NJ: Red Bank and the New White Flight

The Red Bank, NJ, school system is actually a tiny little thing. Three boroughs (Red Bank, Little Silver and Shrewsbury) run their own K-8 schools which then feed into a regional high school.

There's one other school in Red Bank-- Red Bank Charter School. Red Bank Charter School is back in the news because its operators have asked to double the schools size, from 195 seats to 400, in a move that represents a direct assault on the public schools of the city. RBCS has served not just as a drain on the public system, but a powerful engine for resegregation. Red Bank Charter School is not just an example of how charters gut public school resources, but how charters can be the new white flight.

Red Bank Charter is no Success Academy-- when they announced the expansion, they left their own parents and supporters flatfooted. In January, charter leaders held a meeting for parents who wanted some sort of response for when their neighbors cornered them in the grocery store. One characterized the proposal as a PR disaster. At that meeting, they learned that part of the reason for the initiative was Chris Christie's full-on support for charters in his State of the State speech.

Flanked by Trenton lobbyists and a pair of ex-superintendents-turned-consultants, charter Principal Meredith Pennotti said one key reason the school is seeking to expand is “the political climate” — specifically, Governor Chris Christie’s unabashed support of school choice.

Best to expand the operation while the business climate supports it and before Christie leaves office. But there are more arguments-- none of them good.

RBCS likes to make the argument that they actually spend less per pupil than the public school system, even as research shows that they have been better-funded than the district to the tune of about $1,700 per student. They don't like to point out that the lower per-pupil spending is because they serve fewer students with special needs. NJ, like many states, has different state support rates for students with special needs, because they cost more to educate. In Red Bank Borough, the SSN population is 19.2%. At RBCS, the SSN population is 7.3%. RBCS spends less per pupil because they specialize in teaching the low-cost students. If you want a more complete, scholarly look at how this funding system works and how it affects local public schools, this paper by Julia Sass Rubin is worth a look.

When it comes to income, Red Bank Borough's free or reduced lunch population runs around 88%. RBCS runs around 40%.

Segregation is also reflected in racial makeup of the schools (here's where we could mention that New Jersey has a hugely segregated school system). Red Bank Borough is about 7% white. Red Bank Charter is about 52% white. The borough school is 80% Hispanic; the charter, 34%.

But RBCS admission is by lottery, which suggests that these demographics are not just the demographics of the students who attend RBCS, but the demographics of the students who apply. The charter is talking about going to a weighted lottery to favor poor students, but if this is their applicant pool, what difference would it really make?

Red Bank Charter School does not look very much like Red Bank, the borough, or the Red Bank Borough K-8 school.* What Red Bank Charter School does look like is the two neighboring boroughs. Those schools (Little Silver and Shrewsbury) have school populations that are 90% white and virtually without any free or reduced students at all. And they're very close by, so that if parents, say, wanted to get their children away from Those People, a move up the road would do it. What is a community to do to stop that kind of white flight?

Well, in a meeting between local journalists and three charter officials trying hard to sell the expansion, the answer emerged:

Although the charter school is supposed to offer an alternative so that they will as they said in this decision… so as to mitigate the effect of white flight. Now how do you do that? You start a small public school which will offer an opportunity for those who otherwise would leave town or choose the parochial or other private school. It’s as simple as that. What else would you do? Offer an alternative.

Yup. Charter schools as the new white flight. Don't buy a whole new house to keep your kids from going to school with Those People-- just sign up for your local charter.

RBCS uses many of the usual charter shell games-- they like to compare their PARCC scores to the Red Bank scores, despite the fact that their school population is hugely different from Red Bank's. If you care about PARCC scores (and I don't, but it is a reformy metric of choice) and if you can handle charts and regressions, this piece by Jersey Jazzman shows that RBCS's scores are nothing special, and that in some areas they are being outdone by the public system.  In fact, a parent did some number crunching and found that the Red Bank public school actually outperformed the charter without adjustment-- for just one example, the average 8th grade scores for ELA and Math were higher at the public school, for one example. We can play with these numbers all day, but at a minimum, we have to conclude that RBCS does not significantly outperform the public school.[Update: You can look here for Jersey Jazzman's latest look at the latest data. Nothing has changed.]

Many in the Red Bank community have spoken out against the expansion. It's a small district in a small community, and the doubling the charter size will gut the financial support for the public school. Duplicating services is not financially efficient or cost-effective, but it's worse than that.

Charters have introduced a new entitlement-- the right to attend a private school at taxpayer expense. Maybe you could make a case for this if the private school were demonstrably better-- but Red Bank Charter is not. Maybe you could make a case if it weren't going to cost the taxpayers more-- but you can't run two systems for the cost of one. Maybe you could justify it if the new system was going to help all students-- but this will damage the public system for the students left in it. And maybe you could justify it if the charter system was offering something special-- but apparently Red Bank Charter is here just to provide a new version of white flight. Absent other evidence, I assume that the teachers and students of Red Bank Charter School are decent folks who work hard. But is that enough reason to let the charter double its size and take a huge bite out of the public school budget?

Imagine if parents had to go door to door and say, "Hey, I need to take some tax dollars from you so that my kid doesn't have to go to school with your kid." Or maybe a community gathering where someone announces, "Let's take up a collection so we can pay some better-off white folks to stay in town."

The irony at the end of this K-8 kerflufflage is that all of these schools feed into the Red Bank Regional High School, a school so successful and well-regarded that it regularly draws students over and above those coming out of the feeder schools. In other words, when all is said and done, everybody's kids ends up in high school with Those Peoples' Kids anyway.

State Education Commissioner Hespe is expected to rule on RBCS's expansion plan soon. If you're in New Jersey, you might want to contact him with your thoughts. I'm over in Pennsylvania, but I can't even see a reason to keep Red Bank Charter School open, let alone expand it. But I have a feeling that the taxpayers of Red Bank could use a few more voices on their side.



*Courtesy of Red Bank SD, here's a demographic breakdown of the charter and public schools in nifty chart form

Apologies to those who got here early. Attempting to edit by phone led premature publication as well as a host of other issues appearing and disappearing (including, i guess, this oddly centered text).  This should now be it. I swear I'll never attempt editing by phone again.

The Flawed Premises of Reform

In Friday's Washington Post, Mike Petrilli and Chester Finn, the current and former chiefs of the right-tilted thinky tank Thomas B. Fordham Institute, set out to create a quick, simple history of modern education reform. It's aimed mostly at saying, "Look, we have most of the bugs worked out now!" But it also lays bare just what failed assumptions have been behind fifteen years of failed reformster ideas.

They start by throwing our gaze back a decade to when "US education policies were a mess." Then:

At the core of the good idea was the common-sense insight that if we want better and more equitable results from our education system, we should set clear expectations for student learning, measure whether our kids are meeting them and hold schools accountable for their outcomes, mainly gauged in terms of academic achievement.

And there are most of the problems with the reformsters approach, laid out in one sentence.

if we want better and more equitable results from our education system, we should set clear expectations for student learning

Yeah, that sounds sort of sensible, but the problem that first lurked in the background and then erupted with the advent of Common Core is that the way to make expectations clear is to make them specific, and before you know it, you have one-size-fits-all standards, and one-size-fits-all standards suck in the same way that making all US school students wear a one-size-fits-all uniform and eat one-size-fits-all food.

It is like saying that we can fix the divorce problem in this country by setting clear expectations for getting married and holding everyone to those expectations. Fordham sages tried to get around this with their "tight-loose" formulation, but they failed. Meanwhile, the standards themselves are amateur-hour constructions that take a definite side in arguments that experts don't find at all as neatly settled as the standards assume (e.g. is reading a complex relationship between reader and text, or a set of skills and behaviors-- the Core insists on  the latter, but actual educators favor the former). 

if we want better and more equitable results from our education system, we should... measure whether our kids are meeting them 

Also sounds sort of sensible, and yet we do not know how to do it. It really is as simple as that-- we do not have a large-scale, standardized instrument that can measure all learning for all students in a standardized, one-size-measures-all manner. Instead of asking, "What's the best way to measure critical thinking" test manufacturers have asked "What's something we could do on a standardized mass-administered test that would pass for a critical thinking measure?"

The Fordham has just released a report that tries to argue that the latest next-generation tests are achieving great feats of measurement. They aren't. And trying to measure student learning as if it occurs in just two dimensions on a single track is just such a meager, inadequate, stunted approach as to be useless. Well, worse than useless, because doing it leads some people to think they're actually accomplishing something.

if we want better and more equitable results from our education system, we should... hold schools accountable for their outcomes, mainly gauged in terms of academic achievement.

"Outcomes" just means "test scores," and that, again, is such a truncated, inadequate vision of the mission of US public schools. Ask a taxpayer, "What are you paying schools and teachers to do?" I doubt that you will hear the answer, "Why, just to have students get good test scores. That's it. That's what I'm paying them to do."

This is not to claim or pretend that there are not schools that are failing to fulfill the promise of public education. But that failure belongs not to the schools alone-- student success exists at the confluence of teachers, schools, communities, and local, state, and national leadership. Reformsters have been enthusiastic in their calls to hold teachers and schools accountable, but when it's time to hold state and federal governments accountable for bad regulations, unfunded mandates, and grotesquely inequitable funding of schools, reformsters fall silent. The fans of ed reform could, for instance, devote themselves to ferreting out districts where local and state authorities have underfunded schools to the point that students attend in unsafe crumbling buildings, but that's just not happening.

We know beyond the remotest shadow of a doubt that poverty is a huge factor in education. Not insurmountable, not inescapable, not hopelessly overpowering-- but still a major factor. We know that teachers are a large factor inside schools. But somehow we want to a big accountability hammer to land on teachers, but when it comes to holding anyone "accountable" for poverty, reformsters have nothing to say (well, except for those who suggest that the only people accountable for poverty are poor people).

And about that common-sense insight...

The notion that all of these things-- the clear and specific standards being measured by a test leading to "accountability" measures taken against the schools that come up short-- are common sense? Well, we have to call them "common sense" because we can't call them "evidence based" or "scientifically proven" or even "sure seemed to work well over in Location X" because none of those things are true. They haven't worked anywhere else, and now that we've been trying it for over a decade, we can see pretty clearly that they don't work here, either.

The best we get from reformsters is a circular argument-- "this tool is a valid measure and means of improvement, because when I measure the progress of this tool by using this tool, I see success."

There are other unfounded assumptions underlying the reformster approach that depend on these other bad assumptions. For instance, the whole idea that the power of the free market can be unloosed to improve education rests on the idea that we can measure definitively which are the best schools producing the best students who are taught by the best teachers. But we can no more do that than we can list the hundred best marriages in America, or the hundred best friends.

They remain convinced that we must have one-size-fits-all standards so that we can measure all students against them so that we can compare all students and schools so that we can.... what? We still don't have a real answer. It's common sense. It's something you just have to do, because not doing it clashes with reformsters beliefs about how the world is supposed to work. They literally do not understand how education works, and when they approach the world of education, they feel like OCD sufferers in a museum where all the paintings are hung crooked. They want to "fix" it, and they want to ask the people who work there, "How can you possibly function like this?" They can't see that the paintings aren't crooked at all.

The whole reformster approach is based on measuring a cloud with a meter stick, measuring the weather with a decibel meter, measuring love with a spoon.

Reformsters want to drive the school bus by setting a brick on the gas pedal and strapping the steering when into place, and every time the bus hits a tree, they say, "Oh, well, we just need a next-generation brick, and to fine-tune where we strap the steering wheel into place." They will tweak and improve and re-tweak, and they will keep failing because their approach is fundamentally wrong.

Paying Students for Scores

The Houston Independent School District is trying another way to boost AP test scores-- offer students and teachers a bounty. For every score in the 3-5 range, students-- and their teachers-- get $100.

While this is new in Houston, HISD is actually joining several other districts around the country in this use of bribes incentives for high schoolers.

While there may be similar-ish programs in districts across the country, the big dog in the AP bribery biz is the National Math and Science Initiative. NMSI is an organization that was launched "to address one of this nation’s greatest economic and intellectual threats – the declining number of students who are prepared to take rigorous college courses in math and science and are equipped for careers in those fields." You may recognize that as a classic reformster talking point-- low test scores are a threat to our national security-- and in fact, the big launching funders of NMSI include Exxon, the Michael and Susan Dell foundation, and the Gates Foundation. Partners also include the US Department of Education and the College Board, because why not fund an advocacy group that is telling everyone that your product is really important. This isn't philanthropy-- it's marketing.

And market they do. The college-ready initiative that supports the AP score pay-off plan features writing like this:

The AP curriculum is the best indicator available of whether students are prepared for college-level work.  Students who master AP courses are three times more likely to graduate from college. For minority students, that multiplier is even greater: African American and Hispanic students who succeed in AP courses are four times more likely to graduate from college.

Or students who are more likely to finish college are more likely to do college-preppy things like take AP courses. Man, sorting out correlation and causation must be really hard, because so few people want to actually do it.

The operation is pretty simple-- NMSI unloads a giant pile of money with a college-prep program and the rewards begin as NSMI works to transform the culture of the school. This "grant" program has been operating since 2008, starting out in Alabama, Kentucky, Arkansas, Virginia, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. Press has been generally positive when the program popped up in big mainstream outlets like the NYT and US Today. 

Are there issues with this? Well, yes-- any time we inject monetary bribery into education, we are essentially admitting that we can't think of any better reason for learning. That kind of debasement of education is typical of the reformster movement which holds as a foundational belief that the only reason to do things is to get a financial reward.

On the other hand, bribery was already cemented into the foundation of the AP product anyway-- the whole selling point has always been, "Take this course, score well on this test, and it will save you some bucks on your college education. Ka-ching." The AP appeal is to take a challenging course and get college credit. NMSI's program doesn't do much more than move payday forward. The one new feature added by the program is the increased incentive for AP teachers to drop everything and lay into test prep with a vengeance. If you think AP tests are not open to test prep, I have a bridge to sell you. In some courses, the test prep looks enough like real education to be tolerable, though under David Coleman's leadership, that is changing. What is true across the board is that hooking into the AP universe can be just a way to pay the College Board to write your curriculum for you.

NMSI may have to crank their program up soon. It pays bounty on scores from 3 to 5, but at least in my neck of the woods, colleges are increasingly rejecting 3s. Because they have high standards about how often they're willing to give up their own revenue in order to bolster the College Board's business plan.

It would be nice to talk about things like getting ready for college by acquiring actual knowledge and skills. As I often tell my juniors, "I understand that you have to worry about getting into the college of your choice, but you do realize that once you get there, they'll want you to show that you know stuff, too." An actual education is worth more than a hundred bucks.

Politicians Make My Job Harder

Sure, the fact that politicians have commandeered education and inflicted a whole boat-load of anti-education, anti-teacher, anti-students-who-aren't-from-the-right-families rules and regulations. But there are days when I think that all the bad policies, all the funding issues, all the bad leadership on the state and national level, all the esoteric and philosophical and policy issues that take us space on this blog-- none of that compares to trying to swim upstream in a culture that actively rejects some of the values that we're trying to teach.

We invest millions of dollars and endless hours of our attention, for instance, on anti-bullying programs within the walls of our schools. Then we send our students out into a world where bullying is how you Get Things Done. Our policymakers and politicians bully each other to score political victories. Donald Trump is walking away with the GOP nomination for President of the United Freaking States of America because he is the most effective bully in the field.

Or let's try to promote the basic principles of democracy, but at the same time, the Democratic Party will continue to operate its anti-democratic Superdelegate system, by which the party establishment has a buffer against their nomination process being derailed by the actual voters. And no, I don't feel better is you tell me that Superdelegates always follow the will of the voters, because if that's what they always do, they are completely unnecessary.

It is equally challenging to try pushing critical thinking in a world that is actively opposed to it. Take this current very tricky logic problem that our leaders currently face.

1) Supreme court vacancies are filled by the President.
2) The President is Barack Obama
3) There is a Supreme Court vacancy

So-- what happens next?

This is not a hard one to work out, yet we are already awash in people who are trying their damnedest to avoid the clear conclusion that Barack Obama should now nominate someone to fill the vacancy.

But this is politics as currently practiced, dependent on the very opposite of critical thinking. For critical thinking, we need to collect the evidence, analyze the evidence, and follow it wherever it leads. But in politics, we decide what conclusion want to reach, and then start collecting (or ignoring) evidence to support our pre-determined (or pre-paid for) conclusion. Hell, there are already politicians who oppose Obama's theoretical currently-non-existent nominee based on exactly zero evidence.

Sometimes, the adult world looks a lot like the guy who tells kids not to smoke or drink while puffing on a cigarette and throwing back a beer. Oh, wait. That would be our advertising, in which "responsible" alcohol manufacturers deliver the message, "Kids, you totally should not use this really awesome product that will make you feel wonderful. Just say no."

So here's my message to our political and policy leaders. If you want to oppose corruption, don't be corrupt.  If you want to oppose bullying, don't build your career around it. If you think children should tell the truth, stop lying (and doing it badly). And if you want to promote critical thinking, use it.

ICYMI: Edu-reading for the week

It is Sunday morning, and so cold and still outside that you can't hear anything but some birds and the sound of ice crunching up against the bridge. Perfect day to curl up with some hot chocolate and read what's been going on in the education world.

Charter Schools Are Not the Answer in Ohio

The superintendent of the education center in Lorain County, Ohio (the area where I had my first teaching gig) explains why charters just aren't the answer in Ohio.

Looking Anew at How Teachers Teach

"Anew" might be the wrong word here-- Larry Cuban puts the current kerflufflation over teaching in the context of the history of teaching kerfluffles.

Why Do Teachers Need Instructional Coaches

I have mixed feelings about "instructional coaches," but Peter DeWitt makes a good case for them here.

Stop Humiliating Teachers

David Denby at the New Yorker speaks out against the tradition of hammering on teachers everytime the country hits a rough patch.

An Open Letter To John Lewis

I love this letter-- not because it stands up for Bernie Sanders against the civil rights giants' comments earlier this week, and not because it manages to do so without using any of the asshat attacks on Lewis that characterized a lot of the Sanders "support" this week-- but because it includes a great story and reminder of how social movements really make a difference.

Trust Teachers

Russ Walsh makes a solid argument against the age-old practice of putting our trust in programs instead of teachers.

Beauty, the Rip, and Expectations

Back in May of 2015, Shea Glover, a student at the Chicago High School for the Arts in Ukranian Village, created an art project for her class. The project, she said, "evidently turned into a social experiment."

The result became a viral sensation, so you may have seen this before. Even if have (and especially if you haven't), take a look at it now. Go ahead. I'll wait.



At the moment, the video is closing in on ten million views. Numerous videos inspired by this one are out there, as well as an ad campaign from Dove that lifts the idea.

It's simple and striking. Glover tells her subject that they are beautiful, and they become more beautiful. You couldn't ask for a more powerful, clear and simple demonstration of the power of positive expectations.

It stands, of course, in sharp contrast to the gut-wrenching video that surfaced yesterday showing a teacher emotionally abusing a small child at Success Academy, the roughly sixty-gazillionth piece of evidence about SA's emphasis on brow-beating students into either excellence or departure.

There are many folks who don't get it. We see it in "no excuses" and other brutally over-controlling versions of classrooms-- this idea that "high expectations" means rain down shame and an ass-kicking to students who don't meet those expectations. It's ugly and unpleasant and when we see it in its raw naked form as in the SA video, we see just how awful it is. But it's not an anomaly at Success Academies-- or if it is, it's an anomaly so common that many, many people can step forward to say they've seen it, and can, independent of each other, say that it has a name at SA-- "rip and return."

I'm not advocating for a warm, gooey classroom where every student is effusively praised just for holding a pencil and making random marks on paper. Students will make mistakes, often, and we can't pretend they don't, or shouldn't. But mistakes are an opportunity for growth, not a cause for shame. Sometimes that growth is hard, and sometimes the truths that have to be faced are hard and rough; those are the very moments when making things harder, uglier, suckier on purpose is inexcusable. When the paper is wrinkled and the answers on it are wrong, that is the very worst time to rip it and throw it back in a student's face.

It's not just that shaming and browbeating are bad and ugly and lousy ways to treat fellow travelers on the surface of our small spinning globe. The biggest problem is that it just doesn't work.

Imagine that Glover had started filming and then said, "You know, if you would just smile a little, you could be a bit more beautiful." Would those faces have blossomed forth as they do in her film? I doubt it.

When you tell people, directly or indirectly, that they are strong and competent and capable and beautiful, they act as if they are strong and competent and capable and beautiful. When you tell people that they are stupid and they suck, they act as if they are stupid and sucky.

Glover's film ends with the line "There is so much beauty in the world; if you blink, you'll miss it." That's not quite right-- Glover didn't just see the beauty, but she actually added to it. She actually made the world a little bit more beautiful. Charlotte Dial, the SA teacher, made the world a little uglier.

Do you want to make a difference? Do you want to change the world? That's how you do it. You have the power to help every person you encounter become a little more beautiful, or a little more beat down. You have that power by virtue of being alive, and if you are a teacher in a classroom, that power is magnified by virtue of the many small humans in front of you. Use your power for good.

If you are interested in seeing what Glover has been up to, the young filmmaker has her own youtube channel.

ME: The Governor Takes Over

What do you do if you're the governor of a state and you can't get your choice for head of the Department of Education approved?

You just appoint yourself.

Yup. The Governor of Maine has appointed himself commissioner of the Department of Education. The legislature wouldn't approve his choice, currently acting commissioner William Beardsley. Beardsley will serve the maximum time allowed for an "acting" commissioner (six months) and then he will become deputy commissioner under the governor.

This would be wacky enough, but Maine's governor is Paul LePage, the one governor in this country who could give batshit crazy lessons to Donald Trump.

These are guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty—these types of guys—they come from Connecticut and New York, they come up here, they sell their heroin, they go back home. Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young white girl before they leave, which is a real sad thing because then we have another issue we have to deal with down the road.

Yes, that Paul LePage. The one that Esquire's Charles Pierce called "the insane bowling shoe who somehow got elected governor of Maine." Here are some other LePage classics:

Said that a Democratic senator "has no brains and a black heart and claims to be for the people but he’s the first one to give it to the people without Vaseline"

Told robot-building students at a STEM awards ceremony  “Next year I would like you to create a Legislature that doesn’t speak back.”

He's been a big fan of charter schools:  “ If you’ve got a job and you’re going to be intimidated, give it up and we’ll get somebody who can do the job. I am asking them for the good of the kids of the state of Maine, please go away. We don’t need you. We need some people with backbones.” — LePage calling on the members of Maine’s charter school commission to resign, a day after the seven-member panel rejected four out of five applications for new charter schools.

If you want a good education in Maine, and I get criticized by my opponents because I’m hard on education, but if you want a good education, go to an academy. If you want a good education go to private schools. If you can’t afford it, tough luck. You can go to the public school. 

He has compared the IRS to the Gestapo more than once.

And one of his first acts as governor was to refuse to attend a Martin Luther King Day breakfast and, when called on it, to tell the NAACP to kiss his butt. He also undid decades of environmental reguations, and took down a mural of labor history in the capitol, comparing it to North Korean brainswashing. He sabotaged a $120 million wind power plan.

This Politico article helps explain how such a thing happened. LePage is the Tea Party candidate who got lucky and, in a state where the GOP is a minority party, landed in the governor's mansion, where he hasn't stopped embarrassing the state since.

As commissioner, LePage woud be the sixth person to hold that position in three years. LePage is tired of having his nominations questioned and torn apart, but then, this is the guy who hired a corporate lobbyist to help him rewrite environmental laws. LePage calls confirmation hearings "a shit show."

On the one hand, the law says that a commissioner must have first served as deputy commissioner. On the other hand, Maine law says that in the absence of a commissioner, the governor is required to act on behalf of the department. Whatever the case, LePage seems to determined to make the legislature pay. Or, as suggested in the comments, he's just leveraging hard. The actual vote was scheduled next week, but likme a good pol, he's already run the numbers. Maybe he's hoping to hear sweet screams of, "Dear God, no! Anybody but you!"

"So, if they would rather have me in front of the Education Committee talking about education issues, I would be more than happy to," LePage said. "And that's what's going to happen."

"When they need somebody from education, guess who is going to be appearing?" LePage asked as he tugged on his suit jacket lapels. 

LePage is all about charters and choice and an unfortunate attachment to competency-based education, and his tenure as his own education commissioner should keep that rolling right along. It's probably just as well; the only person who could possibly run the department in the full-on crazy manner preferred by LePage is LePage. One can only hope that he will extend this level of wacknuttery to his entire government, eventually declaring himself King of Maine.