Bernie's Charter Lesson

No, not a lesson for Bernie. A lesson from Bernie for the rest of us.

Lots of folks have been trying hard to parse exactly what Bernie Sanders at that Ohio town meeting that gave so much hope and joy to DFER. Does he stand up for public education? Does he think charters are swell? Having poked through his statements on the subject, I'm inclined to conclude what is, really, the obvious-- Sanders doesn't really know or understand much about modern charter schools.

This is not a huge surprise. The modern charter industry has spent millions and millions of dollars to make sure that the public does not really understand charter schools. Sanders's offhand comment is a reminder to the rest of us that those charter efforts have been very successful.

This is easy to forget. Like advocates involved in any issue, public school advocates spend so much time staring straight at the face of reformsterism that we can forget that many ordinary folks are not all that up-to-date on the issues. If we're not careful, we run the risk of being that crazy person in the room hollering, "But look!! It's hoorrrrrrible!!" while our audience turns in genuine confusion to say, "What? That little spider in the corner?"

Bernie Sanders is no dummy, and he doesn't live with his head in the sand. But charter schools and public ed and the rest of the mess have not been on his radar all that much and so, presumably, his knowledge of some issues comes from the ether, the background chatter, the conventional wisdom. And charter school promoters have done a good job of getting their message into the ether. If Sanders doesn't get it, neither do a whole lot of other people.

That is the charter lesson from Bernie-- we public education advocates still got some 'splainin' to do.

I wish I had a direct line to Sanders. I wish my union hadn't squandered an opportunity to build some bridges to his campaign. Both he and the other folks who don't know the charter school score need to get some basic stuff.

Why charter schools are not public schools.

Here's the shortest, simplest list of talking points I can craft.

1) Charter schools use public tax dollars, but are not accountable for how those dollars are spent. 

Charters don't have to tell how they spend public tax dollars. Not a cent of it. In fact, they have gone to court to defend their right to stay unaccountable to elected officials.

2) Charter schools are run by unelected persons who are unaccountable to the voters.

Charter school boards are not elected. Charter corporation executives may not even live in the community where the schools operate. Charter boards do not have to open their meetings to the public-- ever. If you are a parent with a child in the charter, your only "voice" is to pull the child out. If you are a taxpayer without a child, you have no voice at all.

3) Charter schools do not have to accept all students.

The most basic promise of public schools in the US is that they must take every child in their community. Charters do not have any such requirement. Besides pushing students out, charters can use targeted advertisement and demanding application processes that push away the less desirable students.

4) Charter schools are business-centered, not child-centered.

Charter advocates will claim that only a small percentage of charters are for-profits, but a noon-profit charter is just a charter that doesn't have to share its profits with shareholders. Yes, teachers and educators in public schools make money from working there. But if a teacher wants a raise, she must bargain for it with elected representatives of the taxpayers. Because of 1 and 2 above, charter leaders can give themselves as much of a raise as they like. For charter operators, every dollar spent on a child's education is one less dollar they get to pocket.

The Lesson

Charter schools are not public schools. Many members of the public do not get this. In fact, many members of the public have looked this truth right in the eyes and walked on, thinking, "Well, that can't be right. I must just not fully understand things." And charter pushers just keep putting the word "public" in front of "charter schools," because if the word's there, it must be true, right?

We do need to educate Sanders, but we need to educate a whole lot of other folks as well. We don't need to explain anything complicated or confusing. The lesson is pretty simple.

Charter schools are not public schools.

Charter schools are not public schools.

Charter schools are not public schools.

CBE & The One True Path

Competency Works is a one stop shop for all your Competency Based Education PR needs, with a variety of ways to enhance the CBE narrative.

On the website, I came across a piece that, for me, really captures one of the problems I have with the current CBE initiative on a pretty fundamental basis. I'll link us back to the original source of the piece by Courtney Belolan about goal setting.

Belolan is an instructional coach and teachery consultant up in Maine, a state that somehow drew the short straw in the Who Wants To Be a CBE Pilot State contest. Belolan started out in education as a middle school teacher, but then moved on to working with the Maine International Center for Digital Learning which is "a non-profit organization that provides professional development and support for middle and high school leaders and teachers (both in-service and pre-service) regarding student-centered learning and teaching practices in 1-to-1 digital environments for the purpose of fostering student creativity, engagement, empowerment, well-being, and readiness for citizenship, college, and careers in a rapidly changing global society."

Let me just take a moment to note that MICDL has an extraordinarily slippery on-line footprint. This address (http://www.micdl.org/) is offered as theirs, and it looks right, but actually takes you to Gryphondale Educational Services (props for the Harry Potteresque name) which appears to a consulting firm for setting up, operating, making money from blended classrooms. Another lead took me to a site that features MICDL's name and a profile from 2014 of Bette Manchester, credited as founder of MICDL, an award-winning principal (including the middle school where Belolan taught), and a FirstMagic admin-- but the page is so incomplete that it still features body copy filled with "lorem ipsum dolor" placeholders. Manchester is also on the staff of Gryphondale. What else? Hewlett gave them a $41K grant in 2009-- "grantee website" is blank. Artopa, a web design company, boasts of the new website they made for MICDL-- but I'll be damned if I can find the thing! No news clippings. Manchester and MICDL are on a long list of Helpful People in a 2010 "report" boosting digital learning by Jeb Bush's FEE, and the group occasionally turns up in that sort of context, but a google search for their exact name turns up 852 results!


So Belolan's LinkedIn account seems up to date, and it still lists her on the board of this organization that specializes in digital education and yet has no serious online presence. So there's that. But let's get back to what Belolan actually says. Here's the heart of her point:

Goal setting is about deciding to do something and planning to get it done.  Simple as that.  Big or small, lofty or humble, anything can be a goal.  Stop and get eggs: goal.  Get a PHD: goal.  Learn to tango: goal.  Stop losing my keys: goal.  Answer emails: goal.  Walk for 20-30 minutes every day: goal.  Drink less coffee: goal.  I could go on.  The goal itself does not matter. What matters is the process, what you do between deciding to do something and doing it. 

Here's my problem. When you start with the idea that getting eggs, getting a PhD, and ceasing the regular loss of keys-- when you start with the idea that these are all pretty much the same sort of thing, you are in deep, deep trouble. And if you assert, as Belolan does, that simply planning and doing is the secret to all of this, you are in deeper still.

Now, I could craft any number of examples of what's wrong with all that, but let's just use the materials at hand. Belolan actually started out as a music major at Berklee, but then after two years moved on. Somehow the next professional stop was a middle school English teacher's job, which somehow led to consulting and belonging to a shadow organization that was started in 2008 by a woman who worked as a school principal, and THAT organization somehow ended up not exactly changing the international face of education via Maine but is instead-- what? We don't know.

Was that the plan? Did Belolan end up exactly where she planned to be by planning and executing every step of  the way? I am going to bet the answer is, "No," or "Good lord, no" or even "Are you kidding?"

Goals and plans and doing are all very nice, and they certainly have their own place in the world, but if you think that's the Secret of Life, you haven't been paying attention.

I have a lot of favorite metaphors for life-- let me trot out racquetball.

When you play raquetball, you cannot play with a plan other than "When the ball comes, I will hit it." At the moment you are flexing your arm, you may have an intent, which I suppose we can call a plan for about a half a second from now. But anyone who walks onto the raquetball court with a plan that says, "I will win today by scoring more points" followed by a list of the exact moves, swings and hits-- that person is a loon. Readiness and preparation are important. Timing is important. Focus and attention are important. Effort and passion are important. Planning? Not so important.

And since I got a bit personal with Belolan, let me get personal with myself. This is not the life I planned. True, I planned to be a teacher. But not here. And true, I planned to get married, but I was only going to do it once (the plan required me to be a lot better at it the first time). I suppose I could have made plans for my children, but by the time they came along I had begun to suspect that the whole planning thing was kind of a crock. I never planned to be a union president, let alone one leading a strike. And once I had fumbled one marriage, I certainly didn't plan to try again, and when I considered that possibility, I did not plan on the woman who gloriously upended my whole planning cart.

No, I don't mean that one should just flail away randomly. Preparation. Timing. Attention. Focus. And most of all, being aware of what the world is presenting to you. Planning is simply a way of tuning out possibilities, of saying, "Okay, my ship is going to come in, and it's going to be a schooner, and it's going to arrive at this dock." But the more possibilities you tune out, the more possibilities you miss. The more really great ships sail without you because you're sitting they're waiting for just that one.

For yourself, this is just sad. But to enforce this view on another person, a young human-- that's even worse. To say, "No, you don't want that ship. Just stay here." To tell a child, "Out of all the possibilities in the world, you only want those that are on the One True Path, and I will tell you where that One True Path lies." That's criminal. That's educational malpractice.

But it is also the core of what Belolan and other CBE fans want to sell us. Trust us! We will lay out the One True Path, with a couple of side loops and benches along the way so that students can stop and rest where they will (because-- personalization! See!!) We will pre-select the ships for you and we will pre-build the docks and we will pre-plan the voyage.

Because we know where the One True Path lies. We will be able to evaluate your child's planning and execution skills because if your child ends up where we think she should go, then her planning was excellent! We will let your child sit at a computer and step along the proscribed trail that we have set down for her. It's on a computer, so you know it's right.

If it were that simple, teachers would already be doing it. If it were that simple, it would be how most people lived their actual lives. But it's not. And anybody who thinks you can plan your way to a happy, full, rewarding life just like you plan your way to pick up eggs at the store-- that is someone who just doesn't get it, and certainly shouldn't be trying to impart what they do not get to teachers and children.

It's not about a plan. It's not about a marked path with restricting rails and a pre-chosen destination. It's about a map, and a compass, and the skills to travel where you will.

Wasting Time

That's what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those... of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years.
       --Our Town, Thornton Wilder 


Our Town, like most great works of literature, gives up new rich layers of insight every time it's viewed, read, performed. The only dramatic work I've taught more often is Hamlet, and like Hamlet, it turns out to be about something a little different every time I teach it. But for both works, there are always some constants. Hamlet is always, at least in part, about death. And Our Town is always, at least in part, about wasting time.

The above line is from the bitter, troubled Simon Stimson, talking to Emily about her troubling journey back into her own past (at this point they are both dead-- Simon from suicide, and Emily in childbirth). What Emily has seen is a world of people who don't pay attention, who don't really see, who fail to "really realize." She doesn't say it, but she could have-- people ignore Thoreau's idea to "live deliberately." Emily might even have quoted Hamlet, appropriating the infamous "to be or not to be" not as its cliched contemplation of suicide, but as the question, "Do you want to really, actually live your life, or just sort of sleepwalk through it?" Wilder chooses to put a more apt summary into the voice of the failed and unhappy Stimson-- "To spend and waste time as though you had a million years."

These thoughts are never far from the surface for me; they're central to how I try to live my life. But there are times that strike them hard, make them resonate like a tuning fork planted hard against the bone.

A few weekends ago, my father-in-law suffered a pair of strokes. He's home now, working on his recuperation, and doing pretty well. But he's not an old guy. This is way ahead of schedule.

And this weekend, one of our school board members passed away. He was a retired teacher, just a couple of years older than I. We grew up in the same church. When I was a putzy middle schooler, he was one of the cool high school kids. His son is one of my former students, and his daughter is in my class this year. He beat illness years ago, and it reared up again just recently. This was not supposed to happen.

Tomorrow is not promised, and today only comes once. I get a kick out of people who get extra excited about particular dates. "Woohoo!! January 1st, 2016 only comes once in a lifetime!" Well, yes. March 13, 2016 only comes once. July 16, 2022 will only come once. We make jokes about the loss of time ("Yikes! I just bingewatched Fuller House! That's seven hours of my life that I can never get back!") but it's the truth. The time you're spending reading this right now is time you'll never get back.

One of the central challenges of being fully human is figuring out how to respond to the finite nature of our lives. Panic, despair, nihilism, resignation, frantic racing, irresponsible frittering, and joyless intensity are all answers that I reject (and this is too big a nut, and I am not a wise enough man to crack it, in this space). But I believe there is one clear moral imperative that follows from our finite lives--

Do not waste time.

In particular, do not waste other peoples' time.

It is one of the promises that I make my students every fall-- "I will not knowingly waste any of your time this year. Everything we do we will do because I believe it is not a waste of your time to do it."

I'm pretty sure that's the bare minimum we can promise our students. I'm not saying that it's easy-- one student's critical lesson is another student's waste of time, and without a crystal ball, it's a challenge to read the future and know just what tools will come in handy to the students five, ten or twenty years from now. I even accept that handling the pointless demands of a powerful bureaucracy is, in its own way, useful preparation for a future in These United States (though, in the interests of transparency, I will be honest with my students about what we're doing). These years they spend in school are not some sort of free time, some batch of practice days that don't count against the grand total of their lives. These days in school are part of their slim total. Their lives will not start "someday." Their lives are going on right now.

All of us on the planet make choices daily about how to use our own time. Some of us with power and privilege also make such choices for other, younger humans. We have an absolute obligation to make those choices as responsibly as possible, to not waste the few, finite moments that those students have on earth. We don't have a million years and neither do they-- some of us barely have fifty or sixty, and a few of us, sadly, have even fewer. Why waste that time on one standardized test after another or, even worse, days and days and days of preparing for those Big Standardized Tests. "Life is short-- take more standardized tests" said nobody ever.

Life is grand and joyous and messy and rich and churning with a thousand different flavors of a raw and beautiful power. It is also brief. Do not waste any of it.

ICYMI: A Particularly Good Batch of Readings

From the right to the left, from testing to charters, we've got stirring perspectives from a wide variety of observation posts this week. Enjoy!

PARCC Pusher

A look at Opt Out in New Jersey-- and some of the baloney that testocrats are spreading in an attempt to keep those numbers up

Solving the Mystery of the Schools

In the New York Review of Books, Diane Ravitch takes a look at Russakoff's The Prize and Rizag's book about Mission High. And because it's Ravitch, you get a sharp, clear, pithy look at some of the relevant education history.

Rejecting Charter Takeover of Public Schools

Paul Thomas is a gentleman and a scholar, and one of the great services of his blog is the occasional reading list for a particular issue. This is a great resource for building a serious argument against public school takeovers, with some great links on his list.

On Wisconsin

Well, here's what the destruction of tenure looks like on the ground in higher education. Outspoken scholar Sara Goldrick-Rab talks about why she's leaving the university that she has loved and served, and how the assault on tenure is actually an assault on free speech.

Hubris Core

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you are perhaps not a regular reader of Neal McClusky at the Cato Institute. I pretty much never agree with McClusky when it comes to charter schools and the free market in education, but the man is a great representative of the non-loony right-leaning opposition to Common Core.

The Case for a Broader Approach to Education

Another conservative ed reform fan, Jay Greene (no relation) has always shown a willingness to resolve. Here's his piece about how and why he realized he was wrong to think that a narrow focus on math and reading would be good for education.

Easter and Testing

The Rev. Dr. Hope Lee has written a moving and passionate piece about opposition to the testing culture. It was bouncing all over the interwebs yesterday, but if you missed it then, read it now. It's a powerful testament.

Tech Ed

Alfie Kohn is one of the most articulate advocates for human-centered education around. This recent brief look at the role of tech in education is well worth your time.

What Do You Pay Me To Do?

All job evaluation systems answer the same question for employers-- Are these employees doing what we pay them to do?

In some sectors, this is an easy enough process. If I'm paying you to sell a certain amount of product, I can run the numbers and see if you sold that much product. Anyone who has worked in some version of retail knows how this goes-- did you hit your numbers this week, this month, this year?

But the tricky thing about employee evaluation systems is that they force employers to answer a question-- what do we pay these people to do? In fact, employers answer that question whether they mean to or not, and employers have to be careful.

For instance, if you run a catalog call center, a phone bank that takes the orders that customers call in, you might decide to evaluate your employees on how many orders they take per shift. That might seem to make sense. But as some such companies have learned, there's a problem with this evaluation system. One of my many part-time jobs was at just such a call center. The folks who call in are generally older; they may speak slowly or unclearly, and in some cases you are the only human voice they have spoken to all day. But if your evaluations are based on calls-per-hour, then your call center employee is sitting there thinking, as some nice old person tries to chat pleasantly, "Lady, I am not paid to be nice to you. I am paid to take your money and get you off this phone as quickly as possible." The company that I worked for had long since figured out that this was a bad plan, that one of the things you had to pay your employees to do was, in fact, to treat the customer well. And they had to tweak their employee evaluation system to do that.

A good evaluation system is hard to develop for precisely this reason-- because when you create the system, you define the employee's job. You answer the question, "What exactly do we pay you to do, anyway?"

Which brings us to teacher evaluation systems.

You're a taxpayer. What do you think you're paying teachers to do? Maintain a safe environment? Help your child become more confident, more wise, better adjusted, happier? Help your child discover her strengths? Prepare your child to succeed as an adult? Give your child the tools for a successful career, whatever that child might choose? Maintain a personal bank of knowledge and competence that guarantees the teacher is an up-to-date knowledgeable professional? Develop your child into a well-rounded individual? Model how to develop and maintain healthy relationships? Plan, prepare, and evaluate lessons with a wise, professional focus? Support the child's growth? Nurture the child as a special individual? Push the child to learn a wide range of skills and acquire a full body of knowledge? Not waste your child's time? Develop a set of skills and growth that are unique to your child? Plus a whole long list of other things that would make this paragraph too damn long to list?

But the ed reform model reduces that list to just one item.

Get the child to score well on the Big Standardized Test.

Imagine if you were upset about something that happened with your child. She was bullied and nobody did anything about it. She wanted to do have a class to draw in, and nobody would let her. She wanted to go outside and play. The teacher had been cold and unkind to her. She was having trouble with her science experiment and nobody would help her.

You call the school. You schedule a meeting. You sit down with the principal and teacher, express your concern, and they look you in the eye and say, "Look. We appreciate your concern, but we aren't paid to do that. We're paid to make sure your child gets a good test score, and that's it. That's all you pay us to do."

Nobody would be okay with that. Nobody should be okay with that.

Yet, if we have a system that pays teachers for getting good student scores on the BS Tests, what we're saying is, "Never mind the rest of that stuff. We pay you to get good student test scores. That's what we pay you to do." Everything else is extra, unimportant, not really part of the job.

The biggest problem with linking teacher evaluation to student test results is not that it's inaccurate and invalid. The biggest problem is that these VAMmy test-driven systems redefine the job. They say to teachers, "Get in there and get test scores up. That's what we pay you to do. That's all we pay you to do."

The big sell for recruiting teachers was always, "Come touch the future. Come help mold and support young minds. Come help young people find themselves and grasp their future. Come create a love of learning as you hold up young people and help set them on a path to become more fully human, more fully themselves, ready to take their place as adults in the world." If we change that pitch to, "Come help children get better standardized test scores," can we really be surprised that fewer people feel drawn to teaching as a career?

An evaluation system must answer-- cannot help but answer-- the question, "What do you pay me to do?" Students, teachers, the entire education system-- all need a better answer than, "To get good test scores."

Ben Carson Is a Dope

So now, as political reality itself circles a reason-eating soul-sucking black hole of doom, we are forced to contemplate the idea of Dr. Ben Carson as the nation's official Leader of Education, because when Donald Trump is Supreme Leader, he has promised to Make It So.

It is on days like this that I'm glad to be a mere blogger. As a legitimate journalist, I would be obliged to consider this development with thoughtful, reasoned tones, but in our current political cycle, that makes as much sense as sending an ivy league philosophy professor to cover a death match cock fight. No polite and thoughtful considerations in even-tempered tones are enough when what is really called for is a loud, incredulous, "Holy mother of God-- did you see him take a bite out of that wing!? And look at all the damn blood!"

Valerie Strauss has written professional, responsible, and relatively restrained consideration of Ben Carson as High Tsar of Education, and I recommend you read it. But I'm going to be more direct, because when it comes to education, one thing is clear.

Ben Carson is a dope.

When it comes to building American STEM education, Ben Carson is right there, arguing that we need to push math and science, particularly by use of virtual reality classrooms:

"They’re running around the Egyptian pyramids through the virtual reality classroom,”  Carson said. “They could actually go to the Egyptian pyramids and explore the chambers."

Of course, pushing science will be a singular challenge for a guy who utterly rejects evolution.

Candidate Carson addressed education in his materials. You can look at the quick website material about his position, check out the summary version (which is the website version in a nicer font) or the full version (which is the summary version plus some nice graphics and full-page pictures of Carson). They all boil down to the same five-point sort-of-a-plan. And because Carson is, you know, a surgeon, the plan is laid out with some medical terminology. Because fixing schools is just like brain surgery.

His diagnosis is that A) we have low scores on the PISA and the B) even after Common Core, we have an achievement gap. But we have had low scores on the PISA score as long as there have been PISA scores, including the Grand Old Days that Carson wants to return to. Tell me Dr. Carson-- if a monitor in your OR says that the patient is dead, but the patient is having a spirited, alert conversation with you, do you bury the patient, or scrap the monitor equipment? And since "achievement gap" is a fancy-ish name for "test score gaps," of course the Common Core wasn't going to fix it.

His five solutions? Here we go.

1) School choice, and lots of it. Although I'm literally uncertain that Carson knows what he's advocating.

It is our moral imperative as Americans to lay the foundation for a world-class education for every student not simply to those in the best neighborhoods or with the money to buy the educational support they need. 

That's a powerful and eloquent argument-- for fully funding our public school system. It has absolutely nothing to do with supporting school choice, which as currently practiced does not even attempt to serve every student, but "rescues" a handful at the cost of making things worse for the rest.

But Carson imagines that choice is magical. "When choice exists, the best schools will thrive and attract students from all locations, while failing schools and “dropout factories” will be incentivized to institute real, effective changes to compete." We've had charter choice systems for a while now-- the process that Carson has described has happened exactly nowhere. And even if something like that did happen, Carson has betrayed his own vision, because he's describing system that works fine from POV of the free market winners concerned-- but it ignores the question of how such a system will serve ALL students (spoiler alert-- it won't. it will serve only the "desirable" customers).

And remember-- one of the two problems we're trying to solve is the "achievement gap," and after years of charter-choice, such systems have closed the achievement gap nowhere (pro tip-- collecting a bunch of students at the top of the gap in one charter and leaving all those at the bottom is NOT "closing the gap")

2) Empower parents, teachers, local school districts, states-- anybody except the federal government.

But not teachers unions. Teachers unions are evil obstacles to progress.

Carson is particularly bothered by all the money the feds have "thrown at" education over the years (his time frame is hard to pin down-- he talks a lot about the"past seven years" but rails against NCLB and occasionally invokes "for generations" as a descriptor of bad policies.) So maybe he's advocating for local control, or maybe he's advocating for local financing, as in, local districts should be freed of all that federal support and allowed to pursue excellence with all the financial support that a poverty-stricken community can muster. Yay, freedom!

Local authorities should decide what to do with Common Core. States should make sure communities get the funds they need (though remember, that shouldn't be much because money is unimportant and I wonder how often Dr. Carson told a hospital to slash the OR budget in half because throwing money at the problem is pointless).

Do I have to point out the bizarre irony of a black American arguing for states rights? Carson is not a young man; does he really not remember how things play out when certain states are given free rein to decide how to regulate their own educational system? I am a huge advocate for community schools and local control, but even I get that history suggests that local control can be used to crush certain ethnic and racial groups.

3) Encourage innovation.

He has no idea what he's talking about, and so he says nothing. Technological advances. New stuff, of some sort. Because that would be great. "Educators, scientists and web designers" should be free to innovate. Damn, that would have been a great Ben Carson poster-- "Free the Web Designers, and Free the Future of Education"

4) Reward good teachers.

The man cannot make up his mind. A few policy points ago, he was solidly in the "no new money should be thrown at education" camp, but here he is saying teachers are too often required to accomplish Great Things with "inadequate resources and little pay." He wants to free up block grant money for teacher bonuses based on evaluation systems from somewhere. Also, recruit teachers when they're in high school and give them mentors. Really cutting edge stuff here.

5) A better student loan process. Which seems swell but-- wait a minute? How is this related to the achievement gap? Or fixing PISA scores?

Napping through History

As several commentators have noted, one other striking feature of Carson's "plan," released in January, is that Carson seems to have napped through the discussion and passage of ESSA-- the new education law that actually does some of the Get The Feds Outta Here things that he called for. Who knows. If Carson had stayed in the race, he would have come out in favor of giving women the vote and repealing Prohibition.

In fact, Carson's policy brief appears to be a huge cut-and-paste job, void of anything new or interesting and lacking even basic internal consistency. It's the work of a seventh-grader who was kind of half-listening at the dinner table when his parents were talking about what they'd heard that someone had read about education policy.

Other choice quotes

Strauss noted this choice nugget from the Carson library:

He wrote in his book “America the Beautiful: Rediscovering What Made This Nation Great” that Americans were better educated in the 1830s than they are now.  He wrote about “an example of questions in a sixth grade exit exam from the 1830s. I doubt most college graduates could even come close to passing it today.” The questions he uses aren’t actually from an 1830s test but from an 1895 test, which most students who took it flunked. (You can see more on this, plus the actual questions, here.)

Pick the 1830s or the 1890s-- in both cases, US education was reserved for only a select few. The mission-- particularly in the 1830s-- was pretty much the opposite of the one Carson was touting in his plan.

But Carson loves the golden past. Here he is in April of 2013:

Our public schools used to be the envy of the world in the pre-1930s time. But remember in those times we spent a lot of emphasis on very basic education and we also taught values in our school system.

Yes, indeedy. Values like "People who are non-white or non-wealthy don't deserve an education. And if they don't have a penis, they probably don't need an education either." What the hell alternative timeline does Carson come from. No wonder he always seems so tired-- the sheer effort of holding cognitive dissonance at bay while staying anchored in this time line must be exhausting.

And then there's this from November of 2015:

We know that the best education is homeschool, the next is private schools, the next is charter schools, the next is public schools. 

So even though the generation of parents mostly got their education from the vastly inferior public schools, those parents are the best qualified to educate their own children? How does that happen? How do people go from being the product of vastly inferior educators to becoming the people most qualified to educate the next generation? Because that's impressive, and whatever happened to those folks-- we should be trying to get that to happen to everybody.

Did you need one more reason not to vote for Trump?

Well, this would count. Anybody who thinks that Ben Carson is a good choice to be Grand Poohbah or whatever else we'll call government officials under a Trump emperorship is Very Confused. I suspect that Carson is a nice man who will continue to enjoy a career as something, but he has no more business playing at education policy than I do performing brain surgery.

Charter Health Checkup

It's that time of year again, I guess, for the National Alliance for Public [sic] Charter Schools to issue its annual report of the Health of the Charter Public [sic] School Movement. they're scoring and ranking states, because remember-- when you go to the doctor, it doesn't matter how healthy you are, only whether you are more or less healthy than the other patients in the office.

There is some interesting-ish information to be gleaned from the report, but the report is 180 pages long, so if you want the full effect, you are going to have to read it all yourself. This time I'm not doing it for you.

What Are We Doing, and How Are We Doing It?

To make the report's List O'Charter Swellness, states had to meet a few criteria: At least 2% of public school students had to be charter-enrolled in 2014-2015, the state had to have participated in the CREDO study, and it had to have a system for "categorizing" schools.

Eighteen schools made that cut and were then judged by four criteria. Two "quality measures" come from the CREDO 2013 report, which in turn uses data from 2011. So be warned-- a whole lot of the basis for this report's findings is not actually current stuff. In fact, unless I'm missing something, it will be exactly the same data used in last year's Charter Health Report. So to get past that, NAPCS has added two new data criteria-- has the number of top-rated charters increased, and has the number of bottom-rated charters decreased?

They also wanted to come up with a way to include innovation, because innovation is a primo quality of charters, and yet oddly enough, they have found it's to measure innovation in a standardized way. This is not the last time I'll feel as if the NAPSC had a chance to Learn An Important Lesson but just breezed on by. Yes, measuring innovative creative divergent thinking in a standardized way is basically impossible-- but we will still base most of our findings on student test scores from Big Standardized Tests. Sigh.

And, oh, look-- they're going to do it again--

Last, we acknowledge that our definition of a healthy movement is limited by what data we can collect across states. Several other elements of a healthy movement are not included here because we cannot measure them. But that doesn’t mean they are not important. For example, quality beyond test scores can be determined several ways, some of which are more qualitative in nature. A healthy movement needs to have charter schools that are not only succeeding on state tests but also knocking it out of the park on these other determinants of quality.

And so they go on to acknowledge that the whole basis of their rating system and all of NCLB/RTTT reforminess is a foundation built of rotting timbers and sifting sand, and they announce we should stop pretending that these junk ratings mean anything, and then they go on to fill the rest of the report with adult coloring book pages! Ha!! Just kidding. They say, "Well, yes, this system ignores most of the important parts of being a school, but we'll go ahead and use it anyway." That sound you just heard was my palm hitting my forehead.

Here's the weighting system they will use to rate things:

Items 1-8 are for Growth, 10-13 are for Quality, and poor little 9 with its measly two weight must represent for Innovation. So innovation, apparently not all that important after all. And we'll later learn that "innovations" include arts schools and Montessori/Waldorf schools and vocational schools and STEM schools and, for the love of God, No Excuses schools. So "innovation" can include ideas that have been around for decades, or which have quickly established themselves as bad ideas. And despite their concerns, they did manage to fit all the innovations into some standardized categories. Yay, innovation.

I'm also going to point out, as always, that the measuring of learning in days is bogus and a little bit silly. "Mrs. Bogwaller, we're happy to tell you that Chris is a full five days ahead, though we suspect all of those days are Fridays, so it may not be that great news." Is that learning-per-average day? Do we think some days are more learny than others, or is this a constant? Does a child learn the same amount on a birthday as on, say, a Sunday? How did anybody ever break learning down into days? Did somebody study a few thousand children and test them at the end of every single day to get an average learn-per-day figure? And exactly how did that researcher measure quantities of learning? Do you measure out learning by the gram, or by the liter, or by the meter, or do we measure out their lives in coffee spoons (and could we then--please-- name the learn-per-day units "prufrocks"?) Can we talk about single days of learning, or must they travel in a pack? And if we can measure that a student is a single day of learning ahead, how much further can we break that down? Hours? Minutes? Seconds?

Sorry. But the whole days of learning thing is just so silly, and proof once again that when education commentators want to be able to measure something, and can't, they will come up with all manner of solemn baloney to fake it.

So How Did the States Do?

The weights add up to thirty-three with four possible points for each, for a grand total of 132 possible points. Each state gets a score and a rank, and congratulations, Washington DC-- you are first with 106 points, leaving Indiana a distant second with a mere 88. From there we plummet down to last-place Oregon, with a skimpy 45 points. There are some interesting details here. Massachusetts, which is still enduring a wrestling match between charter-loving leaders and the entire actual public school system-- Mass comes in ahead of charter-lovin' Louisianna and Reformster Jeb! Paradise Florida. Ohio, which is either a dreamy charter wild west or a nightmarish charter trainwreck depending on who's assessing-- Ohio is way down at #13.

The report also spends some time holding the Health Checkup rankings against the State Charter Public [sic] School Law Ranking, but there's nothing earth-shattering there and watching a group looking for a correlation between their made-up ranking system and their other made-up ranking system turns out to be as much fun as watching the ink on a charter contract dry. So let's move on.

Pennsylvania-- An Example of a Health Report

The report uses the vast bulk of its pages to take a state-by-state look at charter health, and that includes the other states beside the 18 that didn't make the cut (which is not all fifty-- if you don't even have a charter law in place yet, you're not in this report. Sorry, Kentucky. Also, if your charter law was thrown out by your Supreme Court. Sorry, Washington.)

I'm going to walk through the report on Pennsylvania, because that's where I am. This will give you an idea of some of the pitfalls in the report. You can decide on your own whether you want to sneak a peek underneath your state's charter hospital gown.

I'll tell you up front that Pennsylvania's data will reflect that we are a haven for crappy cyber-charters. I'm betting that is why, for instance, the percentage of charters on the state's naughty list went from 60% to 66%. Why the state doesn't just shut down these cyber-cesspools of educational malpractice is a mystery for another day.

There are other bullet points about the Keystone state, but the report writers also have some nicely designed charts for your perusal, covering the same data in a more graphically delightful manner and following the layout of the chart above. They really have done a good job of formatting things so that it's easy to follow the same ideas all the way through.

PA has 7% of our students in charters, and those are 6% of our schools.

The comparison breakdown of race and ethnicity is, well, kind of useless. They compare the charters against the state, but in any state where the population varies as much as ours, that's meaningless. Pennsylvania is very rural except for the parts that are very urban, and very non-white except for the parts that are very white. In other words, while the state student population may be 73% white, 13% black, and 9% hispanic as a whole, I'd be surprised if you could find any community in the state that matches that demographic breakdown. So comparing charter demographics to that means nothing- the only comparison that really matters is whether or not charters are educating the same population as the local school, and one of the secrets to charter success continues to be making sure that they do NOT try to educate the same population as local schools.

Fun factoid- PA charters are far more centered in cities and suburbs than public schools. 25% of our schools are rural (a nearby district educates about 400 students in one K-12 building serving half of the entire county-- that rural) and no charters other than the cybers have figured out how to make bank serving that population. And because local districts are still the main authorizers, volunteers willing to slit their own financial throats are few and far between.

The rate of charters opening has been slowing down. The rate of closing is a little more stable, but overall rising. About 50% of PA charters have an "innovative" special focus.

Remember the report about how cyber-charters move students backwards? That figures in this report and undoubtedly really hurt charter numbers for "number of days of learning" for charters, which are hugely negative. And while the numbers for charters in the top and bottom categories of PA's school rating system are also dismal, I will give them a pass because our school evaluation system is a hot, ugly mess.

Oh, and we finish with some unscored data, including the data that 27% of our charter students are cyber-students, which is lower than I would have guessed. Now I should probably go back and remove all the places where I blamed crappy charter results on the cybers-- apparently plenty of those Philly charters are able to stink up the place all on their own.

Bottom Line

I give NAPSC credit for reporting data without trying to hide it, spin it, or obscure it behind too many piles of smoke and mirrors, just as I give some folks in the charter movement credit for having figured out that if they don't clean up their own bad actors, the whole industry is going to look worse and worse (I think "worse and worse" is inevitable for the current incarnation of the charter industry, but that's another conversation). This report has some interesting-ish data collected in one handy spot, and it's worth a few minutes to check out the picture of your state and see just how diseased you are.