The New Teach for America-- Now With Less "Teach"

Teach For America likes to reinvent itself from time to time, searching for whatever is currently the sweet spot in the market. And as Emma Brown explains in yesterday's Washington Post, TFA has stepped into the transmogrifier once again, and has emerged with a bit of mission creep.

The latest shift is prompted by a notable drop in TFA's recruiting juice. As Brown reports, applications are down 35% over the last three years, plummeting from 57,000 in 2013 to 37,000 this year. There are a variety of explanations for this including the general drop of everyone going into teaching through traditional paths or made-up paths like TFA; there's an irony in that TFA has itself been part of the movement denigrating and deprofessionalizing the teaching profession. TFA itself is no longer as shiny as it once was, partly because of bad press, but also, I'd bet, because after twenty-five years, TFA is part of the status quo and not some Hot New Thing.

But TFA, always looking to keep itself a viable business, has a plan for combating the lag in applicants and selling the program to a new generation. Part of it is a tactical tweak-- recruit students while they are underclassmen and no longer wait until they are seniors and know better and have a different focus. But that's just procedure and not the heart of the new sales pitch.

The secret? Emphasize how Teach for America really isn't about teaching at all.

Here's a TFA rep talking at a recruitment event:

“We believe that this is far bigger than teaching,” Kimberly Diaz, of the organization’s D.C. regional office, told a group of prospective applicants from Georgetown and George Washington universities in April. They had just visited an elementary school in suburban Maryland and heard from alumni working outside of classrooms. “This is about dismantling systems of oppression.”

Far bigger than teaching. Your two years struggling in a sixth grade classroom will actually be part of dismantling systems of oppression ("No, Pat, I can't help you with your algebra right now. I'm busy dismantling a system of oppression")

Of course, if dismantling isn't your thing, a day-long recruitment event offered college students other incentives.

Then they were treated to lunch and a panel of TFA alumni speaking about how their classroom experiences had translated into marketable skills in fields including law, politics, education advocacy and nonprofit entre­pre­neur­ship.

TFA still pitches itself as the group that is going to close the achievement gap (despite the utter absence of any evidence at all that they can do it, or that they even know how to do it). But they have amped up what was always one of their avenues of appeal-- those two years in a classroom make a super resume builder. They are, of course, not lying. The ed reform industry (as well as the test manufacturing business and the textbook company sales force) is just packed with people calling themselves "former teachers" based on two years of TFAing it up in a charter somewhere.

As Brown summarizes it, it's a one-two punch:

First, by signing up for TFA, they can help solve some of the most in­trac­table social problems in America, including institutional racism and educational inequity.

And second, by signing up for TFA, they aren’t consigning themselves to working in a public school, but to opening doors to a set of opportunities and a professional network that can help achieve career goals, whatever they might be.

You can change the whole world. But you don't have to be "consigned" to a classroom in a public school.

What a great introductory speech that must make on a first day of school. "Hello, boys and girls. My name is Miss Deauxgud, and thank God I'm not actually going to stay at the job long. In fact, since this is my second year at Troubled Elementary School, as soon as I finish up with you guys, I am out of here. Thank goodness. I mean, nothing personal, but I have real work to do, work that's way more important than teaching you guys. I hope we have a good year together, but hey, if we don't, no biggy, because by next year this is all just going to be a bad memory for me anyway."

You know, in a way, the five weeks of training makes sense. If you are trying to lay the foundation for a lifelong teaching career, then five weeks isn't remotely enough. But if you are just trying to learn a couple of techniques so you can get through two years of being in a classroom and then just scoot-- well, you don't need a whole four year degree for that. You don't need to learn to swim if your plan is just to float around for a little bit until the yacht comes to pick you up.

Remember how Kentucky Fried Chicken changed their brand name to KFC because the word "fried" just had bad connotations in the marketplace? If this initiative works, and Teach For America can get recruitment for the business back up with the "Change society and get a good start on your real career" sale pitch, I look for them to rebrand themselves as TFA. After all, the whole "teach" thing seems to be weighing them down-- it makes perfect sense to identify themselves less with the job that is no longer what they're even pretending to be about.

FL: Dept of Ed Says, "Don't Blame Us!" (w/Update)

A few Florida districts managed to earn themselves a heaping helping of angry publicity recently by declaring that a Third grader's ability to read was not nearly as important as the Third grader's willingness to knuckle under and compliantly take the state's Big Standardized Test. Students who had opted out of the test were going to be flunked for the grade, regardless of their report cards, teacher recommendations or other clear signs that they could read just fine, thank you very much.

Manatee County in particular signaled that it was going to A) hold the line hard and B) blame the state department of education.

Now comes word courtesy of the Gradebook at the Tampa Bay Times, talking to the Florida Department of Education--

"Our primary guidance to the districts is to follow the law," spokeswoman Meghan Collins said Tuesday. "Obviously, the law says participation on the FSA (Florida Standards Assessment) is mandatory. But we never said you must retain a student who doesn't have an FSA score."

Collins also elaborated that there was no requirement to take the test before an alternative assessment could be used.

Collins also told Jeffrey Solochek at the Times that the department would not be sending out a letter of clarification. "We've already made ourselves plenty damn clear enough for supposedly educated people who can read and speak English," she did not actually say, but I thought I'd paraphrase. "Local decisions are to be made locally, particularly if they are so glaringly dumb that the fallout will be terrible," she only sort of approximately continued. This is, honestly, better than I expected, given that Florida is the state that once insisted a dying child take the Big Standardized Test.

So, Superintendents Diane Greene and Lori White-- the ball's in your court. In fact, you're kind of in your court all alone now. The state has sent a clear message of "Don't lay this foolishness on us!"  My suggestion? make a reasonable, humane, decent decision here-- the kind of decision that one would expect from a professional educator who actually cares about the welfare of children. Take the opening the state has given you, and pass those children.

UPDATE:

After spending the afternoon taking a good hard look at the undercarriage of the bus, Superintendent Greene has announced that "good cause" promotions, including portfolios, will be totally okee dokee for advancing to fourth grade in Manatee Schools. Furthermore...

“The School District of Manatee County’s stance on third-grade retention was not a decision or a conclusion developed in a vacuum,” Greene wrote in a lengthy statement released Tuesday evening. 

 Does that seem a little subtle? Try this one:

To say that I am angry, frustrated and disappointed in the FLDOE’s lack of leadership on this extremely important issue is a massive understatement. To pass this difficult decision off to 67 different school districts is a gross abdication of responsibility.

Also, "I ended up looking like an ass by compromising my principles about assessing and advancing students over your stupid test, which is looking more bogus than ever, and now I'm looking like a big dope both personally and professionally. See if I carry water for those jerks in Tallahassee ever again." I'm paraphrasing on this one.

Read more here: http://www.bradenton.com/news/local/article80950647.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.bradenton.com/news/local/article80950647.html#storylink=cpy

Is There a Civil War in Education

I've been following tweets from the big Third Way confabulation in Massachusetts today, and apparently one of the recurring themes is a certain amount pearl clutching over the Civil War between charter and public school advocates. And I had some thoughts...

First, kudos to whatever PR flack came up with that rhetoric, because it's kind of genius. 

Once upon a time, charter operators portrayed themselves as scrappy trendsetters, rebels who were going to Fight The Power and disrupt the hell out of that stodgy old education sector. They were going to fight the status quo.

Well, there comes a time in the life of every rugged scrappy entrepreneur when you put on a suit and instead of settling for scraps, grab yourself a seat at the gown-up table and start enjoying the perks of being rather status quo-y yourself. (This is also a handy perch from which to keep your eye on any other scrappy trendsetters who show up to queer your pitch, because once you are the status quo, protecting the status quo starts to make so much more sense.)

The "Civil War" construct is elegant because it assumes all sorts of things that charter folks would like to assume without actually having to discuss. A Civil War occurs between equals, brothers who have been torn apart by a foolish disagreement and who should really be learning to live in harmony, as equals, with equal claim to all the bounty the status quo provides.

If you can't quite see what I'm getting at, imagine how it would change the conversation is, say, we characterized public education as a beautiful home that had become infested with charter termites. Or public education as a big expansive oak tree, with some branches withering from charter school blight. Or public education a robust, vigorous group of athletic young men and women, some of whom had to be benched because they were combating a charter school tapeworm. Or public education was a great construction company, building a wonderful new skyscraper and charter school operators were a bunch of five-year-olds who wandered onto the construction site and kept stealing tools and getting in the way.

But no-- our charter operators would like to declare themselves peers of the trained, experienced professionals of the public education system, based on the fact that charter schools exist, and have acquired political clout, and a few sort of know what they're doing. The Civil War construct is a glorious false equivalency, the charter insistence that they are just as legitimate as public education-- and we get to just skip right over the discussion of whether or not that's even true. It let's us skip some of the central question of charters like 1) is there a good reason for them to exist and 2) if so, is there a good reason they should be owned and operated by hedge fund managers and other folks with no actual educational training or background. The Civil War construct lets us skip the fact that the modern charter debate is just the Teach for America debate writ large-- why should we create an entire parallel education system operated by untrained amateurs?

The one big rhetorical flaw in the Civil War rhetoric

Watch charteristas be very careful in talking about a civil war, because THE civil war was not a battle between equivalent sides. In THE civil war, one side was fighting to preserve to own other human beings. One side was fighting to preserve and maintain one of the most odious practices in human history. It is absolutely true that the North was not without sin, that the Union was not standing up clearly for the side of virtue. But if you look at the American Civil War and say, "Well, you know, both sides really had a point," you need to go back to history class, because they did not. One side was dead wrong. Period. Full stop.

They had resources and political clout and access to money that meant they couldn't be ignored, that they had to be dealt with-- but the Confederacy was wrong, and what they were fighting for was wrong. Do any of the people shaking their heads and clucking over the public school vs. charters civil war want to talk about which side would be the Confederacy in this scenario? I didn't think so.

Suing for what sort of piece peace, exactly?

I've always maintained that despite the occasional (not very successful) attempts, charter operators don't really want to take over entire districts (I have a blog about this somewhere, but damned if I can find it- I have got to get me an administrative assistant just as soon as that next giant grant comes in). Running an entire district would be cumbersome and potentially could leave the charter operator trapped. Most importantly, the most popular modern charter business model has a critical dependency on having a place to dump problem/costly students, and that dumping ground of choice remains the public school system.

So no, by and large I don't think charters ever wanted to wipe out public school systems.

So what do they want? Well, I think the months ahead will continue to give us a clearer picture, and perhaps the reportage from today's confab will shed some light as well. But there are a few things we can reasonably guess.

We've seen similar initiatives, back when we had a call for new, more reasonable conversations. That sort of tone policing generally boiled down to, "Damn, I thought we were just going to walk in and y'all would roll over without a fight, but you just keep talking and hammering at us and sometimes just make it impossible to follow our action plan. What can we do to get you to shut up long enough for us to just think for five minutes?"

This is more of the same. Remember, Empower Schools, the Third Way people, are trying to spread their brand through Massachusetts, a state where reformsters have captured most of the educations leadership roles in the state, and yet the teachers and the students and the parents just won't shut up and let them be. They are trying to make a business plan work, and they would prefer not to have to deal with teachers and the public and the need to sink more money in PR and advertising.

In short, "Can't we just work this out reasonably?" often boils down to "Will you stop getting in my way? Will you stop trying to gab my arm when I go for your wallet? When I punch you in the face, would you please have the decency not to punch me in my face?"

Are some of these people sincere?

The answer is, "Probably." Though whether that sincerity has to do with a sincere desire to make peace or a sincere desire to make money is another question.

However, basic sincerity is easy to gauge when talking to reformsters. All you have to ask is, how much responsibility do they take for the tenor of the conversation. Here's the basic scale:

Puzzled sadness. If their position is, "Gee, I don't understand how all this conflict started. just a mystery, you know, how things got all cantankerous," this is not a serious person, and certainly not a sincere one.

False equivalency. If their position is, "Well, yeah, first I punched you in the face, and then you punched me, so I guess we're both to blame, huh?" this is also someone who is neither serious nor sincere. There is no equivalency in the charter-public school debate. You can tell, because classic traditional charters did not, and do not, stir up any such conflict. But the modern charter movement moved in, led by amateurs who questioned our motives, called us names, denigrated our profession, attacked our livelihoods and tried to savage the health of the schools to which we had devoted our professional lives. Public school advocates did not suddenly become cranky about charter schools for no good reason. We were attacked. We fought back.

Deflection. "Well, maybe we were a bit out of line, and we're really sorry that you are such thin-skinned jerks that you had to react so badly to it." Pass. Next.

Honesty. If they can admit their role in the "civil war," then we have a basis to move forward. It's a possible thing. That doesn't mean they need to display abject sorrow. But prominent reformsters like Rick Hess have managed to say some version of, "If we call people names and accuse them of being stupid and evil, we deserve the opposition we get, because we are wrong." Likewise, if they can actually hear what we're saying and not try to twist it into the straw homme du jour, that's a good thing. I can talk to anybody who will actually read, listen, think and talk honestly. I might not agree with them, but I can talk to them, and we'll probably both be better for it.

So, hey-- there was a question back at the top...?

Is charter vs. public school some sort of civil war? And can it be solved? I'm not so sure about the first. The second is actually easy-- we could stop half of our charter troubles by simply creating an honest funding system. If the politicians of North New Frampsylvania (or whatever state you live in) want to have multiple school systems, be honest and fully fund them all. Don't, as some states do, take the current funding which is already not enough to fund the public system you already have, and try to use that inadequate funding to fund multiple school systems.

The Great Lie of the charter movement is that you can run multiple school systems for the cost of a single system. You can't. And so charters and public schools are left to fight over a pie that is already too small for one diner, let alone a dozen. Of course the result will be conflict, and lots of it. Though somehow I doubt that it would be peaches, cream, and fluffy bunnies if politicians went to the public and said, "In order to have more charter schools, we are raising your taxes."

But a Civil War? Not so much. In much (but not all) of the modern (but not traditional classic) charter movement, we have rich, powerful men using political clout to barge in and privatize pieces of the education system so that rich, powerful folks can get more rich. In the process they may rescue ten out of every hundred children of poverty, which is a noble and worthy goal, but in the process, they abandon the other ninety to a struggling less-than-awesome public school that now has even fewer resources to help. And all of this is done by education amateurs who believe that they have the authority to mess with the education system because, well, they just do, and yet, even after this many years, have few real successes to point to.

What we call it doesn't really matter. I agree that it would help everyone to help it settle a bit, and I actually can envision what okay-with-me charters would look like. But public school voices have been largely shut out of the conversation for at least a decade now, and there are no signs that's going to change. Unilaterally "negotiated" peaces rarely last.

I know what I'd like to see. Great schools in every single zip code, answerable first and foremost to the taxpayers of that zip code. Teaching as a profession supported and elevated, so that every school includes a cadre of top trained professionals who lead the charge. No more leadership (or teachership) by untrained (or faux trained) amateurs. Financial responsibility and transparency, with no tax dollars going to private corporate accounts without local approval. A return to a complete education that allows each and every child to focus on becoming fully human, fully him- or her-self, whatever that turns out to mean. All of which means no more false, narrow, cramped faux measures of school quality.

The Poison Premise

I can see how to get there with or without charters. So if you want to sit at a peace table with me, I guess the first thing you'll have to do is ditch the premise, "Well, of course, whatever we come up with will have to include charter schools." If you're more concerned about a guaranteed future for the charter industry than a guaranteed excellent education for every child, then peace between us is probably still over the horizon.

If it were necessary to include charters to get to my perfect educational future, I could live with that. But here's my question for charter fans-- if it were possible to give every child that excellent education, and the best way to do it was without charters, would you be okay with that?

Or is your premise, o charter fan, that whatever the future of education is going to be, it must have charters in it. Is it more important to educate every child in schools with local control and financial responsibility, or is it more important that the charter industry remain economically viable because that's where you've placed your bets? The answer will tell us what your real priorities and values are, and that answer will tell me how well we can hope to work together.

Associated Press Runs the Charter Industry's Narrative

Sigh. Another day, another undersourced news piece presenting only the charter point of view.

This time it's Christine Armario, writing for the Associated Press. The piece is widely titled "As Charters Grow, Public Schools See Sharp Enrollment Drop," but we can't give Armario credit for that thoughtful distinction, because here she is twitter, responding to former Duncan sidekick Michael Dannenberg's assertion that charter schools are public schools..

@M_Dannenberg1 Yes, charters are public schools. Referring here to district-run public schools - see story.

— Christine Armario (@cearmario) May 31, 2016

Well, no, they're not. When they answer to a publicly elected board. When they give a full, transparent accounting of how they spend tax dollars. When they commit to staying business forever, and not just as long as it makes business sense to stay open. When they take whatever students show up at their door. When they follow all of those rules that public schools follow. When all that is true, we can talk about calling them public schools, but until that day comes, they are private schools being financed with public tax dollars.

I will repeat, as always, that these distinctions do not automatically make charters evil and nefarious-- but they do automatically make them Not Public Schools.

Armario focuses on the draining of students and money from public schools in major systems like LA and Detroit. But her view is not exactly nuanced, and her research is not exactly deep.

For instance, in considering California's charter growth, she might have looked to charter laws that put charters in the driver's seat. A good example would be Mt. Diablo, where the state has imposed a Rocketship Charter on the community despite the charter fraud and local opposition. California charter clout can also be seen in the serious charter pushback against the same report that Armario opens with, in broad simple strokes.

But broad simple strokes are the hallmark of this piece; it looks like Armario's editor called for a quick under-a-thousand-word take (it clocks in at 921 words). So here's Armario's history of charter schools:

Charter schools arrived in the 1990s and began attracting parents searching for an alternative to big-city districts that had strained for years to raise performance among minority and low-income students and those who are learning English.

And here's her analysis of the effects of charter on public schools.

In districts with growing student populations, such as Las Vegas and Orlando, Florida, that growth helps ease potential overcrowding.

But in cities like Los Angeles, where the school-age population has been shrinking, the continued flight from traditional public schools has become a mounting concern. In most states, schools receive funding on a per-pupil basis, and the majority of those dollars follow students when they leave for a charter.

Her summary of the debate? Charter fans say that "it's only fair" that the money follows the students. Public school advocates point out that many public school costs don't change with the loss of students.

And she quotes charter spokeswoman Nina Rees who says that this sort of thing happens since public schools don't meet student needs. But Armario doesn't connect the dots between the draining of public ed resources and public ed's ability to be "competitive." Though she does note that A) that's how charter fans think it should work and B) the research doesn't actually back them up.

Armario also ticks off some of the districts that have experienced big drops in enrollment-- Detroit, Philly, Chicago, Losa Angeles-- without asking the question of how politicians have starved those public districts, thereby making well-supported charters more attractive.

In fact. rather than dig deeper into any of this, Armario gives a rehash of the charter industry's favorite narrative-- public schools are failing, so charters are taking off. 

As for voices she includes in her story-- there's Rees (National Alliance of Public Charter Schools), Ron Zimmer (who has published research sponsored by the charter loving Rand, Gates, and Joyce foundations), and a parent who was happy to get her child out of bad public schools and into a charter. On the other side, Steve Zimmer (LAUSD board president) and Susan Zoller, "a consultant hired by the district's union." There's also a strong showing by "others say." 

Is it glaringly tilted toward the charter side of things? No, but it does present the charter narrative without any critical consideration and the public education side without an explanation. Steve Zimmer's observation that charter proliferation leads to collateral damage is reported, but not explained. Nor does she consider a myriad of other issues, such as charters that move in and cash out, leaving students high and dry, or the question of exactly which students charters prefer to pull from public schools. And she lets the focus rest on the spread and growth of charters, and not the large number of students left in resource-strapped public schools.

Armario's coverage of charters in the past has also been light-touched. Here's a 2012 piece about how charters enroll fewer students with disabilities, with not a single mention of charges that charters enroll fewer SWD on purpose. ("Gosh," says Nina Rees in that piece, "it must just be that those parents don't choose charters.")

I expect more from an AP reporter whose beat includes education and charters. There's a worthwhile conversation to be had about charter schools in this country, but we can't have it if people are not getting the full, accurate view of what is actually happening. This was 921 words that did not help advance that conversation.

TheThird Way (To Make a Bundle in Education)

What is the Third Way? Well, whatever it is, it launches tomorrow (May 31) in Boston with featured guest appearances by Secretary of Education John King and Massachusetts Secretary of Education James Peyser (formerly honcho of New Schools Venture Fund). So maybe we'd better dig a little and see if we can figure out exactly what we're talking about.

The event is touted as The Emerging Third Way: Blazing an Optimistic Path Ahead in K-12 Education, and the blurb on the registration site starts with this little history lesson:

Since 1635, Massachusetts has been known for its district public schools- the “first way”. Since 1993, Massachusetts’ charter schools have led the nation in pioneering a “second way”. It is time to recognize a Third Way – an emerging set of strategies that combine school-level autonomies and energetic innovation with a commitment to universal service and local voice. The Third Way does not obviate the need and demand for either of the other ways but it does hold out a promising path for cooperative change that could raise student success, especially among disadvantaged students, on a large scale.

I'm just going to skip over the first part of the history lesson because arguing about whether or not Massachusett's charter schools have been nation-leading pioneers since 1993 is like getting in argument about whether or not a trio of alopeciac yeti infiltrated the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes during the eighties. It makes a damn good story, but not a very good evidence-based paper. So there goes our Common Core based writing score.

But can we close read a path to understanding the Third Way? Well, "emerging set of strategies" means roughly "we're still working on punching up the rough draft." Next, "autonomies and energetic innovation" are supposed to be the virtues of charter schools, while "universal service and local voice" are concerns of the public ed supporting crowd. So, can we keep the freedom from oversight and regulation for charters but still make sure that all students are still served and some sort of local control continues (I skipped over "innovation" because charter school innovation is tucked away in the dressing room of one of those yetis).

Furthermore, the Third Way doesn't throw out either public schools or charters, but it does-- and this is important-- connect back to student achievement for poor kids on a large scale. That part of the pitch is straight out of the Charter School Messaging Notebook, an honest-to-god real marketing guide ordered up by the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools to help charter operators choose the right language for marketing. The advice is very specific. talk about partnerships. Talk about student achievement, particularly for poor kids.

I will confess that talk of charter "partnership" always rubs me the wrong way. Imagine you're a surgeon with all the training and experience that goes with that. In the middle of an important operation, a guy walks into the operating theater, elbows you to one side, grabs some scalpels, and inserts himself directly in your light. "Excuse me," you say (or something similar). "What the hell are you doing here? Are you a visiting surgeon? Are you supposed to be in here?"

"Well," he replies. "I'm actually not a surgeon at all. I'm a banker. But I have a lot of important friends, and I care very much about health and surgery. Also, I'm getting half your fee for this operation. What are you getting so angry about. I really think you and I ought to co-operate."

But maybe I'm excessively and unnecessarily touchy here. Let's dig a little more and maybe I'll see I'm all worked up about nothing.

Turns out that The Third Way is the brainchild of one outfit-- Empower Schools.

We've run across these guys before in Massachusetts, where they commandeered  three school districts, with both mixed efforts and mixed results. Other reformy outfits think they're just awesome. Jennifer Berkshire (Edushyster) has visited, and found a district that was eschewing some techniques from the charter reformster playbook, but instead followed public ed rules (like, say, backfilling)-- while still leaning hard into old favorites like test-centered schools. Berkshire also found a district hemorrhaging teachers and leaders-- specifically the local, home-grown type, opening ES to the criticism of being one more group of educational carpetbaggers. As she quoted one departing teacher, "When you’re emotionally invested in the future of a place, you have a different measure of what success means."

ES lists as its three missions, inform leaders, advance policy, and catalyze change. So, lobbying and advocacy?

But looking at the list of players at Empower Schools gives you a pretty good sense of what type of group we're dealing with. Let's take a look:

Chris Gabrieli (CEO & Co-founder) Started out as head of medical software company, now partner emeritus of Bessemer Venture Partners. Chairman of Massachusetts Board of Higher Education.

Brett Alessi (Co-founder and Managing Partner) Previously with Massachusetts 2020, a reformy group focused on after-school programming (they call it "expanded learning time). Also worked with Educational Pioneers, a sort of Broad Academy approach to developing school leaders. It appears that he actually taught at some point, at "public and private" schools.

Sarah Toce (Director of Policy) Worked for Wisconsin Charter Schools Association where "she helped develop a strategy for new charter school legislation, provided technical assistance and managed advocacy and communications for WI’s 200+ public charter schools." So, PR and lobbying for charters.

Matt Matera (Program Director) An Education Pioneers alum. He was Teach for America material, and he taught at a charter school where he now serves on the board. And he was also "the Director of Human Capital Investments at New Schools for New Orleans and the Director of Innovation and Talent for Lawrence Public Schools in Massachusetts." B.A. in English and J.D. from Yale.

Kate Anderson (Director of Empowerment Zones) First of all, awesome title. She was previously at the New Profit Inc venture philanthropy firm. Before that, teacher and curriculum developer in a charter school. B.A. in biology and Asian studies from Williams.

Rae Williams (Strategy and Operations Manager) She was a performance management associate consultant for Mendelsohn, Gittleman & Associates, LLC (MGA)

Sarah Robb (Program manager) She comes from TNTP, infamous purveyors of "The Widget Effect" and straight out of the reformster stable. She taught biology in Chicago, at a charter school, as a TFA product.

Empower Schools also partners with other organizations, including Teach for America, TNTP, Relay/GSE and some charter management outfits. They have gotten Gates Foundation money; here's a 2014 grant of over $600K  "to support a set of pilot activities designed to increase the number of high-quality school seats in Massachusetts by leveraging flexibilities with Common Core instruction." And they also get money from the Boston Foundation, a group that never tires of pushing charter schools. 


And Empower Schools is part of Boston:Forward, an astro-turfy coalition of charter schools, charter chains, and charter advocates whose motto is "The Fast Track to Great Schools for Boston."

So I'm wondering-- as all these thought leaders and policy advocates and high-powered groups sat around the table developing this vision of how public and charter schools could come together for a Third Way, exactly who was representing the needs, the concerns, or the point of view of public schools? Is it just me, or do public school voices seem as hard to locate in this crowd as alopeciac dancing yeti?

Because this certainly looks like a gathering of wolves deciding how best the sheep can co-operate with them. This certainly looks like a convocation of foxes deciding on the best security system for the hen house. "Does anyone object if we just leave this opening without a guard, an alarm, or a door? Nobody? Good. Then I think we've found a co-operative solution to our issues."

Yes, they're inviting alleged officials of the public school sector to their party, but given John King's record in New York and Jim Peyser's previous work writing (literally) the book on how to gut public schools, I'm not comforted. This is an old charter trick, borrowed from generations of salesmen-- assume the sale. Start the discussion with the assumption that, of course, charters are important, never going away, and have equal standing with the public schools, so obviously we must learn to work together, as long as by "together" you mean "according to the terms dictated by charter advocates."

As always, I will observe that I am not opposed to charters in principle, and can in fact imagine conditions under which I welcome and applaud them.

But those conditions do not include a bunch of people with no actual experience or expertise in public education pushing into a market and claiming a piece of it based on nothing more than political connections, chutzpah, and a desire to make a buck. Jennifer Berkshire will be in attendance, and I look forward to her report (as should we all), but until I hear otherwise, I'm strongly suspecting that the Third Way is just one more layer of PR massaging to better ease the transfer of a whole bunch of public tax dollars to private pockets. And despite what you may have heard, you can put a really nice dress on a hairless yeti, but it won't make her a Rockette.

How To Defeat Trump

People keep trying to crack the code for defeating GOP Presidential candidate and world's worst human, Donald Trump, and they keep failing.

You cannot swing a cat on the internet without reading a "Looook at how much Trump lies and contradicts himself!" posts-- and yet nobody cares.

I think what best captures Trump's imperviousness on matters of truth, consistency, and decency is the slogan on a poster just down my street--

Trump-- Finally, someone with balls.

How do you qualify as someone who has giant brass balls? By showing no regard for the kind of social conventions involved in matters of truth, consistency, and decency. Every time Trump gets "caught" lying or changing his position, his supporters do not react with shock or disappointment-- they give each other high fives because their boy just flashed his giant brass balls again.

That line of attack is never going to work.

But then I was on the interwebs today, minding my own business, and I saw multiple reports of this.

Pundit-for-God-knows-why Bill Kristol let loose the mysterious claim that there will be an impressive independent candidate "with a strong team and a real chance." And then in less than two hours, Trump flipped out with another one of his reactive tantrums, calling Kristol names and squawking about the proper rules to play by.

Now, mind you, Kristol, who has almost never been right about anything, is undoubtedly completely full of it when he makes this claim. But that doesn't matter. Look at Trump-- reacting rather than acting and squawking like the tantrum-throwing toddler he is, not even looking like a grown-up, let alone an actual candidate for President. His followers probably won't care, but it cuts into his usual rhetoric, and it makes him look bad to everyone else. So I'm thinking, here's the campaign strategy for opposing him.

Lie. Lie about him. Lie at him. Throw lies in his general direction like Buddy-the-Elf-powered snowballs.

Kristol isn't intentionally lying--he's just always wrong-- but why not start with the lies? Have the GOP issue a press release that candidates whose last name starts with T will not be allowed at the convention. Pretend to be a repo man and repossess his car on the way to an event. Hire an ugly woman to announce that she gave birth to Trump's ugly child. Heck, hire three hundred of them. Announce that Cleveland will be closed for repairs all summer and fall because global warming has caused the lake to rise all the way to Superior. Announce that Trumps planes will not be allowed to fly because the Air Force has determined that alien spacecraft are attracted by his hair. Photoshop him into pictures showing him naked in a hot tub with Stalin. Hire a Trump impersonator to start issuing press releases as John Miller announcing that Trump's wife is leaving him because he's old and boring and has been impotent for years.

I'm not saying any of this would be ethical or right. But one of the abilities that Trump lacks is the ability to just let stuff slide off his ample back. And as all of his opponents have discovered, it is hard to maintain dignity while trying to defend yourself from stupid lies. To defeat Trump, Republicans, Democrats, and Americans who don't want to be led by President Asshat just need to find someone who will go after Trump with the same disregard for truth, consistency and decency. Not an alternative candidate-- ust a political operative who can squash Trump and then fade back into the shadows while our normal politicians resume their usual normal not-so-Trump-sized disregard for truth, consistency and decency.

Cross your fingers and let the lying begin.

HYH: Student Voices and Lawrence, Mass

The fourth episode of the podcast Have You Heard has been out for a while, and as usual I am way behind because I can read or type under almost any circumstances, but listening is a Whole Other Thing. So here we go, theoretically better late than never.

The episode features Jennifer Berkshire and Aaron French on their first road trip, for which they head to Lawrence, Massachusetts. Berkshire notes that while the ed debates are "all about the kids," it's rare that the kids' voices are actually heard. And Lawrence makes an interesting destination because the state took over the schools about five years ago.

We find our intrepid podcasters in the Boys and Girls Club of Lawrence, surrounded by students who are writing responses to the question, "What is education?"

But what they're really talking about is finding a voice, and expressing that voice through writing. "I was angry about a lot of things," says one student, in particular noting "decisions that were made for me" without ever involving her in the process. This is a student-run workshop, even though there are some adults present.

"You don't get many opportunities to experience something bigger than yourself," says one writer in reference to an open-mic night at a local spot, and that really hits me as I listen, because school really ought to provide many of the Bigger Than Yourself opportunities. This is one of the less-often-mentioned aspects of test-driven standards-centered ed reform-- the whole education process has been shrunk down from the business of finding things in the world that are bigger than yourself to a tiny, cramped activity that isn't bigger than anybody.

I'm also struck by how specific this is. Students are largely Dominican immigrants who find themselves in the poorest city in Massachusetts, but they are surprisingly focused on fixing the city, rather than escaping or destroying it. The program addresses turning writers into advocates and activists, and one student talks about pushing back against a system that is set to turn them into robots.

And as an English teacher, I can get really excited about students who see authentic connections between their voice and their writing and their way of being in the world. Even in a classroom that is not dominated by test-centered instruction, it can be hard to get students to see writing as a means of authentic expression and not just some dumb thing the teacher makes you do.

These students surveyed over 600 students in Lawrence about education (imagine that-- surveying students about education) and created results that include a short film (a podcast listener has added a link). But even the description of that film is compelling. You can find it at the bottom of this post-- and it speaks to all of us who work in a classroom, not just reformsters.

This is a great episode, and it's exciting to hear students speak with such strength about finding and using their own voices. I'll make it easy for you to listen-- it's about ten minutes of your time well spent.