FL: Participation Points

When it comes to terrible education decisions, few legislatures can hold a candle to the whiz-bang elected wizards of Florida. Along with their the state's chief education minion Pam Stewart, they have raised fetishizing the Big Standardized to awesome heights.

Stewart and the legislature earned their Gold Medal in Being Awful for their treatment of Ethan Rediske. The state demanded that Ethan's parents provide plenty of proof that he needed to be excused form the Floirida BS Test because he was dying. Stewart accused Ethan's mother of trying to use Ethan's situation to make political hay,.because when a grieving mother has lost a long-suffering child to long-term debilitating illness, her first thought as she grieves is to get some political leverage out of the situation. Okay, maybe Stewart can be excused for thinking that of course someone would try to raise political capitol from the tragic death of a young child-- because that's exactly what legislators in Tallahassee proceeded to do.

Many testocrats have tried to sell the story that we are actually doing students a huge favor by wasting their time on BS Testing, but nobody has really committed to this unsupported claim like Florida's leaders. And here they are, at it again.

The law now says that all students must participate. And that means that the Rule of Stupid Laws now kicks in: when you create a stupid law, you end up looking far stupider trying to enforce it than anybody does breaking it.

There was a classic example years ago in Massachusetts at Danvers High School when the principal (I am not making this up) tried to ban the word "meep." Besides opening the school to universal ridicule, the entire business included robocalling the entire student body and (still not making this up) informing a lawyer that his "meep" infused letter to the district had been forwarded to the police. If you've spent any time at all around small humans, you know how this played out. Students tested every possible permutation of the rule. Would you get in trouble for saying "Mee" or "Peem" or "Peep" or, most awesomely, "Ni." I have often wondered how that story finally played out, but I can guarantee you it didn't end with the principal winning cheerful compliance and students solemnly determining they had seen the error of their ways.

In Florida, the word is not "meep," but "participate." And that means we now get to watch the state of Florida attempt to beat back all manner of tests of that law. 

If my child signs his name to the test and then pushes the test away an answers zero questions, has he participated? Does he have to answer one question to qualify as "participating"? Ten questions? Does she have to try, or is it participating if she plays ACDC on the test?

Hilariously, the state has so far declined to answer any such questions:

"I feel like answering the type of question provides more information that could be construed as encouraging students or parents not to take the test," DOE spokeswoman Meghan Collins said. "That's just something we don't want to do."

In other words, we refuse to tell you what the minimum requirement is to avoid violating our stupid rule.

The Tampa Bay Times pressed Stewart's office for an official, legal definition of participating, but they simply referred the reporter to the actual letter of the law, which is not very helpful:

"Participation in the assessment program is mandatory for all school districts and all students attending public schools, including adult students seeking a standard high school diploma under s. 1003.4282 and students in Department of Juvenile Justice education programs, except as otherwise provided by law. If a student does not participate in the assessment program, the school district must notify the student's parent and provide the parent with information regarding the implications of such nonparticipation."

So the penalty for not participating is a note home to your parents. And nobody seems to knpow what the big bad punishment might be beyond that. But still no whiff of a definition of what "participate" actually means.

Whatever it means, lots of Florida parents don't do it. Last year over 100 Florida schools didn't get their official fake grade from the state because they fell below the 95% participation rate. Probably lots of principals and teachers and students and families crying themselves to sleep over that one.

You can't brow beat people into compliance by using a stupid rule, which is what Florida has tried to do.  They now have to deal with a rule so unclear that nobody can tell when you've actually broken it or what happens to you if you do break it. I'm willing to bet that the rest of the nation's testocrats will not be looking to Florida for pointers on how to beat back opt outers.

Teacher Eval: Waist Deep in the Big Muddy

Thomas Toch turned up in the Atlantic this morning to argue that teacher evaluation, now given a bit of freedom in the new ESSA, should stay the course.

Toch is senior partner at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, a name apparently chosen for its high degree of irony. Their emphasis is making teachers into uniform cogs in a machine that works at scale. One of their six guiding principles is "Variation in performance is the core problem to address." Their staff includes a woman with one of the absolutely best titles ever-- Director of Productive Persistence-- but their board of trustees includes many of the usual reformy suspects, including Harvard Graduate School of Education, Teach for America, and Randi Weingarten.

Toch notes that the Obama administration worked real hard to push teacher evaluation systems, even though they were opposed by the "two powerful forces" of teacher unions and Tea Party. But he is concerned that ESSA "abandoned" the work of identifying "who in the profession was doing a good job, and who wasn't."

This is a bit of a fuzzy point. There's actually a difference between trying to identify effective teachers and trying to foster teaching effectively, but Toch is going to cut several corners before we're done.

The teacher unions have dismissed the Obama strategy as ineffective, as more hurtful than helpful to the teaching profession. But over three dozen states have embraced more meaningful teacher-measurement systems under the Obama incentives, combining features like clearer performance standards, multiple classroom observations, student-achievement results and, increasingly, student surveys. 

First of all, a bicycle, because a vest has no sleeves. Toch has put two sentences side by side that have nothing to do with each other. Have teachers unions dismissed Obama's "strategy" as ineffective and more hurtful than helpful? Well, yes-- and so have a boatload of other people. So it might make sense to ask if the system is, in fact, any good. But instead Toch says, "But hey-- lots of people implemented systems of some kind."

What Toch persistently and deliberately skates around throughout the article is that the Obama plan for teacher evaluation rested almost entirely on linking teacher evaluation to student test scores through what's usually called a VAM system, and it has been debunked and rejected by everyone from the American Statistical Association to the National Association of Secondary School Principals. There is an entire blog (Vamboozled), run by a numbers scholar, devoted to debunking VAM.

Toch very carefully avoids mentioning that Obama's teacher evaluation plan was to tie teacher evaluation to the same high stakes standardized tests that have become so controversial in a system that is widely regarded to simply not work. The test score evaluation ties come up just twice-- and Toch dismisses them as if they are something far in the past and not part of current reality, and blames them on Duncan. And to prove that he's uninterested in facts and data and reputable science, he cites the National Council on Teacher Quality, an organization that has rated colleges on programs that don't exist and once critiqued college education programs based on the handouts from commencement. They are quite possibly the least serious research group in all of education, and if Toch wants to make a serious point, he should not mention them.

He refers to some other great new ideas, like teaming up master teachers with newbies which is neither a bad idea nor a new one. He touts new systems for providing teachers with personalized "playlists" of canned lessons, as if that's a good idea (it's not). He notes that lots of professional development sucks, which is news to exactly nobody. He notes that some side-effects have been stupid (gym teacher evaluated on ELA test scores), but he signals that he really doesn't get it with an oft-repeated refrain:

But it’s clear from the many new evaluation initiatives launched in recent years that well-designed evaluation systems with a mix of measures, multiple evaluators, and a strong focus on teacher improvement can strengthen instruction, make teaching more attractive work, and raise student achievement.

This is the signal fallacy, the giant gaping maw of wrong nestled in the heart of Bush-Obama teacher eval policies-- the notion that a teacher's primary job is to get students to score well on a Big Standardized Test."Student achievement" is reformspeak for "test scores," and that's simply not the most important-- probably not even An important-- part of a teacher's job. No parent in America says, "My kid has a great teacher this year," and means "My kid's teacher helped her get some really good test scores."

The Obama-era teacher evaluation systems sucked. They collected lousy information about things that aren't even the most important part of a teacher's work. They consistently proved to be unreliable and invalid. They provided no useful information to anybody. One of the few bright spots of ESSA is the end of the federally-mandated inaccurate unreliable nonsense evaluation system. Yes, many of the old-style evaluation systems were not very helpful, but the new systems actually managed to be worse by creating the illusion that real evaluating was going on, and by forcing schools to focus on unimportant baloney instead of real teaching. Toch can go wading on into the Big Muddy, but I recommend that the rest of us turn around and get back on solid ground.

Misunderstanding the Core

In today's New York Times, Kevin Carey says that Donald Trump does not understand the Common Core. He's not wrong, but as I read his piece, I suspect that Carey doesn't understand the Core, either.

Kevin Carey is the education policy program director for the New America Foundation. NAF bills itself as a non-partisan thinky tank based in DC. Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, is chair of the NAF board. Their over-a-million-dollar funders include the Gates Foundation and the US State Department. He has beaten the drum in the past for the terrible awfulness of US education at all levels.

His main point is solid-- when Drumpf and the rest proclaim they will rip the Core straight out of the federal gummint, they are slinging high-grade baloney. The Core cannot be removed from federal laws and regulations for the same reason that I can't stop Shakira from sending me torrid love notes every day. The Core have no place in regulation; this, of course, is one of the advantages of pushing a policy initiative through a well-financed network of billionaire-supported organizations that push policy, create supportive PR, and credential their own operatives to move into governance and leadership roles. If Drumpf or Cruz really wanted to do something, they could swear that they would visit Bill Gates and make him withdraw every cent of Gates money from organizations that support the Core.

Carey presents a brief history of educational crisis, starting with an unironic mention of A Nation At Risk, the report that announced that the country was in imminent danger of collapse because of our terribly mediocre education system and if we didn't Do Something Right Away, there would be hell to pay. Except that the report came out thirty-three years ago, and we have still received no invoices from Hades. Carey asserts that this is because (and this is a fine line some reforminators have to walk) there has been lots of progress, but not enough progress.

Carey also argues that while local districts can set local standards and approaches, they "don't actually have the ability" because "the world around us ultimately determines what students need to learn." This would be a compelling argument if the Common Core had not been presented without a single concrete reference to what the world around us demands. But no-- some wise men (whose wisdom was because of, not in spite of, their lack of educational credentials) came up with their own idea of what students need to learn.

If Carey doesn't get that, it may be because his understanding of the Common Core isn't any better than Donald Drumpf's.

The Common Core is simply a way of organizing and articulating standards that already exist, for the benefit of students, parents and teachers, so that schooling makes sense when children move between different grades, schools, districts and states. (emphasis mine)

Nope. The Common Core were built on a foundation of unicorn's breath and rainbow seeds. Search all of the Common Core promotional and PR materials, cruise the many many many MANY David Coleman interviews, and you will not find a single reference to pre-existing standards.

Some education amateurs with rich and powerful friends wrote down their ideas of what standards all students must reach to be college and career ready, despite the fact that nobody has any proven list of "college and career ready" requirements.So what we end up with is a top-down imposed one-size-fits-all(-and-therefore-fits-nobody) standards.


Carey clearly does not want students to be "at the mercy" of local schools and local decision-maker, but what he and other Core fans still have not explained is why students should instead be at the mercy of un-elected corporately-paid federally-enabled amateur education "officials" who decide on their own that they are the ones to redefine what it means to be an educated person. And at the end of the day, the education that is delivered by a local district is still determined by the local district, anyway.

What both Trump and Carey don't understand is that the Common Core is now an amorphous mess, no longer having any single universal meaning. It means different things in different states, on different tests, in different classrooms, in different districts. In some places some version of it is enforced with iron strictures, while in other schools, a teacher can strap a laser to a tap-dancing monkey for a class project and call it Common Core aligned.

There are so many different understandings of the Core out there that we can truly say that nobody understands the Core-- not Drumpf, not Carey, not anybody. That's one more reason that it should simply go away.

Competency Based Ed for Teachers

Competency Based Ed (or Proficiency Based Learning or Outcome Based Education) is increasingly and alarmingly all the rage, but so far we've been talking about it mainly as a content delivery system for K-12 students. Well, says Patrick Riccards at Real Clear Education, why not use it as an approach to training teachers as well?

Riccards is the chief communications and strategy officer for the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and he lays a foundation here of reformy building blocks. Here's the Bellwether Partners report on how we don't know how to unpack "the black box of good teaching." Here's a charmingly trusting assertion that Charlotte Danielson " has clearly identified the knowledge and skills that beginning teachers need to both succeed in those formative years and remain in the classroom for many years to come." Has she? Has she really? Why, bless her heart, and yours too, if you believe in her so hard.

But Riccards is here to argue against inputs, against the traditional teacher prep program that measures hours and lists the courses one must take.

There is nothing magical about 36 credit hours of graduate education that ensures one will be an effective teacher. Instead, it is about understanding content and pedagogy, as well as being able to put that understanding to use in a classroom of your own.

Well, no. There's nothing "magical" about 36 credit hours, just like there's nothing "magical" about studying human skeletal structure on your way to mastering physiology for your physical therapy degree. But Riccards want us to see as necessary and inevitable a shift from lecture halls to actual practice in a classroom.

Let me step aside for a moment to note that I am not the person you want to defend traditional teacher prep programs. I was trained in a non-traditional program with far fewer hours of education courses before student teaching and far more support and coursework while I was getting my classroom practice on. I happily await the day that some college education department calls me up and invites me to re-configure their system, because I have more than a few ideas.

I should also note that debating study versus practice in teacher prep strikes me as just as useful as endlessly arguing about whether there should be more hugging or kissing with your romantic partner. If you are arguing violently for mostly one at the exclusion of the other, you've lost sight of the point.

But Riccards has his eye on his own point, and his point is Use CBE To Train Teachers! He does a good job of anticipating some objections:

Yes, some are resistant to the idea of competency-based education. It is too often misconstrued as a checklist approach: anyone who is wearing a blue shirt on Tuesday meets competency 183. Such application is CBE at its very worst, and doesn’t reflect what it can and should look like in teacher education.

I'm still dubious that his Tuesday checklist is not so much CBE at its very worst as it is CBE at its very usual. But Riccards says there are several things that CBE done right will do for 21st century teacher awesomeness--

- Establishes a set of outcomes one  must attain in order to graduate, rooted in what excellent beginning teachers must know and be able to do;

- Constructs meaningful assessment tools designed to determine candidate competencies at the outset, to gauge candidate progress, and to shape each candidate’s course of study; and

- Provides a problem-based, individualized, adaptive curriculum tied to these competencies.

No, I don't think so. The "set of outcomes" that every beginning teacher must perform is a very tall order, but the "meaningful assessment tools" requirement is unicorn farming. It simply isn't going to happen, because every single candidate (at least as long as we are talking about human candidates) is a completely different set of strengths and weaknesses, which themselves play out differently depending on the young humans who are in the classroom. Those students, live and in the classroom, are the "problem-based, individualized, adaptive curriculum."

There are too many variables, too many possibilities to ever be covered by a canned program. Either the "set of outcomes" will have to be so vague as to be useless ("Teacher will keep classroom orderly and focused") or so specific as to require the equivalent of a six zillion page manual ("If a male student tends to make sarcastic fart jokes, the teacher will use one of the following responses depending on their own skill set: A) If teacher is a petite, quiet female, she will approach the student with direct eye contact and a stern tone of voice and say.... on through ZZ) If teacher is a physically imposing woman with a loud voice and an infectuous sense of humor, she will keep her distance while making the following joke..." and on and on and on). In other words, this system demands that checklist-- either a checklist too short to provide useful feedback and direction, or a checklist so long it takes long minutes to load it from a zillion terrabyte cloud where it lives.

I'm a little nervous that Riccards is dreaming of an EdTPA type of program, with videos and a set of standard behaviors that can be evaluated at a distance. That idea is a snare and a delusion. It does not work. It will never work.

This also feels like one of those attempts to remove subjective personal judgment from the process. That is also a snare and a delusion.

Teachers have to be educated by other teachers. That is why student teaching works-- daily constant supervision and feedback by a master teacher who knows what she's doing. That experience is best when it rests on a foundation of subject matter, child development, and pedagogical knowledge. It also works best when the student teacher is helped to find her own teacher voice; co-operating teachers who try to mold mini-me's are not helpful.

The computer era has led to the resurrection of CBE because computing capacities promise the capability of an enormously complicated Choose Your Own Adventure individualized approach to learning-- but that capacity is still not enough for any sort of learning that goes beyond fairly simple, tightly focused tasks. Sure-- creating a CBE teacher prep program would be super easy-- all you have to do is write out a response for every possible combination of teacher, students and content in the world. And then link it all together in a tagged and sequenced program. And then come up with a clear, objective way to measure every conceivable competency, from "Teacher makes six year old who's sad about his sick dog comfortable with solving a two-digit addition problem when he didn't actually raise his hand" to "Teacher is able to engage two burly sixteen-year-old males who are close to having a fist fight over the one guy's sister to discuss tonal implications of Shakespeare's use of prose interludes in Romeo and Juliet."

And if those examples seem ridiculously specific, just remember that at the opposite of the scale is a CBE program where there's only one object-- "Teacher will teach real good." And if you now want to say, "Well, of course, the CBE outcomes will be somewhere between those extremes," then we have to have a conversation about where exactly we intend to land and who is qualified to make that call.

I know-- I really do know-- that it's appealing to dream of reducing teaching to a set list of competencies. But I don't believe you can do it. Particularly if your dream is a list of objectively measurable competencies.

Teaching effectively (which is a much better way to conceive of this than effective teachers) is work for trained, experienced professionals. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, concert pianists-- we need their complex professional judgment to navigate complex human situations. Using a pre-fab program to substitute simplistic non-professional judgment for complex human situations doesn't help anybody. Yes, systems that depend on human professional judgment are prone to Bad Things when that professional judgment fails, but using a program to substitute someone else's non-professional judgment does not help. We do need the very best professional educators we can foster and grow, but CBE will not get us there.

Howard Fuller, Ed Reform, and New Orleans

Jennifer "Edushyster" Berkshire and Aaron "Need a New Twitter Handle" French have released the second of their Have You Heard podcasts, and it further cements Berkshire's standing as the number one interviewer in the education blogosphere.

This time Berkshire has headed to talk to Howard Fuller for a conversation that underlines the degree to which Fuller is-- well, I don't want to say complicated. He has the quality I most admire in anyone working in a troublesome and contentious arena-- he manages to follow the issues and his values without getting sidetracked by labels, tribes and affiliations. Which means, of course, that he manages to piss off a wide variety of people (you can get a quick picture by looking at Lyndsey Layton's profile.from 2014 entitled "A civil rights warrior, or a billionaire's tool?")

Fuller has spent a lot of time on the reformster side of the street, so that is why it's extra interesting to find him explaining to Berkshire the many failures of ed reform in New Orleans.

It began, he says, with conversations over sixteen months with African-Americans in the community, asking two questions: 1) What do you think about education reform in New Orleans and 2) What do you think about black peoples' role in it?

The overriding theme that he heard? "This has been done to us, not with us."

Fuller asserts that some students are now far better off than before, and many are not. But even if there are good outcomes from the complete charterization of NOLA, if African-Americans have not had a significant role, and if this is all more disempowerment of blacks in the community, the reform is a fail. It is unsustainable, because there is no broad support in the black community.

Berkshire observes that New Orleans seems richer and whiter, and Fuller acknowledges that schools alone cannot over-ride issues of class. Ultimately economic policy will have broader impact than education policy in reversing systemic poverty, but the ed reform is still important. Does that seem a bit contradictory? When Berkshire (in her signature gentle nudgery way) calls Fuller on his connection to the Waltons, he replies, "When you are in struggles, you deal with contradictions."

In some cases, that means you need resources and you take them where you can find them. That also means, if you're Fuller, that your relationship with the teachers unions is-- well-- he states clearly that unions have an important role in making peoples' lives better but he also says, "I have real scars from dealing with unions." He also says, "Some people want me to be anti-union, which I'm not. Other people want me to support the teachers' union, which I don't."

He also has some complicated thoughts about pedagogy, particularly when it comes to No Excuses schooling which are worth listening about.

Through all of it, Fuller maintains a focus on making things better for students, getting better education for students, improving the lives of students. Hearing him lay his thoughts out, even in this brief interview, made me respect him even as I disagree with some of the positions he has taken in the past. Beyond the specific points to be made about reform in New Orleans, the interview is also another excellent reminder that the ongoing debate (and the people in it) is more complex than we sometimes admit.

But seriously-- best interviewer in the biz. Listen to this. You'll be glad you did.

Why This Teacher Supports Sanders for President

Every political cycle is a sad reminder that public education in general and teachers in particular are political orphans. Neither party even pretends to be interested in or supportive of traditional public education and the people who work in that sector. Where once upon a time, kissing a baby could be reliably followed by thanking America's teachers. Now both traditional parties just want to punch us in the face.

None of the 147 Presidential candidates at any point showed any concern about making nice with teachers or standing up to the institution to which we have devoted our lives, the institution which is the very foundation of our country, our democracy.

No, not even Bernie. We've been able to get him to cough up a couple of usable quotes that would suggest that he's a fan of teachers and public education, which puts him ahead of Hillary who bent over backwards to avoid letting one sentence worth of charter school criticism upset any of her deep pocketed backers [but even at Sunday night's debate, given a chance to directly address education and educator issues, he punted]. Pretty sure I missed the part where she dispatched Bill to reassure public school teachers that any of her zillion pro-charter comments were no cause for alarm. And the closest that any GOP candidate came to saying something nice about teachers was that time John Kasich said that he would abolish teacher lunch rooms, which sounds mean but, hey-- at least he didn't say he would abolish letting teachers have lunch at all.

If I were a one-issue voter, a candidate who voted his job, I'd have a choice between  a symbolic for D. Jill Stein or just staying home.

Let's not kid ourselves. In the political world, nobody has our collective backs.

But I'm not a single-issue voter. Well, actually, I am. But it's a bigger issue than public education, even though it's the same issue.

My issue is democracy.

Sanders doesn't talk much about education, and I don't get the impression that it's something he's really studied up on or fully grasped.

But he talks a great deal about the ways in which our democracy has been stripped from us, eroded by the toxic spread of big money as the very rich buy up our government, our processes, and, almost without exception, our candidates for major offices.

This ongoing attempt to milk the taxpayers while stripping them of their voices, their say, their ability to help steer the national bus-- that is the problem that, right now, is virtually all problems. The dismantling of our public education, our selling off of the pieces, our transformation of universal public education into a system that serves the needs of only a few, a system that enriches the already-rich while trying to get away with training many young citizens to be nothing more than drones, fodder for their corporate overlords-- that grand perversion of public education is mirrored in the co-opting of our food industry, our military industry, our decaying cities, our twisted political system, our money-sucking health care system.

I care, obviously, about our public education system, about the teaching profession, about the care and nurture of our young people. But I am also aware that the gutting of public education is a symptom of a larger problem, like a shirt that keeps getting bloody because it's being worn by a person with a knife driven deep into his chest. And I can live with somebody who's not too concerned about the shirt if he's focused on removing the knife and healing the wound.

We have candidates who want to punch the shirt-wearer for bleeding all over the place. We have candidates who want to "solve" the problem by putting a different shirt on a different person. And we have more than a few candidates who owe their allegiance to the knife manufacturer and will never do anything with that knife except to drive it in deeper and maybe twist it a little.

I'm concerned about the shirt, and the blood. Sanders is not paying so much attention to the shirt, but he is totally on point about the knife and the wound and the need to draw the weapon out and heal the breach.

To be less metaphorical, education is not anybody's issue-- including Sanders. But the toxic rot and corruption that he rails against in the country is the same toxic rot that is eating at public education. I can get behind that. I'm not a naive kid, and I don't expect miracles. But I can get behind a man who at least talks about the knife and the wound. That's why this teacher supports Bernie Sanders.

What Is the Charter Difference?

What exactly makes a charter school a charter school? What is it that charter supporters expect to get from a charter school that they cannot get from a public one?

Variety and choice? 

Some advocates say that parents and students need choices, a variety, a plethora, a cornucopia of educational options from which to choose. We should have a sciency school for science students and a musicky school for musicians and a welding school for welders.

But we have that. In smaller districts, the possibility of magnet schools and specialty schools is lessened, but even in my mostly-rural county, districts have a co-operative vocational school that prepares welders and auto mechanics and security guards. Large urban districts can have all manner of specialty magnet schools that give students plenty of variety and choice. We don't need charter schools to accomplish this.

Quality?

As I've argued before, people don't really want choice, anyway-- they want their children to go to one good school. Being "trapped in a zip code" never comes up when people have a school they like.

There's no arguing that some schools fail to live up to the promise of public education. But if you don't like the color of your house, do you paint the house, or do you buy a second house? If the school that I'm providing for my community's children is not doing a great job, sending some kids elsewhere will leave Sore Thumb High School still right where it is, doing poorly.

If I want it to be a better school, I can make it into a better school. This is what many communities have done over the years-- remade and reconfigured their local school to better reflect their desires at the time. We don't need charter schools to accomplish this.

Regulations?

Charter fans say, "Well, we can create schools that don't have to work under the weight of bad government regulations."

I say, "If we know they are bad regulations, why don't we lift them for all schools?" And if it's a bad idea to lift them for all schools, exactly why are they bad regulations? If there are regulations that are not good for education, let's get rid of them for everybody, and if they are good for everybody, then let's have everybody follow them.

We can fix stupid laws on the legislative level. We don't need charter schools to accomplish this.

Staffing?

Charter fans like the idea of schools that are non-union, non-professionally-trained teachers who can be paid by whatever mechanism and salary schedule. But in many locations, advocates have successfully imposed such ideas on the public system, with the dismantling of tenure, collective bargaining, and professional requirements to be a teacher. And local school districts are always free to negotiate whatever contracts the local market will bear. We don't need charter schools to accomplish this.

Competition?

Free marketteers believe that if schools have to compete, that will drive them into paroxysms of excellence. But we already have competition between school districts-- in fact, competition between school districts is often a single factor in larger competition between communities. One of the ways that communities distinguish themselves as Better (and the houses therein more valuable and the neighborhood more desirable) is by making sure that the schools in East Egg are way better than the ones in West Egg. It is competition that has produced the very tyranny of the zip code that reformsters so hate. Because a feature of free market competition is that it has winners and losers, both in terms of producers and consumers.


We already have a school system handcuffed to a free market system of real estate. Schools already compete-- as best they can, given whatever local limitations they wrestle with. We don't need charter schools to establish a system of competition.

Doing more with less?

Do we need charters to show us how to do more with less? This is a non-starter. Plenty of public schools already have to do more with less every year, while charters frequently decide that the secret of success is more money. Next?

Laboratories of Innovation?

There is nothing to keep public schools from innovating and no signs that charters have discovered heretofore undiscovered revolutionary ideas in education. There is also nothing to indicate that public schools are not already filled with educators intent on finding new and better ways to do educate students. If you want to see more innovation, then by all means, rewrite the rules and regulations of public schools to reward or spur more such innovation.

But we don't need charter schools to accomplish this.

Selective enrollment?

All right, this isn't even an advantage that charters claim they want, but it's one they're often accused of-- creating a school with carefully selected student body, with undesirable low-performing high cost students pushed out and desirable high-performing low cost students gathered in.

But this, too, is something we already do in public schools. Districts with magnet or specialty schools require students to move through an admissions process. And systems have an alternate education placement with students whose more severe issues, from autism to social maladjustment to developmental disability, make them a poor fit for the mainstream classroom.

We don't like to admit that we don't always take all comers in public schools, but we know how to be selective about who gets in the door and stays in the building. Some charters go much further, but the basic principle is the same-- public schools just don't fess up. Not that we should be proud of it, but we don't need charter schools to accomplish this goal.

So, really-- what do we need charters for?

Improvements in quality, choice, innovation, instruction, programs-- all of it can be accomplished in a public school system. All of these ideas for improving education could be applied to public schools, which would have the additional advantage of bringing the improvements to ALL students instead of a small group.

Of course, part of the challenge would be that changes and reforms would have to be discussed, debated and deployed publicly. A person who wanted, say, to subject non-wealthy non-white students to boot camp style No Excuses education would have to convince the taxpayers that it was a good idea. It's possible that only charters can provide an opportunity for one driven visionary to impose his or her ideas on a school without being answerable to anyone. But that would be less like a democratic institution and more like a small-scale dictatorship. It's not a very admirable goal-- and anyway, the invention of mayoral control has once again made it possible to establish small scholastic dictatorships without resorting to charters. This, too, we can accomplish without charter schools.

There isn't anything on this list of goals that we actually need charter skills to accomplish.

Is there any other goal I'm forgetting to-- oh, wait a minute.

Redirecting Tax Dollars

Charter schools do accomplish one goal that can't be achieved by public schools-- they manage to redirect public tax dollars into the pockets of private corporations, charter operating companies, corporate shareholders, and guys who just figured they'd make some money in the charter biz.

For everything else on the list, no charters are necessary. For everything else on the list-- well, imagine this: your car needs a new bulb for the headlight, has a flat spare tire, and is filled with discarded beer cans and McDonald's wrappers, and your mechanic says, "Well, obviously you have no choice but to buy a new car." And that makes no sense until you discover that the used car salesman is your mechanic's business partner.

The charter purpose that cannot be achieved by public schools is to move public tax dollars into private pockets. The one true difference between public schools and charter schools as currently envisioned is that only charter schools are making people wealthy. And if that's the only true thing different about charters, maybe we should stop talking about charters and start talking about fixing the issues-- the education-related issues-- that we really want to work on.