More Bad Poverty News

We have seen versions of these findings before, but one more study drives home the point again-- education does not erase the economics of your family of origin.

This particular study is written up by Brad Hershbein over at Brookings, and the findings are short, simple, and important.

While some folks accept that a person from a rich family and a person from a somewhat-less-rich family won't be put on a level playing field by a college degree, they'll at least enjoy the same sort of boost from that education. But Hershbein's research says, no, that's not how it works. This chart spells it out--

(FPL is Federal Poverty Level)

In other words, a BA helps rich kids get way richer, while a BA helps poor kids get only just a little bit less not-poor.

As I said, this is not exactly news. A Johns Hopkins study over twenty-five years in Baltimore cemented the importance of family-of-origin. Robert Putnam wrote an entire book about how access to social capital is both product and producer of differences between wealthy and not-wealthy children.

The results are clearly not exactly what Hershbein expected, and he reports that he and his partners are moving next to see if the findings hold up for other data sets as well as looking for explanations (neighborhood, location, college choice for non-wealthy students?). It is frankly refreshing to see a researcher first come upon results that don't match his pre-existing assumptions and then not leap to trying to explain them away.

If a college degree is not the great equalizer we hoped, strategies to increase social mobility by promoting post-secondary education will fall short. A more comprehensive approach may be needed.

I look forward to seeing what else Hershbein et al turn up. In the meantime, it's nice to have further proof that simply jamming poor students into a college will not magically erase poverty. 

Yes! Make King Secretary of Ed!

Well, it's finally happening-- Acting Pretend Secretary of Education John King is going to have his very own nominations hearing starting on Thursday, and I'm okay with that.

Carol Burris, former all-star New York principal and currently Executive Director of the Network for Public Education, has written a clear and thorough explanation of just how badly King performed as New York State's education chief. John King has a compelling personal story, though I wonder what he's learned from it. But Burris points out three major issues with his management style.

King is inflexible and deals with those who disagree by questioning their motives. His total and blind commitment to Common Core and other reformy programs created many major messes in NY. And King's devotion led him to stay the course, no matter what actual data came in. Under King, Common Core implementation was a disaster, teacher evaluation was a disaster, testing was a disaster, massive data gathering was a disaster, and having public meetings to manage public reaction to the other disasters was a disaster.

Nevertheless, I am happy that King is getting a hearing, and I hope he gets the job.

First, we need to recognize that the administration is going to pick somebody in the Duncanesque reformster mode. People who believed that Duncan was somehow responsible for all the evils of ed reform under Obama were always kidding themselves, imagining that somehow Duncan was driving the school bus and Obama was  not paying attention. We've had seven years of exactly the education policy that President Obama wanted us to have.

Put another way-- while people may object to King's support for the Common Core, standardized testing, the use of test scores for teacher evaluations, and charter school love, the unfortunate truth is that anybody put forward by this administration will share those affections. The policy support menu that people hate about King is also the policy support menu that is a basic requirement for being Barack Obama's ed secretary. If King is rejected, the President is not going to get on the phone to Diane Ravitch. Heck-- Jeb Bush is now available, and there's nothing that Jeb believes about education that would conflict with current administration policies.

So we're going to have someone who perpetuates reformsters policies, and if we must, I say that John King is a fine choice.

Why? Well, let's look at some of his accomplishments in New York State.

King helped galvanize such outrage and activism about data mining that a $100 million project supported by Bill Gates was scrapped.

King powered up the largest test revolt in the country, creating an opt-out movement that is now a potent political force in the Empire State.

As often as he said dumb things, Arne Duncan also was able to say the right thing. Let's be honest-- there was a time when we all listened to what he and his boss had to say and thought, "Yeah, that's right. That sounds good. I think maybe we're going to be okay." King (or some USED intern) is already showing an ability to make semi-conciliatory noises, but two things work against him-- we know who he is and what he's supported and until he tells us a story about his trip on the road to education Damascus, there's no reason to believe anything has changed; and second, he has a proven track record of being a terrible communicator. Say what you like about Duncan (I know I have), but he would never have screwed up the New York "Splaining Tour to the point of cancelling it because he couldn't handle it.

In the ongoing argument about public education, we pro-public ed folks have had a problem convincing civilians that there's a problem. We shout and point and holler, "There's a monster over there!" and they look and they see a reasonably pleasant mild-mannered guy who explains that he's just looking out For The Children. We try to sound the alarm and end up looking like William Shatner gawking out the airplane window.

But in New York, John King did what dozens of pro-public ed activists failed to do-- he got thousands upon thousands of parents and taxpayers to see just how crappy the reformster plan for education was. His tone deafness, his inflexibility, his utter dismissal of other viewpoints, his unwavering focus on barreling right past red flags-- all of that had the effect of displaying the reformster agenda in all its ugly unvarnished glory. John King was the emperor who paraded his nakedness without restraint or artifice, and many New Yorkers looked and said, "Damn! Yuck! I finally get it! This is bad stuff."

So keep sending those letters and letting Congress know he's bad news. That's fine. Maybe somebody at the hearing will actually even ask questions about the train-wreck of federal education policy, even if they do think they've rendered his office mootly neutered with the ESSA (Education Secretary Spanking Act). They're wrong, but that's another conversation. Let's go ahead and have this conversation first.

But me? I'm just hoping that King can do for the nation what he did for New York. Spread opt out across the country. Galvanize parents. Tout reformster ideas with so little sense or restraint that even the most casual observers will start to think, "Hey, those seem like really bad policies."

ICYMI: Reading for a quiet Sunday

Some reading for you from this week in education. 

TN Not Ready

Tennessee was supposed to be taking its super-duper online test. Things didn't go so well.

I’m a New York City school administrator. Here’s how segregation lives on.

This piece isn't short, but it's pretty raw and thorough, from someone who taught, founded a school, and learned some hard lessons about segregation in NY.

The Promise of Integrated Schools


Integrated schools are better for everybody, and the research keeps saying so, over and over and over.

Students Aren't Coddled; They're Defeated

I referenced John Warner's article earlier in the week, but it's worth reading the whole thing. You may or may not agree with him, but I bet you'll recognize some of the students he's talking about.

McKinsey and Friends in Minneapolis

Sarah Lahm has been writing a super series about how McKinsey helped worm reformsterism into Minneapolis. The above link takes you to part one, and you should follow up with parts two, three and four

MS To Teachers: "Shut Up!"

So, first, to put this in context, I have to tell you about Initiative 42.

Mississippi has historically languished at the bottom of the American education barrel, notable for their unwillingness to spend money on schools. Maybe many of their leaders don't like education, or don't like spending money, or don't like spending money that might somehow help black folks. I'm sure it's all very complicated. But at the end of the day, Mississippi has systematically underfunded their school system.

They took a shot at fixing the problem in 1997 with the Mississippi Adequate Education Program. By passing the MAEP, the legislature committed to funding schools according to a formula, but mostly all MAEP has done is provide a formula for computing just how money public schools are being cheated out of. The funding requirement laid out by MAEP has only been met twice since 1997. Since 2009, Mississippi has underfunded schools by $1.5 billion-with-a-B.

So last year, some folks proposed yet another tweak to the rules. That tweak looked something like this, with strikethroughs representing the deleted language and underlining the added language:

SECTION 201.
Educational opportunity for public school children: To protect each child's fundamental right to educational opportunity The Legislature the State shall, by general law, provide for the establishment, maintenance and support of an adequate and efficient system of free public schools upon such conditions and limitations as the Legislature may prescribe. The chancery courts of this State shall have the power to enforce this section with appropriate injunctive relief.
 
This was Initiative 42, and while it may look like SOP in some states, in Mississippi, it raised quite a fuss.

Arguments against it included "We underfund everything; why are schools special?" Also, "the GOP has been doing a great job funding education!" Republicans from Haley Barbour to the MS GOP chairman argued that this gave power to "a judge in Hinds County." Because if there's anything that characterizes our democratic form of government, it's that the legislative branch should be allowed to operate without having to answer to anybody, ever.

The GOP-controlled legislature floated their own amendment called "Alternative 42," putting the legislature on par with those companies that create cheap knock-off versions of popular films in hopes that your easily-confused grandfather will buy you a copy for your birthday. Alternative 42 was sort of the same idea except instead of having to provide an "adequate and efficient system of free public schools" to the satisfaction of the courts, Alternative 42 would have required the legislature to provide "an effective system" that satisfied the legislature's idea of what such a system would be. IOW, Alternative 42 would not have done jack.

What it did do was turn the ballot initiative into a series of confusing questions about either-or propositions where you had to decode exactly what you were voting for. Both measures were defeated, allowing Mississippi's political leaders to continue sitting on their hands and doing Not A Damn Thing about education. (If you would like to read more about the ballot initiative, I recommend this highly informative article at Ballotpedia, upon which I leaned heavily for the above account.)

Actually, Not A Damn Thing isn't quite fair. The MS legislature is still considering lots of fun education bills. Here's one that fines a school $1,500 every time it doesn't have students say the Pledge of Allegiance within the first hour of school. Here's one forbidding schools to open before Labor Day.
Here's one to make sure that Creationism can still be taught in the classroom (actually, as written, it also allows teachers to throw in Holocaust denial and Flat Earth Theory).

Oh, yeah. And this bill and this bill both intended to make teachers shut the hell up.

One version of the bill is from House Education Chairman John Moore, who filed a similar bill last year. The other version of the bill is from Greg Snowden, who also authored Alternative 42, the legislative smokescreen that laid down to mess with Initiative 42.

Not that Mississippi has ever been fond of vocal teachers-- this is the state where teacher strikes are illegal, and if a teacher takes part in one, she can never work in any school in Mississippi ever again. But it may be the Initiative 42 fracas that finally overstressed the legislative camel's back. Teachers and superintendents lobbied hard for that bill, and the legislature didn't much care for it. So now we have increased attempts to silence Mississippi educators.

Some of the provisions of these proposed laws are reasonable. Teachers who want to advocate for a political action shouldn't be doing it while they're on the state's clock. "Here's a worksheet to do quietly while I call my Congressman or work on this phone chain" is not an acceptable professional stance.

But the bills as written are both vague and extensive. Can I turn to a colleague at lunch and say, "You know, I really think we should all vote for Candidate Barnswaggle in the upcoming election"? Getting on Facebook and posting any kind of political message while I'm on my duty-free lunch period-- well, depending on the bill, that could earn a fine of $100 to $250 (Snowden) or a fine of $10K and loss of my teacher license (Moore).

Teachers, however, make out far better than superintendents, who are not allowed to take a political position on anything, ever. They may not advocate for or against bills that could affect their districts, ever. Ditto for school board members, which must make them the only elected officials who give up their First Amendment rights by being elected.

As one analysts suggests, these bills could also clamp down on any political activity in the schools-- say goodbye to your campus chapter of Young Republicans or Young Democrats. In fact, combined with the "teach the controversy in science" bill, these would make Mississippi schools the only place where you could discuss the existence of God, Satan or the Flying Spagetti Monster, but not the existence of political parties and legislation.

And so the Mississippi legislature works hard to maintain its supremacy in education awfulness, pursuing its right to avoid spending any money on schools while not having to listen to anybody bitch about it. Mississippi-- "it's like coming home" if you are over 150 years old.

Awful Mean Naughty Journalism

unionsCaroline Bermudez is senior writer and press secretary at Education Post, Peter Cunningham's  pro-reform rapid response war room created to help Tell the Reformsters' Story. And this week Bermudez took to Real Clear Education to complain that "Uninformed, Irresponsible Journalism Is Killing Needed Education Reform."

Bermudez wants to call out the anti-reform narrative, the "amalgamation of all the myths spewed forth against education reformers." These pieces are "political propaganda as nuanced as a jackhammer drilling into concrete." But those pieces come from people like Valerie Strauss and Jeff Bryant who, she implies, are eminently dismissable, but it makes her really sad when the New Yorker publishes film critic David Denby's "hollow critique" of the general anti-teacher tenor of education reform. And he did it without any data!! Or reliable evidence!! Bermudez's indignation would be more compelling if "No data or reliable evidence" were not the reformster movement's middle name. Can we talk about how Common Core arrived without a stitch of evidence to its name, not even for the very idea of using national standards to improve education, and it's still prancing around naked today? Or the kind of fake research regularly churned out by groups like TNTP or NCTQ?

But Bermudez is not here simply to register her righteous shock and blah-blah-blah over a major magazine pointing out what millions of teachers already know. She would also like to take a moment to mock all articles that disagree with the reformsters. She calls the anti-reform pieces "endemic" and notes that reformsters "utter familiar groans" when they come across these articles that so often "repeat the same sound bites."

And then she lists the things she's tired of hearing:

1. Education reformers disrespect teachers.
2. Reformers solely blame teachers for educational failure.
3. Poverty goes unacknowledged by reformers.
4. Public education is fine. Reformers are hysterical.
5. Charter schools privatize public education.
6. Reformers reflexively hate unions.

So, I guess the good news is that she has been listening, kind of? The bad news is that Bermudez does not offer any research, data or arguments in response to any of these alleged criticisms. But education reformers do disrespect teachers, from their idea that anybody from the right background can become a teacher with five weeks of training, to their insistence that bad teachers are the root of educational evil, to their steady attempts to reduce teachers to simple "content delivery clerks."

Of course, almost no reform critics claim that reformers only blame teachers (and that includes the article she linked to, which also doesn't claim that), just as no serious reform critic claims that reformsters don't acknowledge poverty at all. There are some good conversations to be had about poverty, its effects as an obstacle to education, and how to deal. But Bermudez is hell-bent on overstating her case in order to make a point, so she says silly things like claiming that pro-public education writers say that public ed is fine and that reformsters are hysterical (once again, the article she links to, which actually has a good deal of charts and data, doesn't actually say what she suggests it says).

Not all of her points are overstatements. Lots of pro-public ed writers point out that charter schools privatize public education, which is kind of like pointing out that the sky is blue and water is wet. I don't think I've read all that many reformsters who even try to claim otherwise.

Union hatred? Well, yes. DFER hates unions with the hot, shiny hatred of a hundred suns. Vergara, Friedrichs, Baby Vergara in New York-- all lawsuits brought by big-money reformsters to roll back the union, just like the arguments about removing tenure and other job protections, all rooted in a general philosophy that a school leader CEO should be free to make choices without having to deal with a union. maybe her point is that reformsters don't hate unions "reflexively," but after lots of thought and careful consideration. Fair enough.

Of course, she also doesn't argue that any of these oft-repeated points is wrong. Just that they're of-repeated.

Bermudez has some specific recommendations. "Ambitious, valuable journalism" does not, for instance, use terms like "corporate reform." Not that she thinks reformsters should never be critiqued:

While our opponents believe we prefer to live in an echo chamber, we would much rather have our work analyzed—even challenged—thoughtfully and without an obvious agenda.

So says the woman who handles PR for a website launched with $13 million dollars from Eli Broad and other reformsters in order to make sure that they get their message out there. 

The irony is that I actually know several thoughtful reformers with whom it is possible to have thoughtful, productive conversations. But they generally don't open by making unsupported mis-statements of pro-public education arguments. Bermudez is not trying to start a conversation; like many reformsters before her, she is arguing that the other side should by and large be silent.

She is also promoting the old subtext that Education Post and some others are fond of-- the notion that pro-public ed folks are some large, well-coordinated conspiracy, passing talking points back and forth and creating swarms that make it hard for the beautiful truth of reformster policy to be heard, and occasionally infecting real journalists with their mean propaganda. I'll give her credit-- she at least doesn't accuse all pro-public ed writers of being tools or paid shills of the teachers unions. You haven't really arrived in the pro-public ed writing world until you've been accused of being a union shill.

I always want to ask the paid reformsters mouthpieces like Bermudez-- just how much do you believe this stuff. If you were not a paid PR flack for this site, how much of your time and effort would you devote to your cause. Because I'm sitting here tapping one more blog post out for free in the morning hours before I head to work (all day rehearsal-- it's school musical season here). In a couple of months the Network for Public Education will have its third annual convention and some of us won't be there because we can't afford it and nobody pays us to go. Sometimes I just don't think that folks like Bermudez get that we are neither well-funded or well-organized-- we just believe that we see something that has to be called out and resisted. I have no idea how much Bermudez is paid to be Education Post's PR flack, and I don't know how much she got to write this particular article, but I'm responding to it for free.

Of course, Bermudez is not arguing against bloggers so much as decrying that a real paid journalist is picking on ed reform, but she tries to dismiss Denby by lumping him in with the rest of us, by treating all anti-reform writing as if it's one big piece of fluff. But at no point in her piece does she explain where she thinks Denby-Bryant-Strauss-Ravitch-Heilig get it wrong. Maybe coming up with the research and data to support such a view would just be too rigorous, or maybe such work has no place in a pro-reform screed. But if Bermudez knew more about teaching, maybe she'd remember that a good technique for teaching is to model the behavior you want to see.

WI: Trying To Hide Charter Truth

One of the great lies of the charter-choice movement is that you can run multiple school districts for the price of one.

A school district of, say, 2,000 students can lose 75 students and with them about $750,000 dollars of revenue, and somehow that district of 1,925 students can operate for three quarter of a million dollars less. And how does the district deal with that loss of revenue? By closing a building-- because the more school buildings you operate, the more it costs.

The other common response of a school district to the loss of revenue to charters is to raise local taxes. If charters want to look at where some of their bad press is coming from, they might consider school boards like mine that regularly explain to the public, "Your local elementary is closing and your taxes are going up because we have to give money to the cyber charters."

We can run examples a dozen different ways. What is cheaper in the aggregate-- to house your ten person family in one house, or to house each family member is a separate building? Is it cheaper and more efficient to educate 2,000 students in one district with one set of administrators and special areas teachers, or in five school districts with five sets of administrators and special area teachers?

The inefficient, multiple provider model of charter schools creates greater expense, and the difference can only be made up one of two ways-- either taxpayers must fork over more money for education, or schools must cut services. If you are going to add charter-choice schools to a system, those are the only two options.

States have tried to fudge their way around with various systems of reimbursements to school districts for the students they lose to choice-charter. IOW, when that district loses the $750K, some states help make up the shortfall, either partially or completely. This is solidly in the Taxpayers Must Pay More category, but by funneling the money through the state, taxpayers might be kept unaware that they are paying more tax dollars so that a handful of students can go to a private school at public expense.

Which brings us to the morning  news from Wisconsin. 

Wisconsin is a happy land for school choice fans, with vouchers in play through three separate programs, robust choice advocacy groups, and a governor who tries to expand school choice every time the sun shines. So they have had plenty of opportunity to feel the effects of voucher prorgams sucking the life blood from public schools. Choice advocates have tried combating the bad PR with bad arguments ("it all just kind of evens out over time, somehow"). But now the legislature is trying to patch, or at least hide, the bleeding.

The 2015-2017 let local school districts draw on additional tax dollars, through state aid and through property taxes, to cover the money lost to vouchers, but Assembly Speaker Robin Vos didn't like that plan, feeling that local school districts could "pocket" the difference (schools would probably have squandered those tax dollars on books and programs and education stuff, and we can't have that). Vos's proposal would have dramatically reduced the amount of revenue that districts could call on to plug the gap, actually leaving districts in the hole.

Thursday the legislature passed a break-even compromise. If a school loses $750K in voucher money, they are authorized to gather some combination of additional state aid and local tax increases to raise exactly that $750K.

Which means that having vouchers in a Wisconsin school district raises the cost of educating students in that district by exactly the cost of the vouchers. The vouchers represent not a backpack of student money following students from school to school, but additional taxpayer dollars injected into the education system. The taxpayers will pay extra so that some students can go to a private school.

This is not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. If you want to stand up in front of the taxpayers and sell the idea that they should pay higher taxes so that some students can go to a private school at public expense, go ahead and try to sell that idea. But if you are going to insist on lying about it and insist, for instance, that people's taxes are NOT going up to finance vouchers-- well, that sort of dishonesty doesn't benefit anybody.

Wisconsin is a fine example of a state that has successfully avoided having an honest discussion about what they are actually doing, which is increasing taxes in order to fund a new entitlement-- the entitlement of a handful of students to attend a private school at pubic expense. Such an entitlement may or may not be a good idea-- that's a separate discussion, but step one in having that discussion is to be honest about what you want to do.

PA: Philly School Commission Gets Spanked

Philly schools are, by any measure, a mess. And after almost two decades, they are a prime example of how badly state takeover districts fail.

In the nineties, the school gave up lost local control in exchange for enough funding to survive. In 2001, the state installed the School Reform Commission, a board created by the legislature and  made out of politicians appointed at the state and city level. Of course, the advantage is that politically appointed boards know secrets to effectively running school districts that locally elected boards do not. Ha! Just kidding. Despite its insistence that it could do better, the SRC doesn't know a damn thing about running school systems-- but they have certainly learned a lot. And the states supreme court just delivered another lesson.

In the process of gaining an education, the SRC has managed to anger just about everybody on every side of the education debates. Their overwhelming concern became coming up with more money because, shockingly, it turns out you can't just reverse the effects of Pennsylvania's cockamamie inadequate funding system just by Tightening Your Belt and Being More Efficient. So the SRC went looking for money everywhere.

They angered teachers by finding money in staffing. They found this money by unilaterally declaring that they would honor neither their contract nor state law. They declared for themselves the power that reformsters like TNTP dream of-- the power to ignore seniority in staffing choices. This power allowed them to make staffing choices, including layoff choices, based on cost rather than seniority. They tried outsourcing substitute teachers to save money this year and-- well, fun fact: when you offer people less money to do a job that not many people want to do anyway, they do not turn out in droves for the chance.And they privatized like crazy, the Superintendent serving as chief charter conversion officer.

They could experiment with all these various techniques because the legislative act that created the SRC exempted them from huge chunks of the Pennsylvania School Code, the portion of state law that governs schools.

But the SRC learned one other thing-- Pennsylvania charter schools are financial vampires that suck the blood right out of public schools. And so the SRC started saying no to new schools, no to raising caps, no to letting charters grow. Some charters fought back by, well, just ignoring restrictions (one charter exceeded its cap of 675 students by 600-- probably not a clerical error). But the West Philadelphia Achievement charter decided to take their beef to court. The SRC said, the financial hardship no law law allows us to do this, because charters constitute a big fat financial hardship on our public school. And the case went to the state supreme court.

And the SRC lost.

What the State Supremes said was that the legislature was acting unconstitutionally when it gave the SRC powers that only belong to the legislature.

Is this good news or bad news? Well, it means that the days of the Philly SRC acting as if they don't have to answer to anybody are over, so that's not a bad thing. On the other hand, it means the day of Philly charter schools acting as if they don't have to answer to anybody are just beginning. Most importantly for the plaintiffs, in Pennsylvania a charter can expand as much as it wants, and the public school district to which it is attached, leechlike, must just keep forking over money (that's how the charters of Chester Uplands could end up actually taking more money from the district than the state gives in support). So now the district has to play by the rules even though, as the SRC has already noticed, some of the rules suck.

Philly schools now also have a tremendous mess to clean up from the years of disregarding seniority in job assignments and layoff callbacks. That's going to be a fun time.

Of course, there are other solutions. Periodically somebody floats the idea of installing an Achievement School District style state takeover district, and since most of the bottom schools in the state are in Philly, establishing an ASD would mean that the state could take over from, well, the state. That could prompt another fun rule rewrite.

Another solution would be for the state to finally fix its dementedly off-kilter finding system, but that's not going to happen any time soon. As I type this, we are on Day 233 without a state budget. The state capitol, currently occupied by the least competent legislature in the country, is currently the least likely place to find any sort of solution to anything. Good luck, SRC!