The SAT-- Worse Than You Think

Folks have been questioning the accuracy, validity and usefulness of the SAT for decades, and the chorus of criticism only increased when College Board, the test manufacturing company responsible for the SAT, brought in Common Core architect David Coleman to take over. Coleman's fast and ugly rewrite of the venerable test was intended to bring it in line with the K-12 standards of Common Core. Coleman, whose ego has always seemed to be Grand Canyon sized, had finished redefining education for K-12 students-- now he was going to fix college, too. And, the College Board hoped, he was also going to recapture a share of the market dominated by the ACT. In fact, a plan to grab huge market share by getting states to use the SAT as their federally-mandated Big Standardized Test-- or even an exit exam.

New vocab. New math. New batteries of tests, and a PSAT set up to work as a marketing tool for AP courses (another College Board product). A flubbed delivery on PSAT scores, and then an awkward mess surrounding the spring rollout of the SAT-- so awkward that SAT prep professionals recommended sitting out the first round of the test.

It looked like a shaky product was even shakier. You never want to see them make the sausage, but apparently SAT sausage is being made with even worse parts of unspeakable animals than we suspected.

And now a whistle blower has stepped forward to add to the story, and what we're learning is that as bad as things seemed with the SAT, they were actually much worse.

The name we're all getting to know is Manuel Alfaro. He started out his college career at Williams College, where he co-authored a paper with Jason Zimba, the architect of the math side of the Common Core. Alfaro says they were classmates and friends, but says that the call twenty years later to come work for David Coleman came "out of the blue."

In between Alfaro worked for publishers McGraw Hill and Riverside Publishing. He then spent seven years with American Institutes for Research, another big name in standardized testing. He went to work for David Coleman and the College Board in May of 2013, less than a year after Coleman took over the venerable test maker.Alfaro lasted about a year and ten months.

What he found at the College Board apparently troubled him. In an open letter to his colleagues, he outlines the steps he tried to take:

Over the last year, I’ve explored many different options that would allow me to provide students and their families the critical information they need to make informed decisions about the SAT. At the same time, I was always seeking the option that would have minimal impact on your lives.

I gave David Coleman several opportunities to be a decent human being. Using HR and others, he built a protective barrier around himself that I was unable to penetrate. Being unable to reach him, I was left with my current option as the best choice.

Alfaro elsewhere has this to say about himself:

The College Board will tell you that I am a disgruntled employee. This statement would not be entirely wrong, but it would not be entirely correct either. I am a disillusioned idealist, shocked by the reality I encountered at the College Board.

And so for the last month or so, Alfaro has been blogging on LinkedIN, outlining some of what he saw on the inside that bothered him so much. Mercedes Schneider took a look at his output yesterday, and you can find the up to date list of his posts here.

But here are some of the strikingly awful revelations that he shares. From one of his first posts:

My first assignment with the College Board was to review a draft of the test specifications for the redesigned SAT. The document had been created by two of David Coleman’s cronies, two authors of the Common Core. This document is now known as the “research-based, empirical backbone” of the SAT Suite of Assessments. Back then, it was a subset of standards taken straight from the high school and middle school Common Core. My instructions were to rubberstamp the selection of standards and to rewrite the standard descriptions to make them unrecognizable, so that no one could tell they were Common Core.

So the College Board's story of all sorts of research-based alignment between their "backbone" and the CCSS is baloney-- they just used the standard high school sophomore trick of copying material and changing the language so that it wasn't obvious.

The software system for managing the test content? I suppose we all imagined some sort of complex tagging and tracking system for balancing and managing sophisticated testing strategies for each test item, but Alfaro says no-- just a bunch of files and folders and an excel spreadsheet for banking the test items.

Alfaro says that experimental items are spread throughout the test with no particular regard for difficulty. But that could be because, as he also shockingly maintains, many test items are never reviewed before they make it onto the test in the first place. These items are not reviewed or rewritten until they've already made it onto the test. 

Alfaro says that the work group that performs that review and revision had many concerns, some of which they attempted to raise fairly forcefully. The College Board's own internal review group was concerned about:

Item quality: Their biggest concern was the large number of items that were mathematically flawed; items that did not have correct answers; and items that did not have accurate or realistic contexts. Some members even went as far as stating that they had never seen so many seriously flawed items.

Development Schedule: They felt they didn't have enough time to address all of the item issues.

Development Process: They felt the overall process was inadequate to the task.

So, too many terrible items, not enough time to fix them, and a flawed process for creating a decent test. outside of that, everything right on track.

The short form of Alfaro's story-- the College Board has knowingly lied about using best practices in developing the "revamped" SAT, and in the process of selling the SAT as a state-wide and/or graduation exam, will be lying some more. And it would appear that even this stripped down, cut corners approach isn't letting the College Board get tests written fast enough, for as Schneider found poking around Reddit, the same form of the SAT was given in March and in June.

Alfaro is still out there and still writing. He says that the story has "more plot twists than the Da Vinci Code." It seems certain that those plot twists are not good news for the College Board. Go read some more about the full extent of Coleman's fraud. Stay tuned, and pass the word.

[Update: Alfaro has a White House petition started to demand investigation. Maybe a long shot, but why not sign on and maybe put some more pressure on Coleman's College Board.]

Back to the Children's Table

Do you remember?

It was going to be our year. Education-- the issue, the American institution, the highly contested battleground of policy, politics, and pedagogy-- was going to be on the front burner. Presidential politics would be the Big Event, and education was going to be seated at the Big Table.

Lots of folks thought so. Jeb! Bush had spent ages first fine-tuning his education organization as a Florida-based group, and then scaled it up so that he would have a national profile built around his aggressive and forward-thinking reform of public education. He mounted all sorts of clever PR pushes like Learn More Go Further to help push his education cred into the public eye. He even stepped down from running the Foundation for Excellence in Education, which in retrospect is kind of cute-- like a candidate for governor who resigns from his job as watchman at the junkyard because he doesn't want to look like he's getting an unethical advantage. Jeb! was ready to ride the Big Education Wave right to the White House.

Campbell Brown thought it was our year. Her website/advocacy group/hobby business The 74 Million was poised to ride the wave-- education was going to leading the parade down Pennsylvania Avenue and Brown was going to be there waiting for it, staking out the eduterritory so that she could set the proper agenda. She was going to be a king-maker; everyone who wanted to be President would have to talk about education, and everyone who wanted to talk about education would have to talk to her.

And if we're being hones, we can't fault Brown or Bush for what now looks like childlike faith. At one point or another, we all thought that education was set to be a defining issue. And then, poof, it was gone.

On news sites, "education" was no longer a heading-- or if it was still there, it was buried deep. Politicians who thought that Common Core was a guaranteed boffo baby-kissing moment were shocked and horrified to discover that the crowd was rebelling. At first they pushed back (it's just the tin hat crowd) but it became evident that the game was up. Looking back, the Common Core Kerfluffle may have been one of the first clear signs that the GOP was seriously out of touch with their own people. Meanwhile, union leadership kept discovering that they, too, were out of step with membership on issues like Common Core and Arne Duncan (remember when members were all "let's tar and feather him" and leadership was all "oh, give him a break. just give him a stern look and a hug").

So as the great clown car of primary season, politicians started avoiding education as a topic. Brown tried to hold her education candidate summits and got less than half of the GOP candidates and none of the dems to show up, and when she tried to gin up outrage over the no-shows, the crowd yawned.

But in on respect, she wasn't wrong. Nobody was talking about education any more, and when they did, they stuck to the safe stuff-- more pre-K for the babies and cheaper college for the big kids.

And then. Arne Duncan went away, taking his fifty foot lightning rod and foot-sized mouth with him. Congress managed to actually do their job and pass a new version of the ESEA, erasing No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top/waiverpallooza, and while it was a welcome eight-year-overdue exercise of actual lawmaking, it was also vague and fuzzy and ended a lot of things while leaving the door open for a lot of other things, and the passage of it let a lot of hot air out of a lot of balloons. Suddenly, a lot of peoples' favorite eduproblems to bitch about were off the table.

As the field got narrower, the talk about education became less and less. Trump said he would use federal power to cancel Common Core, because he's an idiot. Clinton said as little as possible, but since her campaign is run by the same guy who used to run the Center for American Progress, we don't need tea leaves to know where she stands; she stands exactly where Obama stood and where Bush stood before him. Sanders occasionally spoke about education, and if we squinted we could convince ourselves that his stated intent to take on the forces of Wall Street and Big Money would put him on a path to oppose privatization of education.

But Sanders is out of it. I just looked at a House GOP roadmap for a brighter tomorrow, and it has nothing of substance to say about education. The GOP's goals look pretty much like the Democratic ideal-- the only difference is whether the states or the feds should drive the bus. But either way, the bus still runs to Test-Driven Public Edville and downtown Charter Town, both located in the heart of Privatizania.

This has been clear, obvious, painfully obvious for months now, but I can't deny the truth any longer. The grown up table is getting set, and there is no seat there for education. Decisions will be made about education, and they will by and large suck for the health of US public education, but they won't be the subject of robust public debate. Nobody is going to bleed or bruise on that hill, let alone fight and die there.

No, for education it is back to the kiddie table off in the corner, where we'll sit with pressing issues like Uruguay's debt, choosing a National Peach Pit Day, and the price of tea in China. The only discussion of public education will be the discussion that those of us who care can force. No matter what happens next, there's no denying the hard truth-- we had better buckle up, hunker down, and gather our strength, because the next four years are going to be dry and ugly. At the children's table, they only serve leftovers.

TX: Yet Another Testing Screw-up

The Texas version of the Big Standardized Test is called the STAAR, which could stand for Some Tests Are Always Ridiculous or maybe Should Throw Away Any Results or even Stupid Tests' Asses Are Raggedy.

This year's STAAR season has been a parade of blunders and clusterfahrfegnugen. There were plenty of reasons not to like the test to begin with (here's a good list of just ten such reasons). But once it came time to actually deploy the test, things just got worse.

A "computer glitch" (which sounds so much nicer than "some programmer screw-up at corporate headquarters") caused a whole bunch of student answers to just disappear. Poof!

A collection of Dallas Houston*-area superintendents (representing over one million students) signed a letter to the state listing over 100 (yes, one hundred) problems with the test ranging from questions that had no actual correct answer to thousands of students listed with the wrong school.

Central Texas school districts also reported extensive problems with pretty much every single aspect of the test. Across the state districts reported mislabeled and misdelivered boxes of testing materials, problems with the software for taking the test, misreporting of results, and errors in test correction.

Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath said that the problems were "unacceptable" but that test results would still be used to judge schools. Because reasons.

That was all a couple of months ago, and now it's June and reports of screw-ups are still rolling in. This week reports showed that the testing company simply lost all of the answer sheets from the Eanes school district.

A district staffer "has been informed that ETS has lost all of our boxes of scoreable results for (grades) 3-8!" he wrote. "We did everything right on our end. ETS agrees that they received the boxes. They just don't know what they have done with them." 

ETS would be Educational Testing Services, not exactly newbies in the testing world. ETS won the Texas contract last year after Texas dumped Pearson as their testing company. Only time will tell if they're going to actually hold onto that contract. In the meantime, we have what has become a not-unusual reformster spectacle-- a big, bold, grand idea that nobody knows how to translate into something that actually works.


*I initially put the wrong city here.

The GOP Education Vision

Earlier this week, House Republicans released a... well, a thing. A reporty kind of thing, straight from the House GOP "Task Force" on Poverty, Opportunity and Upward Mobility. There's a website that goes with it, and the language there is pretty blunt and direct:

Our nation is on the wrong path. We can complain about it, but that won't help things. To get America back on track, we have to raise our gaze. We have to be bold. That's what A Better Way is about. It is a full slate of ideas to address some of the biggest challenges of our times. Developed with input from around the country, it looks past this president to what we can achieve in 2017 and beyond...

We can complain about it??!! You're the freakin' US Congress-- there's a hell of a lot more you can do than complain. But I get it-- if you're in the party that somehow just nominated a blustering dumpster fire of a con man for the highest office in the land, I can see how you might be feeling a little helpless right now. Or inclined to just fast-forward to next year. It is perhaps a bit of projection that Paul Ryan and his crew have set a goal of a "confident" America, because the Republican Party of Donald Trump certainly isn't looking very confident right now. Blustery, noisy, overcompensatingly bullyish, all laid over a second level of party members who can't decide whether they want to stand for some sort of principle or whether they would support a wet paper bag filled with dog poop as long as it had "Republican" written on the outside-- all that, but not confident.

But hey. "Biggest challenges of our times." That must include education, right? Well, no. The six areas on the website are the economy, health care, poverty, national security, tax reform, and the Constitution.

Now, the GOP has noticed that many US citizens are "stuck." Let's shift over to the more easily-navigable position paper:

The American Dream is the idea that, no matter who you are or where you come from, if you work hard and give it your all, you will succeed. But for too many people today, that’s simply not true. Thirty-four percent of Americans raised in the bottom fifth of the income scale are still stuck there as adults. In fact, the rates at which people move up the ladder of opportunity have stayed remarkably stable over the past several generations. 

The paper does mention education by name as an area to address, which was what attracted my attention, because our politicians of both parties can agree on two important things--

1) Education is really important.

2) We should definitely not discuss it in any depth or detail, or maybe even at all.

I'm not going to dig down into other areas of the... plan? proposal? PR outline? Short form-- welfare is bad and has made people dependent. Also people who can work should, because the GOP is apparently unaware of the huge number of working poor in this country who have actual jobs and are doing all the right things, but can't make it on our minimum subsistence wages with no benefits.

Anyway, since the GOP is willing to actually talk about education, let's see what they have to say. What are their proposals?

Early Childhood Programs 

The House GOP is unimpressed by Head Start and wants to fund states to be more efficient in providing these essential pre-K services, but wants to measure effectiveness and not use the DC Big Government metric of measuring how many programs we've got going. Pre-K programs have become the Mom and Apple Pie of education-- everyone is for them, nobody opposes them, and nobody really pays attention when you start talking details. Always an easy win.

Support Research to Advance High Quality Choices

Make sure the above-named pre-K services are being researched and stuff. Head Start gains famously disappear by later years. Maybe we should talk to developmental specialists or something. Also there are too many duplicate programs. Get rid of some of those, because needless duplication of programs is wasteful and bad. And let state and local folks decide how to spend money-- not DC. So, choice.

Support At-Risk Youth

Helping children reject a life of crime and violence requires more than a detention facility; helping children who are in foster care, who are homeless, or who come from disadvantaged backgrounds succeed requires more than a government program...

Cooperation between parents, schools, teachers, etc is needed, because ending up in jail is bad. Also, ESSA improves ed services to incarcerated youths. ESSA also helps promote and support school choice, which is really important in saving students from failing schools. Because remember what we said a bullet point ago about the wastefulness of redundant programs? Well, we think the opposite is true when it comes to charter and choice programs. The more redundant school programs, the better. And that DC voucher program? It is the berries [insert bogus stats here]. This is also spiced up with some individual anecdotes, because the best way to write policy is to base it on what happened to this one person.

So remember-- more charter schools will keep students out of jail. Also, there are a bunch of failing schools in this country, and we don't have a clue about how to help them not fail. Also, if you collect all the best students in one school so that their concentration results in a high graduation rate, you can pretend that you have "raised the graduation rate." Like if you have a field of multicolored flowers, and you collect all the yellow flowers and put them in one bucket, you can point at that bucket and say, "Look, we have made the field more yellow."

Improve Career and Technical Education

Add us to the list of people who are figuring out what professional educators (those teachers we never talk to) already knew-- not everyone needs to go to four-year college. A bachelors degree does not meet the needs of every student, nor the needs of the country for a broad and varied workforce. The education system should pay more attention to what employers claim they need (though how our school system can produce more people who will work for $3/hour is unclear).

But hey-- I'm a fan of CTE (which we've never not had in my area), so I support supporting it. Now if the7y could just figure out that there's no reason for the future welders, roofers, hairdressers and machinists of tomorrow to have to pass the PARCC in order to graduate.

Strengthen America's Higher Education System

The GOP's theory is that college has become too expensive because of federal regulatory excess. Also, there's not enough transparency and parents can't find the information they need to make an informed choice. There are multiple sentences calling for more transparency and less confusion, but none which describe the information that is not readily available. Male-female ratio? Number of fraternities? Square footage of average dorm room? How much the average alumnus makes? Ivy per square foot of brick? It's not clear.

The GOP would also like to see simplified financial aid, which is a challenge because "simple" also means "less flexible in responding to many different individual situations."

Also, more college stuff should just be on line competency-based education stuff. That would make it cheaper! As would getting rid of those onerous federal regulations,though, in a paper filled with many individual anecdotes, the GOP does not offer a single example of an onerous, cost-increasing regulation that colleges deal with. There's a suggestion of reporting requirements as a problem, and a vague part that might be a shot at transexual bathroom directives, but mostly just vagueries about how regulations keep students from learning stuff. Somehow.

Also, there should be "strong accountability and a limited federal role" which-- wait a minute. We are going to enforce rules more strongly but we will be less involved in enforcing them? I understand that this is the opposite of the traditional government approach (We will have a million rules and do a half-assed job of enforcing them) but I still don't see how it works. Stronger accountability, or more federal hands off. One or the other. Don't see how you get both.

Improved Nutrition for Students and Working Families 

School lunch and nutrition programs used to do a great job for America's children, but then Certain People messed it all up with regulations and stuff. We should stop doing that. Be nutritious and flexible. As with many of these programs, the feds should give the states a bunch of money and just let them use it as the think is best.

Annnnnd that is it.

Yup. That's it. That's everything in the House GOP vision for education. In keeping with the trend set by the presumptive Presidential candidates, we will just ignore K-12 education except to say we like charters and choice.

More better Pre-K. Stay out of jail. Eat better food. More charter-choice, somehow. Career and tech ed is good. Cheaper college, somehow.

That is the entire House GOP vision for a Better Way for education. An absolutely non-visionary opposite-of-bold proposal that, even with the choice nods, is not going to be very exciting for anyone on any side of the ed debates. It's one more indicator, if we really needed one, that both those of us who advocate for public education and those who push reform-- we are all of us involved in a subject that almost nobody in DC has the interest, understanding or guts to put on a front burner.

MA: Boston Schools Remain Opaque

Massachusetts has just a wacky dynamic in the education biz. Their governor is a reformster, their secretary of education is a reformster, and the mayor of Boston is a reformster. Various swarms of reformsters have come to the commonwealth, presumably attracted by tasty clam chowder and the smell of money. And yet the citizens of Massachusetts, many of whom still have vivid memories of when the state was a national leader in school excellence without so much as a dollop of reformy baloney needed.

The dynamic plays out most notably in Boston. Students walk out of school (more than once) and the Powers That Be respond with a combination of mansplaining and suggestions that the students were just tools of Other Nefarious Adults. Just this week, students showed up for a BPS budget meeting and were initially met with patronizing ice breaker exercises. And Mayor Marty Walsh continues to deny his plans to close down school buildings, despite folks having found evidence to the contrary. Meanwhile, the education course in Boston is charted by an assortment of "advisory" groups like Boston Leaders for Education, a group that selflessly pushes reform and charters even though it includes guys like Michael Tooke, a venture capitalist and investment banker, plus an assortment of other venture investment guys who I'm sure have no connection to or profit from various Boston charters.

In short, one of the defining features of education politics in Boston is the lack of transparency and the presence of-- and I hesitate to type this because I know my mother, who started her education at Girls Latin School in Boston, is a regular reader, but in the end, there just isn't a better word-- bullshit (sorry, Mom).

Now Quality Education for Every Student (QUEST) has come through again by uncovering more documentation of what Boston's leaders are actually up to. Much of what they've discovered in this batch of e-mails is not new-- just further confirmation of what was already known. They have also re-proven that Freedom Is Not Free-- the city said that QUEST's original FOIA request would cost $3K to process, so QUEST whittled it down to a $300 request.

If there is anyone in the Boston area who does not know that Mayor Walsh and BPS plan to close a few dozen schools, my condolences go out to that person's family, and I hope he or she comes out of the coma soon. The emails contain further proof that the report from McKinsey, the high-priced consulting group and often a favorite tool of reformsters, was to be used as a basis for closing thirty-six or so schools. But somehow Walsh still cannot bring himself to own up to this. He was out of the country when QUEST released their report on the e-mails, but he still has a response:

“While I appreciate the input of the McKinsey report, it is only a starting point for analysis,” Walsh said, “and I have made it clear that I am not comfortable with any proposal that would close schools until we complete our comprehensive facilities master plan.”

This is a favorite weaselly construction in Boston. BPS also replied to the QUEST release with

There are currently no plans to close any school facilities. While Boston Public Schools appreciates the analysis of external partners and organizations, one evaluation report will not determine the future of our schools. After the completion of the BuildBPS facilities master plan, an informed 10-year road-map will be created to align allocated investments in Boston's school facilities with the district's 21st-century educational priorities. We look forward to continued community engagement throughout this process.

I imagine Walsh taking a call from his girlfriend. "Do you want to eat supper with me tonight?" she asks.

"I have made no plans for eating at this time," he replies. "I certainly have no intention of eating until I am experiencing hunger. At that time, I may develop plans for consumption of food-related materials, but at this time I must state categorically that I have no plans to eat, ever."

So, yes, he's going to eat, and yes, he fully intends to close school buildings. What I find fascinating at this point is his utter refusal to just say so, to just fess up to what everybody already knows. Instead, leaders keep throwing around vague pronouncements about right-sizing the district, while the emails reveal conversations about how to "rework the verbiage," a directive from the mayor’s Director of External Relations & Opportunity Gap Initiatives Ramon Soto in an email in which he also notes that he has concerns about "stating ‘sell/lease 30-50 buildings’ as part of a strategy." So not just close down buildings, but sell them off. Just don't tell anybody, because they'll probably be angry. Another directive in the emails reminds officials not to use the word "close" anywhere.

This active avoidance of transparency is habitual. The city continues to insist that Boston Public Schools are getting their biggest pile of money ever, which is kind of like telling a McBurger McAssembler that thanks to a two-cents-an-hour raise, he is now getting the highest wage he's ever earned at Micky D's. The truth, readily available to anyone with eyes, is that BPS's 1.3% increase is peanuts compared to the 4% increase in the full budget. It's also peanuts compared to the increases for other school districts across the state.

It's true that BPS enrollment continues to drop, a foreseeable outcome of ratcheting up the charter pressure. Boston is working from the same old playbook on how to gut public schools and replace them with charters (a book literally written by current MA Secretary of Ed James Peyser back when he was cuing up charters for venture capitalists).

It's understandable that Walsh and his cronies don't want to just come out and say, "We'd like to gut the budget for the public schools so that they can fail and be shut down or sold to the many charters that we'd like to see take over the system. We're going to give public schools the least amount of money we can get away with, and we are going to put them out of business and turn Boston into charter heaven. Because ka-ching. Oh-- and we're going to call the whole thing BuildBPS because we dig irony-- it's kind of like a Peacekeeper Missile. We will build BPS by destroying it." But they're unwillingness to actually speak plainly and honestly leaves them shoveling out bovine fecal matter by the metric ton in a manner that's just insulting, like that kid in class who insists he did not throw that paper wad at you, even though you just watched him do it.

Among the emails QUEST also found a note from the above-mentioned Michael Tooke who wants to ask, basically just how big Walsh's balls are:

Does Boston have the courage to take an immediate and diverse solution to these underperforming institutions, including closure (in concert with a thoughtful and complete facilities plan), redesign as in-district charters, addition of independent charters or insertion of new school leadership with true autonomy?

I don't know if Boston's leaders have the courage to gut public education, but it continues to be clear that they don't have the courage to speak plainly about what they want to do. 

Icahn: A Better Charter?

I've taken a few (hundred) shots at charter schools on this blog, but I've always tried to be clear-- I believe it is possible to do charter schools right, to create a charter school that is not a fraud-running, student-abusing, system-gutting, money-grubbing scam, but which actually serves the needs of students and community and is grounded in actually educating students.

With that in mind, I've been looking at a new piece by Charles Sahm. Sahm is attached to the right-leaning thinky tank the Manhattan Institute, and I've looked (and thrown bricks) at his work before, including a defense of Common Core and an attempt to plug Eva Moskowitz's Success Academy in particular and charters in general.

This time Sahm has written a profile of the Icahn Charter School chain of New York City, a chain that he has apparently been following for a while. Bottom line: this chain of schools is not a typical modern charter school.

The "Icahn" is Carl Icahn, one of the roughest, least-beloved corporate raiders of the eighties and currently a Trump supporter. But Icahn also built a 65-unit housing facility for homeless mothers in the Bronx, Icahn House, operated by his foundation the Children's Rescue Fund. Icahn House convinced Icahn and his wife that breaking the cycle of poverty required education. When Governor Pataki signed the New York charter school law, Icahn was first in line. He got ahold of the Center for Education Innovation (once upon a time part of the Mahatttan Institute), one of New York's first charter pushing groups, and their president, Sy Fliegel, put Icahn in touch with Jeff Litt. And that, for me, is where the story gets interesting.


At that time, Litt had spent thirty-ish years in public education, both as a classroom teacher and as a principal of P.S. 67, which he renamed the Mohegan School and where he implemented a full version of Hirsch's Core Knowledge content rich program while turning over most of his staff-- all, apparently, without much official approval. (He also, apparently, spent some time working for the NYC chancellor). "Rigorous and nurturing" were his main principles, and he pushed for content-rich instruction, and was successful enough to attract the attention of people like Fliegel and the Core Knowledge folks:

“We stopped in a classroom where the music teacher was giving a lesson,” Fliegel recounts. “She played Beethoven’s Funeral March, and asked, ‘Who knows why Beethoven included a funeral march in this symphony?’ A little Puerto Rican girl, a 3rd grader, raised her hand and said, ‘Well, Napoleon had declared himself emperor, so Beethoven may have felt that democracy had died.’ After we picked up Don Hirsch off the floor, he declared Mohegan the national urban-center Core Knowledge model.”

Litt's approach seems to have been what Icahn wanted-- he put Litt in charge of the whole business and let him design a school from the ground up. The deal-- Icahn would take care of the capital side of things by writing a check for the building and facilities. Litt would have to operate the school on the per pupil money redirected to him by charter law, which, by every account I can find, is what he's done.

Litt and Icahn Charter have maintained a low profile. Confession-- I received a copy of Sahm's article a few days ahead of time, so I've had time to dig for dirt on the Icahn Charter chain and, well... there's not a lot there. On Charter School Scandals, there's a mention of a non-bid contract, plus over $6K spent on staff parties (including booze), plus bonuses awarded without any clear explanation of for what. That was back in 2010.

Litt won the Brooke Russell Astor Award for unheralded public service in 2014. In 2015, Reason (Free Minds and Free Markets) profiled him with this lead:

The Icahn Charter School network in the South Bronx has been quietly registering extraordinary test results for years, while nurturing its students in an atmosphere of "unconditional love," as its emotive leader, Jeff Litt, puts it.

The Reason profile sets up a dichotomy between Litt and Eva Moskowitz, calling Litt's charter's an example of old school chartering, with Moskowitz representing the new breed. That's probably not an unfair distinction-- Litt opened Icahn Charter's first doors in September of 2001, at the end of the Clinton Presidency. Likewise, Sahm says that Icahn Charters are outliers to the charter movement, sharing some characteristics like a longer day, but differing from modern charters in many significant ways.

Yes, the schools were bankrolled by a corporate guy, in fact, one of the most notorious corporate raiders ever. But he hired an actual experienced educator to run them-- and then let him do it. And this was an educator who already had a vision of what his perfect school would look like.

Yes, the schools do well on the Big Standardized Test-- in fact, the only charters they don't beat are the Success Academy Test Prep Academies Charter Schools. But that doesn't seem to be the be-all and end-all of their system.

Yes, their teaching staff is non-union-- but turnover up until last year is reportedly pretty good. Sahm shared with me that Icahn's numbers show 7-10% attrition from 2012-2014. Even at a possible high of 15% in 2015, that still beats Success Academy's reported rates as high as 50%. Sahm quotes Litt as saying that  “teaching should be a real profession, not something you dabble in for a year or two.” Icahn teachers get their certification before they start teaching there (and who knew that the day would come that this sentence was one that would actually need to be typed).

Yes, their success is undoubtedly due in part to the usual self-selecting charter factor. But Icahn doesn't use the lock-out non-backfill policy popular with some charters and will accept students who have not been indoctrinated into their charter system since the primary grades.

Class sizes are capped at eighteen, making them some of the smallest classes in the City. The chain itself only handles 2,100 students. Nobody associated with the Icahn charter chain seems to spend much time plugging it or trying to attract press coverage. And in the limited press coverage that I could find, I didn't find any dreams of scaling up or presenting themselves as a proof-of-concept for the charter industry. Honestly, it's almost as if they were more interested in educating children than in jump-starting someone's political career or generating increasing return on investment.

Their form of educating children is certainly open for discussion. Content rich education works directly against the Common Core grain, particularly in English studies. The Core wants you to treat reading and writing as a set of context-free skills; the content rich approach is all about a context of knowledge and background and actual information. (Not everyone shares my belief that these approaches are largely incompatible.) Core Knowledge also gets into the question of what chunks of knowledge are really necessary for all humans, and that's a huge argument all by itself. But here's the thing about the Core Knowledge approach-- we can have a discussion about its usefulness in a school without having to use terms like "educational malpractice" or "abuse," which is more than we can say for schools centered around no excuses and test prep.

There are other bits that give me pause. Among their list of "philosophies" we find "On-going student assessment to ensure individualized instruction," which sets off my Competency Based Education sensors. I suppose it could also be harmless, personalized instruction run by live human educators, but it could also be a sign of the computerized CBE monster. And while Sahm has been hanging about the schools for a while now, there still is always the possibility that Icahn just showed him their best face. And, finally, it's a charter, which means under current NY law it's draining public school resources.

Still, even if it's partly illusion and press tour, I have to admit-- real or not, this is a picture of the kind of charter that I could be somewhat less bothered by. Created by a career teacher, based on his vision of education and rooted in his experience, focused more on education than profit or notoriety or scaling up, without claims to having discovered a magical secret of education. Not financed with galas and a stream of investors. Small class size. It's the first portrait of a charter in a long time to make me think I'd like to get a closer look. Feel free to disabuse me of any such notions in the comments section, but at a minimum, it could mean that right in Eva Moskowitz's back yard is an example of how a charter can do just fine without all of her special brand of malpractice. 

The Left and Right of Ed Reform

Robert Pondiscio triggered a reformy tempest almost two weeks ago when he wrote that the Left was in danger of pushing conservatives out of the ed reform movement. The reformy blogoverse and twitterverse have not shut up about it since, with responses ranging from the sympathetic to... well, less so (Best title: "Audacity of Nope"). A large portion of the education post stable has taken a shot at the issue, and so have many of standard-bearers on the right-leaning side of the ed reform tracks. I had a response of my own (written before I realized this was going to be A Thing), but I am not going to try to digest the whole sprawling conversation here. You can read your way around the internet if you've missed this.

But I'm writing about it today, because reading all of these responses has revived one of the questions that has puzzled me about ed reform for quite a while.

When we look at the ed reform coalition of the Left and the Right, how are we supposed to tell the two sides apart?

Exactly what policies or principles are different when one compares lefty reformsters to righty reformsters?

There was never any real difference on Common Core support, other than folks on the right abandoned it a little faster than folks on the left, and both have been stalwart in supporting the Big Standardized Test. Even the differences one might have expected to find are not there. One might expect that conservatives might be more inclined to defend the traditional institutions of public education or to stick up for local control instead of state-level or mayoral take-overs, that didn't happen. It's happening now (here's Rick Hess just today), but it sure wasn't happening when reformsters were railing about defenders of the status quo. One might expect that lefties would hew close to traditional lefty allies like teacher unions, but we find nominal Democrats like Whitney Tilson (DFER) and Andy Cuomo ranting about how the evil unions must be crushed.

If we look at reformy politicians, are there real policy differences between the education policies of Rahm Emmanuel and Chris Christie, between Marty Walsh and Nathan Deal? Certainly, when it comes to education policy, there were no substantial difference between the goals of the Bush and Obama administrations.

Pondiscio's original piece distinguished between the practicality of righties and the social justice concerns of lefties, but I'm not sure that really holds up-- at least not in terms of how both groups present themselves. Both left and right reformsters have advocated for charters as a means to correct inequity and reduce poverty, with those goals tied back to standards and testing. So maybe the distinction can be expressed by these two different visions:

Righties: Using tests to identify which schools are not meeting standards, we will have government provide better education in those areas by sending education tax dollars to competitive, privately operated charters that are free from regulation and tasked to close the achievement gap.

Lefties: Using tests to identify which schools are not meeting standards, we will have government provide better education in those areas by sending education tax dollars to competitive, privately operated charters that are free from regulation and tasked to close the achievement gap.

There may be some actual differences about the role of the US Department of Education in all of this-- do we get to charter school heaven with more government involvement, or less? But if the destination in mind is pretty much the same, how much do the disagreements about how to get there matter?

Is there an article or opinion piece that could run on Education Post (the advocacy outfit run by Obama administration alum Peter Cunningham) that could not also run on Education Next (run by the right-tilting Fordham Institute)? If Jeb Bush had miraculously become President, is there any reason that Arne Duncan or John King could not have been his Secretary of Education? Has Bill Gates spent his ed reformy billions exclusively on left- or right-tilted groups?

To read some of the reactions to Pondiscio's piece, one might conclude that the major difference between conservatives and liberals is that conservatives are exclusively white guys and liberals are exclusively everyone else-- in other words, to tell conservatives and liberals apart, we just have to see them to check for breasts and melanin. That seems far too reductive and unfair to both groups.

Some disagreement seems to center around issues of racism and economic inequity and whether government should fix these things by instituting programs or just, well, dying. It has seemed all along like left and right reformsters agreed on these things ("If you don't support charters, it's because you're a racist who doesn't believe that black kids can achieve great things," came pretty easily out of reformster mouths all across the spectrum). So maybe there was a list of things that people on the reformy left and right were pretending to believe, and we're about to see more space open up between them as they stop being polite and start getting real. In fact, this exchange just happened:

@travispillow But @rickhess99 was also a reformer until the going got tough. Then he raised concerns & backed away as did many conservatives

— Peter Cunningham (@PCunningham57) June 8, 2016

I was a reformer long before you were, my friend. It's just that what you have in mind isn't my vision of reform. https://t.co/l6W2nri3sW

— Frederick M. Hess (@rickhess99) June 8, 2016

That could make for interesting times. As I suggested before, I think a fair number of reformsters have no educational or political convictions at all-- they'll just lean whatever way the wind is blowing the money. There's also a good sized chunk of reformsterdom that are neo-liberals, who aren't really left or right.

So perhaps we're about to see a big fat game of musical chairs at the Legendary Table and a continuing, ever-louder discussion of who, exactly, deserves a seat at that table. And to all the people who are afraid that they might end up under-represented or barred from the table or sitting near the table but not at it, or that the table might end up crowded with a bunch of people who neither understand nor represent their point of view, I think I can speak for most US public school teachers when I say, "Welcome to the last decade of our lives."