Norms vs. Standards

I've found myself trying to explain the difference between norm and standards reference multiple times in the last few weeks, which means it's time to write about it. A lot of people get this distinction-- but a lot of people don't. I'm going to try to do this in plain(ish) English, so those of you who are testing experts, please forgive the lack of correct technical terminology.

A standards-referenced (or criterion-referenced) test is the easiest one to understand and, I am learning, what many, many people think we're talking about when we talk about tests in general and standardized tests in particular.

With standards reference, we can set a solid immovable line between different levels of achievement, and we can do it before the test is even given. This week I'm giving a spelling test consisting of twenty words. Before I even give the test, I can tell my class that if they get eighteen or more correct, they get an A, if they get sixteen correct, they did okay, and if the get thirteen or less correct, they fail.

A drivers license test is also standards-referenced. If I complete the minimum number of driving tasks correctly, I get a license. If I don't, I don't.

One feature of a standards-referenced test is that while we might tend to expect a bell-shaped curve of results (a few failures, a few top scores, and most in the middle), such a curve is not required or enforced. Every student in my class can get an A on the spelling test. Everyone can get a drivers license. With standards referenced testing, clustering is itself a piece of useful data; if all of my students score less than ten on my twenty word test, then something is wrong.

With a standards-referenced test, it should be possible for every test taker to get top marks.

A norm-referenced measure is harder to understand but, unfortunately, far more prevalent these days.

A standards-referenced test compares every student to the standard set by the test giver. A norm-referenced test compares every student to every other student. The lines between different levels of achievement will be set after the test has been taken and corrected. Then the results are laid out, and the lines between levels (cut scores) are set.

When I give my twenty word spelling test, I can't set the grade levels until I correct it. Depending on the results, I may "discover" that an A is anything over a fifteen, twelve is Doing Okay, and anything under nine is failing. Or I may find that twenty is an A, nineteen is okay, and eighteen or less is failing. If you have ever been in a class where grades are curved, you were in a class that used norm referencing.

Other well-known norm referenced tests are the SAT and the IQ test. Norm referencing is why, even in this day and age, you can't just take the SAT on a computer and have your score the instant you click on the final answer-- the SAT folks can't figure out your score until they have collected and crunched all the results. And in the case of the IQ test, 100 is always set to be "normal."

There are several important implications and limitations for norm-referencing. One is that they are lousy for showing growth, or lack thereof. 100 will be and has always been "normal" aka "smack dab in the middle of  the results" for IQ tests. Have people gotten smarter or dumber over time? Hard to say-- big time testers like the IQ folks have all sorts of techniques for tying years of results together, but at the end of the day "normal" just means "about in the middle compared to everyone else whose results are in the bucket with mine." With norm referencing, we have no way of knowing whether this particular bucket is overall smarter or dumber than the other buckets. All of our data is about comparing the different fish in the same bucket, and none of it is useful for comparing one bucket to another (and that includes buckets from other years-- as all this implies, norm referencing is not so great at showing growth over time).

Normed referencing also gets us into the Lake Wobegon Effect. Can the human race ever develop and grow to the point that every person has an IQ over 100? No-- because 100 will always be the average normal right-in-the-middle score, and the entire human race cannot be above average (unless that is also accompanied by above-average innumeracy). No matter how smart the human race gets, there will always be people with IQs less that 100.

On a standards-referenced test, it is possible for everyone to get an A. On a normed-referenced test, it is not possible for everyone to get an A. Nobody has to flunk a standards-referenced test. Somebody has to flunk a norm-referenced test.

What are some of the examples we live with in education?

How about "reading on grade level"? At the end of the day, there are only two ways to determine what third grade "grade level" is-- you can either look at all all the third graders you can get data for and say, "Well, it looks like most of them get up to about here" or you can say "I personally believe that all third graders should be able to get to right about here" and just set it yourself based on your own personal opinion.

While lots of people have taken a shot at setting "grade level" in a variety of ways, it boils down to those two techniques, and mostly we rely on the first, which is norm-referencing. Which means that there will always be people who read below grade level-- always. The only way to show the some, more or all students are reading above grade level is to screw around with where we draw the "grade level" line on the big bell curve. But other than doing that kind of cheating with the data analysis, there is no way to get all students reading above grade level. If all third graders can read and comprehend Crime and Punishment, then Crime and Punishment is a third grade reading level book, and the kid in your class who has trouble grasping the full significance of Raskolnikov's dream of the whipped mare as a symbol of gratification through punishment and abasement is the third grader who gets a D on her paper.

And of course, there are the federally mandated Big Standardized Tests, the PARCC, SBA, PSSA, WTF, MOUSE, ETC or whatever else you're taking in your state.

First, understand why the feds and test fanatics wanted so badly for pretty much the same test to be given everywhere and for every last student to take it. Think back to our buckets of fish. Remember, with norming we can only make comparisons between the fish in the same bucket, so the idea was that we would have a nation-sized bucket with every single fish in it. Now, sadly, we have about forty buckets, and only some of them have a full sampling of fish. The more buckets and the fewer fish, the less meaningful our comparisons.

The samples are still big enough to generate a pretty reliably bell-shaped curve, but then we get our next problem, which is figuring out where on that bell curve to draw the cut score, the line that says, "Oh yeah, everyone above this score is super-duper, and everyone below it is not." This process turns out (shocker) to be political as all get out (here's an example of how it works in PA) because it's a norm-referenced test and that means somebody has to flunk and some bunch of bureaucrats and testocrats have to figure out how many flunkers there are going to be.

There are other norm-referencing questions floating out there. The SAT bucket has always included all the fish intending to go to college-- what will happen to the comparisons if the bucket contains all the fish, including the non-college-bound ones? Does that mean that students who used to be the bottom of the pack will now be lifted to the middle?

This is also why using the SAT or the PARCC as a graduation exam is nuts-- because that absolutely guarantees that a certain number of high school seniors will not get diplomas, because these are norm-referenced tests and somebody has to land on the bottom. And that means that some bureaucrats and testocrats are going to sit in a room and decide how many students don't get to graduate this year. 

It's also worth remembering that norm referencing is lousy at providing an actual measure of how good or bad students are at something. As followers of high school sports well know, "champion of our division" doesn't mean much if you don't know anything about the division. Saying that Pat was the tallest kid in class doesn't tell us much about how tall Pat actually is. And with these normed measures, you have no way of knowing if the team is better than championship teams from other years, or if Pat is taller or shorter than last year's tallest kid in class.

Norm referencing, in short, is great if you want to sort students, teachers and schools into winners and losers. It is lousy if you want to know how well students, teachers and schools are actually doing. Ed reform has placed most of its bets on norm referencing, and that in itself tells us a lot about what reformsters are really interested in. That is not a very useful bucket of fish.

Moskowitz Schadenfreude

Eva Moskowitz, the super-well-paid queen (almost a cool half million) of Success Academy, finally had more than just a lousy day. She flat out lost one. I know it's not nice, but let's share a little schadenfreude over the defeat of a woman whose defiant hubris has been a bamboo shoot under the fingernails of educators all across New York.

The plan has been to expand the SA empire by adding Pre-K. But in an unexpected twist, the city of New York, rather than simply handing Moskowitz a pile of money and saying "Have a nice day," actually insisted that she sign a contract and agree to use the money in particular ways.

You might think that this does not sound terribly unreasonable, that virtually all vendors who want a chunk of public money have to enter some sort of contract in which they agree to do certain things in certain ways according to certain rules. Even the long-existent military-industrial complex does not work by having contractors say, "We'd like a million dollars to just do some stuff." Heck, plenty of charter advocates propose a system in which charters contract to hit certain marks and have their success or failure measured accordingly.

But we're talking Eva Moskowitrz here. Moskowitz who successfully told the state of New York that they had no right to audit her. Moskowitz who simply went over the head of the mayor of New York City and had the legislature overrule him so that she could have more schools.

Not only did Moskowitz want her pile of Pre-K money without conditions, but she offered the argument that it was illegal to require anything contractually of her when the money was handed over. The contract may have been okay for every other provider of Pre-K services in the city, but Moskowitz answers to no one. Check out her op-ed here, where among other things, she says that whether or not the city's requirements are reasonable is "beside the point." Her reading of charter law is that charters should get tax dollars without having to answer to anybody.

How much is at stake here? About $720K. As Politico wryly notes, that's slightly less than the $734K that Moskowitz spent on her big rally in Albany.

And so, after repeated defeats and denials, after not getting her way from anyone, Moskowitz declared that she would take her ball and go home. Because while providing quality Pre-K For The Children may be a noble goal, it's not as important as Moskowitz getting her own way. Any oversight that the city wanted to exert in order to make sure that all programs are high quality? That's just  an uinfair burden. Her entitlement shows through the open letter to Mayor DeBlasio that she reportedly circulated to SA parents, in which she accuses him of "stealing" an opportunity from children. In other words, she doesn't have to prove to anyone that her program is good-- she is entitled to those tax dollars and to deny her is to steal what is rightfully hers.

Politico laid the story out in pretty fair and balanced terms, and the Daily News picked it up a day later, but mostly it appears that Moskowitz threw a press conference to raise a chorus of outrage and anger, and mostly nobody showed up.

So she tried again yesterday with a "rally" at city hall, covered just by the charter-loving New York Post-- and even they said that Moskowitz "fumed." It seems that Moskowitz just can't draw a big crowd any more, nor can she as easily convince folks that her outrage should be everyone's outrage. And the press keeps asking if she's running for mayor-- almost as if they don't think she's entirely serious about this whole charter school thing. This has to be the unkindest cut of all-- not just that she can't get her way, but that she can't draw a sympathetic crowd of people to amplify her dismay. Imagine a day when Moskowitz has become, not just less of a threat to public education, but actually irrelevant to the discussion. Won't that be a day?

How To Blackmail a Teacher

This is not a post about some reformster program or educational policy. This is about just how low someone can go. This is about one of the worst websites I have ever come across.

TeacherComplaint.com is a site that looks clunky, but makes an offer that seems appealing:

TeacherComplaints.com - A Unique Web Site which allows Students & Parents to take control of what goes on in school!

Do you feel that your child is treated unfairly in class? Do you feel that your child gets to much home work? - Do you feel that your teacher doesn't understand your child / student? Do you feel that the school staff could care less about your problems, feel neglected? - Here, You can give an in depth report of how a school and teacher uses his/ her classroom and how they treat you as a parent and student.. Why Rate A Teacher or school (which can be maniputalted) When you can File A Teacher Complaint!

They claim to have been mentioned on major news networks. Ed Week took a look at it back in 2011; it has been around since 2009 ("This site has officially went online today- March 11, 2009"). It ranks around 368,000 on alexa.

So why am I picking on a site that exists to give students and parents a voice, which provides them with a chance to speak up about injustice they see at school? Isn't that a good thing, even if it is a site that is rife with spelling and usage errors? Certainly lots and lots of folks are using it-- with new complaints posted as recently as yesterday. Why am I calling this the worst thing ever.

The answer can be found in this paragraph on the site, which gives us a better picture of the business model involved:

To bad teachers who have made a big mistake in the teaching profession, we recognize that you may have learned your lesson from a student or parent posting a complaint.  The First Amendment - Free Speech law protects students and teachers rights as long as what was done by the teacher was correct.  To remove a complaint from this web site and the search engine takes time and someone to remove them with sophisticated tools, so for those teachers that want the complaint removed and will abide to improve their teaching and not make the same mistake again, we can remove your complaints within a short period of time with a Remediation Removal Fee of $400 per complaint per person.  Each additional complaint by another student or parent will be an additional fee of $50 payable through PayPal 

It's a blackmail site, pure and simple, a nifty cross between old school blackmail and new school ransomware. There's no reason to believe that the site actually gets relief for its complainers. They suggest that the power of social media will accomplish things, and complainers can certainly "choose to have your complaint submitted to the school." They list one case from in 2010 where someone filed a complaint about (maybe) a teacher later in trouble with the law for sexual harassment.

Should there be an avenue for students and parents to pursue action against teachers who they believe are bad actors? Certainly. Is this site that avenue? Doesn't look like it. This site looks like somebody has found a way to abuse the trust of students with a complaint as a means of running a tidy blackmail business, thereby both abusing teachers, students and parents. After all, what good does it do to place a complaint at a rando website where the object of your complaint can just pay $400 to make your complaint go away?

It's a vile racket, with no indication of who is actually behind it. But somewhere out there is a person with little shame and even less ethical guidance.

Death Notice for Neoliberalism?

Neo what? You may not be paying enough attention to political labels and categories, particularly when they don't seem to fit any of the standard Dem-liberal vs. GOP-conservative model.

Neoliberalism was born in the thirties in Europe (where it was also known as the "Middle Way" or the "Third Way"). Its central tenet is that private corporations ought to be free to do whatever they want, and neo-libs love free trade, deregulation, privatization, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Wait-- why does this thing even have "liberal" in its name? Because 1930s Europeans were wacky that way, I guess. Or maybe it's because it wants to "liberalize" the movement and accumulation of money.

Neoliberalism is about the idea that the private sector can do everything so much better than the public sector, that competition is the secret to excellence, that a truly free market will create excellence and wealth for all. And as we can immediately recognize, it has been embraced by prominent members of both parties.

It is well-positioned to sell to both right and left. On the right, you can take solace that it makes the government smaller and directs lots and lots (and lots and lots) of tax dollars to private sector interests. On the left, you can take solace that neolibs preserve government programs-- they've just hired some private company to take care of the programs. If something's worth doing, it's worth paying some private company tax dollars to do it.

Groups like ALEC, the legislation mill where private corporations get to tell elected legislators what bill they ought to pass-- well, that's just a natural outgrowth of the neolib philosophy. The public sector really ought to be working for the private sector, not getting in their way, telling them what regulations they must follow, and telling them how to play fair. The worst horror stories you've heard about the TPP, like the secrete tribunal where companies can sue countries for interfering with the company profits-- that's how a neolib thinks the world should work.

For thirty or forty years (depending on who's counting) thought leaders and political leaders and leaders of leaders in shadowy rooms have supposedly been embedding neoliberalism in everything. That group of embedders would include the people who run the world's financial systems, all the way up to the International Monetary Fund. The IMF has been a huge fan of neoliberalism.

Which is why it is big news this when the IMF publishes a report entitled "Neoliberalism: Oversold?" and comes damn close to saying, "Yeah, we were totally wrong on that one. Sorry for the last forty years of economic inequality and mess."

Their simplified explanation of neoliberalism is that there are two planks-- plank one is increased competition, and the other is less government via privatization and shrinkage.

Mind you, they are not doing a complete 180-- the report says that neoliberalism has delivered on some of its promise through international trade that helped poverty in some areas, foreign investment that transferred tech to emerging economies, and privatization that increased efficiency cheaply in some places. But all is not rosy. For instance, the report uses this as a big fat pull quote:

Instead of delivering growth, some neoliberal policies have increased inequality, in turn jeopardizing durable expansion.

They could be quoting virtually any not-a-neolib of the past four decades, but no-- that's the IMF. And here's another shocker of a pull quote:

Governments with ample fiscal space will do better by living with the debt.

There's a lot more to it in several reports which are actually kind of hard to get to on the web, and which also require a certain level of eco-wonkery skill. But you can read the astonished reactions everywhere, from the people who want to say "I told you so" to the people who are a little more detached. The refrain is the same-- if the IMF thinks maybe neoliberalism is not actually working, then something is up.

Of course neoliberalism is the secret sauce that explains why Barrack Obama and Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton and Whitney Tilson and the (supposedly left-leaning) Center for American Progress and the (theoretically right-tilted) Fordham Institute all appear to be singing in the same choir from the same hymnal when it comes to education. I'm not a huge fan or student of political theory labels, but there is a name for what unites the vast majority of reformsters, and the name is neoliberalism-- the belief that a free market filled with privatized providers (of both education, schools and teachers) and scraped free of as many government regulations as possible (including those damned unions) will bring us all to a shiny promised land.

That, my brothers and sisters, is the technical wonky political theory name for what ails us, and now one of its most staunch believers, defenders, priests and acolytes is suggesting in what qualify as loud tones for the economics wonky world that maybe it doesn't actually work after all.

After all these years, neoliberalism has not spread the wealth, not lifted up the poor, not provided excellence, not made government more effective or efficient, not done much of anything except make a small group of people very, very rich-- rich enough to start running governments and telling elected officials what to do. Lots and lots and lots of people noticed long ago that it wasn't working-- and have said so repeatedly. But to have the IMF notice something and say something out loud, in print-- that is a new thing. 

Yes, there are caveats, hedges, fine print, details and a world of quibbles. But the foundation has cracked. It may be years before that does us any good in public education-- the idea that privatized competition breeds excellence has, despite all clearly visible evidence to the contrary, grown strong roots in our culture. The body may keep kicking long after the head has died. But for all that, for all the time me have to wait for the street dancing, this is still good news. I'd suggest we bow our heads for a moment, but there's nothing in this news to be sad about.

 

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.