to improve, and the more pressure it created, the more people fought back.
Over time, as expectations rose, so too did the number of schools failing to meet them. At the law’s peak, more than 19,000 schools — about two-fifths of schools receiving federal funds and one-fifth of all public schools nationally — were placed on lists of schools “in need of improvement” and subject to consequences built into the law...
As the law aged and those consequences rose, it became less and less politically acceptable to tell so many schools to improve, let alone expect states or districts to have the technical capacity to help them do it.
What Aldeman fails to mention is that the increased failure rate was directly related to NCLB's bizarrely unrealistic and innumerate goal of having 100% of American students score above average on the Big Standardized Test.
[Update: Aldeman disagrees that "proficient" is the same as "above average," and there was some argument at the time about what "proficient" really meant and whether it was "just good enough" or "ready for college." Here's what the state of PA was saying in 2006:
Students are identified as performing in one of four levels: advanced, proficient, basic and below basic. The goal is for all students to be proficient or advanced – meaning that they have mastered Pennsylvania’s assessment anchor content standards at their grade level.
"At grade level" is a tricky construct, but "grade level" frequently means "average."]
NCLB guaranteed that as we approached 2014, we would have only two types of schools in this country-- schools that were failing and schools that were cheating. Success was literally impossible. And that guaranteed that the number of failing schools would increase and that the public, as they saw the failure label hit schools that they knew damn well were good schools-- that public was going to push back and politicians were going to join in.
Aldeman notes the history of Obama waivers. And he notes the irony of the GOP's love of federal intrusion when it came to education policy.
But Aldeman is also bleary-eyed when it comes to the history of intervention in "failing" schools.
Perhaps worst of all, a strategy focused on fixing the toughest problems hinges on the desire and ability to actually do something about poor performance. The Obama administration, to its credit, did allocate significant resources to chronically low-performing schools through its School Improvement Grants program. And in exchange, it required tough and aggressive interventions in those schools. Although the results of those efforts are still uncertain, they represent a real attempt to shake up persistently poor-performing schools.
No, the results of the SIG program are not uncertain. They're a full-on failure, and all Aldeman has to do is walk across the hall to his Bellwether colleague Andy Smarick hear about it.
Aldeman is unhappy that ESSA is not draconian enough in its approach to "failing" schools. He misses the bigger problem with his aims. Neither NCLB nor the Obama Waiver program had a clue of how to accurately locate failing schools, nor do policy-makers have a clue about how to fix a failing school once they find it. All we've gotten from the last fifteen years of reformsterism is a means of using "failed" schools as a means for creating markets for charter operators and ed-related corporate money grabs.
Like many victims of nostalgia, Aldeman is sad to lose things that we never had. I can think of plenty of reasons not to love ESSA, but a belief that we actually lost some things that NCLB got right-- that does not make the list of objections.
Some folks are already getting misty-eyed over the halcyon days of No Child Left Behind and grumbling about what has been lost in the newly-minted Every Student Succeeds Or Else Act. The problem with getting misty-eyed is that it seriously impairs your vision.
Take Chad Aldeman (Bellwether Education Partners) in yesterday's Washington Post, who wants us to know what wonderful things we've lost now that No Child Left Behind has been left behind.
In Aldeman's story, NCLB put pressure on schools to improve, and the more pressure it created, the more people fought back.
Over time, as expectations rose, so too did the number of schools failing to meet them. At the law’s peak, more than 19,000 schools — about two-fifths of schools receiving federal funds and one-fifth of all public schools nationally — were placed on lists of schools “in need of improvement” and subject to consequences built into the law...
As the law aged and those consequences rose, it became less and less politically acceptable to tell so many schools to improve, let alone expect states or districts to have the technical capacity to help them do it.
What Aldeman fails to mention is that the increased failure rate was directly related to NCLB's bizarrely unrealistic and innumerate goal of having 100% of American students score above average on the Big Standardized Test.
[Update: Aldeman disagrees that "proficient" is the same as "above average," and there was some argument at the time about what "proficient" really meant and whether it was "just good enough" or "ready for college." Here's what the state of PA was saying in 2006:
Students are identified as performing in one of four levels: advanced, proficient, basic and below basic. The goal is for all students to be proficient or advanced – meaning that they have mastered Pennsylvania’s assessment anchor content standards at their grade level.
"At grade level" is a tricky construct, but "grade level" frequently means "average."]
NCLB guaranteed that as we approached 2014, we would have only two types of schools in this country-- schools that were failing and schools that were cheating. Success was literally impossible. And that guaranteed that the number of failing schools would increase and that the public, as they saw the failure label hit schools that they knew damn well were good schools-- that public was going to push back and politicians were going to join in.
Aldeman notes the history of Obama waivers. And he notes the irony of the GOP's love of federal intrusion when it came to education policy.
But Aldeman is also bleary-eyed when it comes to the history of intervention in "failing" schools.
Perhaps worst of all, a strategy focused on fixing the toughest problems hinges on the desire and ability to actually do something about poor performance. The Obama administration, to its credit, did allocate significant resources to chronically low-performing schools through its School Improvement Grants program. And in exchange, it required tough and aggressive interventions in those schools. Although the results of those efforts are still uncertain, they represent a real attempt to shake up persistently poor-performing schools.
No, the results of the SIG program are not uncertain. They're a full-on failure, and all Aldeman has to do is walk across the hall to his Bellwether colleague Andy Smarick hear about it.
Aldeman is unhappy that ESSA is not draconian enough in its approach to "failing" schools. He misses the bigger problem with his aims. Neither NCLB nor the Obama Waiver program had a clue of how to accurately locate failing schools, nor do policy-makers have a clue about how to fix a failing school once they find it. All we've gotten from the last fifteen years of reformsterism is a means of using "failed" schools as a means for creating markets for charter operators and ed-related corporate money grabs.
Like many victims of nostalgia, Aldeman is sad to lose things that we never had. I can think of plenty of reasons not to love ESSA, but a belief that we actually lost some things that NCLB got right-- that does not make the list of objections.
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