This week in Slate, Laura Moser covers yet another flap in New York City centered on schools, race and class.
I generally try to stay away from NYC education stories, because I find the politics of the city, district and union to be absolutely headache-inducing. But there are two elements in this story that are familiar to residents of many cities.
First, the well-regarded school at the center of the story, P.S. 452, has enrollment that does not reflect its neighborhood-- the school population is more white, more wealthy than the area housing the school. (13% of students at the school qualify for free lunch, while 48% of the district is low-income).
Second, because the school is overcrowded (it was originally opened to relieve overcrowding in another popular school), there's a proposal on the table to move it to a larger building. But that building is sixteen blocks south, next to large housing projects.
"Well, now, wait," say a whole bunch of parents. "We bough pricey homes to be near this great school."
Nobody yet quoted in a story has yet actually said, "But that would mean my child would go to school next to, and maybe even with, Those People." But, gosh, there does seem to be a bit of a subtext here. Yes, NYC has some of the most segregated schools in the country, but, said one parent as quoted by Chalkbeat, “Why do we have to fix that issue for the whole district?”
The mayor's office is not exactly running at integration with great fervor. Also from Chalkbeat:
The mayor has expressed support for school diversity, but he also has said the city must respect parents’ real-estate investments
(a statement that at least one P.S. 452 parent repeated this week),
while Chancellor Carmen Fariña has warned against forcing integration “down people’s throats.”
Moser's reaction to Farina's quote is pretty blunt:
Fariña’s line about forcing integration down people’s throats is almost
laughable, for what else is the whole history of integration in this
country but one of force-feeding, often in the form of landmark Supreme
Court decisions?
I might go a step further and note that segregation has pretty much always been forced down people's throats. The difference is whose throats are involved. Segregation, whether we're talking about the explicit segregation of Jim Crow laws in the South or the implicit segregation of cities like Chicago where Blacks were forced into certain neighborhood for housing-- segregation has always forced down the throats of non-white, non-wealthy citizens, where as integration is generally forced down the throat of white folks.
Look, integration is complicated, and people who are pro-integration can make the mistake of treating Black children like props-- let's get some Black kids in our school so we won't look so racisty, or I hear there's some research that says our kids will do better if they have some non-white kids sitting next to them. Community schools are great-- except when they're used as a tool for short-changing one particular group of students.
So maybe even better than making integration a goal is to set a goal that all citizens' voices are heard, all citizens' needs are considered, and all students are viewed as deserving quality education.
After all, the underlying assumptions of integration are often not good:
* Some schools are going to be good and some are going to suck, so it's only fair that students of all races and backgrounds have access to the good ones.
* We are only going to try to make schools decent if there are white kids in them, so let's put some white kids in each of the schools so that each of the schools will get the attention and support it needs.
Either of these problems could be better solved by a resolve to make all schools good schools. I'm not a fan of integration if we are proposing it instead of trying to make all schools great schools.
On the other hand, integration makes supreme sense if we are saying, "Schools should look like our country, our society and our communities, and none of those things are monochromatic any more. You are going to grow up to live in a world of many cultures and many backgrounds, and you might as well start getting a handle on that from the first day you go to school."
That strikes me as far more productive than, "I bought an expensive house on the upper west side precisely so my child could grow up without knowing that Those People even exist. How dare you threaten my bubble."
Sunday, June 19, 2016
ICYMI: Get a Comfy Chair
Maybe it's because it's summer and I often have larger stretches for reading. But once again, I have lots of good reads for you from the last week.
The Disconnect Between Changing Test Scores and Changing Later Life Outcomes Strikes Again
You may or may not be familiar with Jay Greene, who generally works the reformy side of the street. But he is one of those reformers who's not afraid to call BS when he sees it, and these days he is seriously challenging the assumption that raising test scores actually accomplishes anything. This is one of most important reads of the month.
A Void in Oversight of Charters
Wendy Lecker takes a look at just how messy the lack of charter oversight gets in Connecticut.
Promise Me
Kate With Keyboard writes a heartfelt open letter to the parents of her students as she sends those students home for the summer.
The Upper West Side Is New York's Latest Integration Battleground
Laura Moser at Slate looks at one more new battle over integration
On Latinos Education in America
Speaking of things we don't speak much about
Why Denver Is a Warning Sign, Not a Model
Man, do I ever appreciate people like Jeff Bryant who do actual journalism. A look at how the Denver model is to be feared, not imitated.
How To Cheat Good
One of the great things about the internet is that you can stumble across old friends here. I first read this essay years ago, and I still love it. A classic for anyone who deals with student papers.
Dr Steve Perry Sells Black Kids to the Highest Bidder
Jose Vilson reacts to Perry's proud announcement that he got a bunch of black kids to make themselves look less "black." Read this, and then read Vilson's follow-up piece here.
Feeding the Sparks of Revolution in Chicago
Xian Franzinger Barrett gives us a look at student activists on the ground in Chicago, where students now have to fight for their own educational future
Surviving Success Academy
Do you have time for one more horror story from a teacher who escaped working for Success Academy?
Call It a Racism Tax
Bob Braun and how New Jersey taxpayers are paying more just so they can keep all those black kids away.
How We Pervert Compassion in Schools
Empathy is helpful, but pity-- not so much.
Major: Debt
Jennifer Berkshire talks to writer Neil Swidey, who provides some powerful argument against the idea that a college education is the path out of poverty.
The Disconnect Between Changing Test Scores and Changing Later Life Outcomes Strikes Again
You may or may not be familiar with Jay Greene, who generally works the reformy side of the street. But he is one of those reformers who's not afraid to call BS when he sees it, and these days he is seriously challenging the assumption that raising test scores actually accomplishes anything. This is one of most important reads of the month.
A Void in Oversight of Charters
Wendy Lecker takes a look at just how messy the lack of charter oversight gets in Connecticut.
Promise Me
Kate With Keyboard writes a heartfelt open letter to the parents of her students as she sends those students home for the summer.
The Upper West Side Is New York's Latest Integration Battleground
Laura Moser at Slate looks at one more new battle over integration
On Latinos Education in America
Speaking of things we don't speak much about
Why Denver Is a Warning Sign, Not a Model
Man, do I ever appreciate people like Jeff Bryant who do actual journalism. A look at how the Denver model is to be feared, not imitated.
How To Cheat Good
One of the great things about the internet is that you can stumble across old friends here. I first read this essay years ago, and I still love it. A classic for anyone who deals with student papers.
Dr Steve Perry Sells Black Kids to the Highest Bidder
Jose Vilson reacts to Perry's proud announcement that he got a bunch of black kids to make themselves look less "black." Read this, and then read Vilson's follow-up piece here.
Feeding the Sparks of Revolution in Chicago
Xian Franzinger Barrett gives us a look at student activists on the ground in Chicago, where students now have to fight for their own educational future
Surviving Success Academy
Do you have time for one more horror story from a teacher who escaped working for Success Academy?
Call It a Racism Tax
Bob Braun and how New Jersey taxpayers are paying more just so they can keep all those black kids away.
How We Pervert Compassion in Schools
Empathy is helpful, but pity-- not so much.
Major: Debt
Jennifer Berkshire talks to writer Neil Swidey, who provides some powerful argument against the idea that a college education is the path out of poverty.
Saturday, June 18, 2016
Pearson's Cyber-Kindergarten Sales Pitch
So I stumbled across the Connections Academy blog Virtual Learning Connections (a friendly resource supporting K-12 school from home). In particular, I stumbled across this post-- "5 Reasons Why Parents Choose Virtual School Kindergarten." The piece is written by Carrie Zopf, a teacher at one of the Conections Academies. Connection Academy is the virtual charter chain purchased by Pearson in 2011, and they would love to just hook your five year old up to a screen. And it is from way back in 2014, but it still gives me the heebie-jeebies.
It's a great little listicle, combining the sales pitch with the "everybody's doing it and here's why" peer reinforcement. So what are these five great reasons to put your child in virtual kindergarten?
It's easy!! You can have breakfast and then walk into the next room and plunk your child down in front of the computer! Or go to the store and then plunk. More family time, more adaptability to your schedule. More like not actually sending your child to school at all.
Frequent parent-teacher communication. Though Zopf says this is "much like in a traditional school," talking to your child's teachers is super-easy! And since all the learning is online, you can see everything right there. In fact, you can see everything the teacher can see. Plus you actually have the live child there with you. Actually, why would you even need to talk to the teacher. What is the teacher even doing?
Active participation. You can get right in there and help, because you can see every lesson, see every assignment. When your child is trying to work through worksheets assignments, you'll be right there. Right there. Boy, I hope you have some educational training. I also hope that you have the self-control and toughness not to just feed your child the answer when she gets frustrated. Zopf notes that being involved in the child's education is the primary reason that parents go this route.
Real world learning opportunities. Cyber-k still has field trips and stuff, so your child will still get out in the world and occasionally interact with her "classmates." Also, your five year old can sign up for a foreign language.
A safe learning environment. Your child doesn't have to go out into the big scary world. According to Conection's own parent survey, keeping their child safe and in the home was a major motivator for parents. So if you are the biggest helicopter parent ever, cyber school is a good choice for you.
Zopf also cites a study that suggests that small children are great at figuring out "unusual machines," though she completely skips the issue of screen time for children and the controversies around reading comprehension and computers. There's also an app to help you obsess over academic skills while your toddler is still toddling.
You can check out the broad outlines of Connections' cyber-K curriculum here. It's not very encouraging, though that may because I'm an old fart who recognizes this curriculum for five-year-olds as what we used to do with six or seven year olds. It's times like this that I think I just don't know what I'd do if I were raising a tiny human.
It's easy!! You can have breakfast and then walk into the next room and plunk your child down in front of the computer! Or go to the store and then plunk. More family time, more adaptability to your schedule. More like not actually sending your child to school at all.
Frequent parent-teacher communication. Though Zopf says this is "much like in a traditional school," talking to your child's teachers is super-easy! And since all the learning is online, you can see everything right there. In fact, you can see everything the teacher can see. Plus you actually have the live child there with you. Actually, why would you even need to talk to the teacher. What is the teacher even doing?
Active participation. You can get right in there and help, because you can see every lesson, see every assignment. When your child is trying to work through worksheets assignments, you'll be right there. Right there. Boy, I hope you have some educational training. I also hope that you have the self-control and toughness not to just feed your child the answer when she gets frustrated. Zopf notes that being involved in the child's education is the primary reason that parents go this route.
Real world learning opportunities. Cyber-k still has field trips and stuff, so your child will still get out in the world and occasionally interact with her "classmates." Also, your five year old can sign up for a foreign language.
A safe learning environment. Your child doesn't have to go out into the big scary world. According to Conection's own parent survey, keeping their child safe and in the home was a major motivator for parents. So if you are the biggest helicopter parent ever, cyber school is a good choice for you.
Zopf also cites a study that suggests that small children are great at figuring out "unusual machines," though she completely skips the issue of screen time for children and the controversies around reading comprehension and computers. There's also an app to help you obsess over academic skills while your toddler is still toddling.
You can check out the broad outlines of Connections' cyber-K curriculum here. It's not very encouraging, though that may because I'm an old fart who recognizes this curriculum for five-year-olds as what we used to do with six or seven year olds. It's times like this that I think I just don't know what I'd do if I were raising a tiny human.
Charter vs. Charter Fight Heats Up
K12 Inc is feeling grumpy.
Earlier this week we looked at a report co-created by the National Alliance for Public [sic] Charter Schools, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, and 50CAN in which the bricks and mortar wing of the charter school industry took the cyber-charters to task for stinking up the whole charter sector, and very helpfully offered some advice that involved a whole lot of restrictions and rules that cyber charters should have to follow.
It did not take long for the cyber charter industry to fire back.
K12 Inc, one of the very largest cyber chains. It was founded by banker and McKinsey alum Ronald Packer and got its initial stake from Michael and Lowell Milken (Michael is famous as the junk bond king who went to prison for fraud) and also a chunk of change from Andrew Tisch, big cheese at Loewe's (his wife served on the reformy Center for Education Innovation board and opened an all-girls school in Harlem in the late nineties). In addition to running their own cyber-empire, K12 has also been the force behind spectacular cyber-failures like the Agora cyber charter chain. Oh, and they are fully unabashedly for profit, like most of the cyber charters.
K12 Inc did not much care for the Cyber Shape-Up report, and they issued a press release to say so.
"Not collaborative," they say of the report. Nobody invited cyber-charters to come participate in the scolding of cyber-charters. Speaking for most public school teachers of the last decade, let me just express our sympathy for how annoying it is when people want to attack your work without even talking to you.
K12 also attacks the study that is most of the basis for the scolding of cybers because the data is old and doesn't include points that the cybers think are important (like why the student left her original school). K12 claims that at least one cyber school in Ohio is had some really good data a year ago. So there's that.
"Most troubling" is the reports call for an end to open admissions. The report suggested that only students who demonstrated the factors linked to cyber-school success (self-motivation, involved parents) be allowed to enroll. But K12 argues forcefully for open enrollment with the usual bogus claim to being public schools.
They should be open to all eligible families and every child should be treated equally. Policies that restrict parent choice, or create perverse incentives for schools to turn away at-risk children or others deemed not to likely to succeed, should be rejected. They have no place in the school choice movement.
Actually, I agree with all of that-- and it's a nice shot from K12 at the brick-and-mortar schools that with few exceptions do take steps to control exactly who gets into them, from the Got To Go lists of Success Academy to them many cities where only actively involved and motivated parents can hope to navigate the "lottery" process.
K12 argues that many students "fleeing" their public school have no other choice but cybers, which underlines that cybers have been a great way in states like mine to extend charter reach into markets that could never sustain a brick-and-mortar charter. It also sidesteps the larger issue of what a lousy job cybers actually do for those students. But never mind-- charters want to make sure they can pack students in.
In fact, packing them in is the business model, as well as packing in lots of at-risk students who don't expect much form school (and remember-- you only have to keep them on the rolls until counting day). In fact, K12 is a bold choice to speak up in defense of the cyber charter industry, because you can follow links to K12 horror stories all day (if you want to play that game, just start with the two articles linked in this paragraph).
K12 goes on to make their goose-and-gander point-- if the accountability measures advocated are good for cybers, then why not apply them to all charters? And at this point, K12 has smoothly slipped right past other issues raised by the report, like the gross overpayment of cybers.
But K12 is now reduced to the vaguest and thinnest of defenses-- we work hard For The Children, and we are totally working hard to "meet these challenges." Also, look at all the teachers we have employe4d, jobs we have created, and students we haveshoved through graduated.
It's pretty weak sauce, but it does signal that the cyber-charter industry is not just going to knuckle under their bricks-and-mortar brethren, nor are they going to 'fess up to their increasingly obvious failures. But if they are going to just keep stinking up the charter school business, the bricks-and-mortar charters will just have to come after them with a bigger stick. I would just settle back with my bag of popcorn, were it not for all the real, live students who will continue to be collateral damage in the cyber-battle to keep a bad business model afloat just so some rich guys can get richer.
Earlier this week we looked at a report co-created by the National Alliance for Public [sic] Charter Schools, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, and 50CAN in which the bricks and mortar wing of the charter school industry took the cyber-charters to task for stinking up the whole charter sector, and very helpfully offered some advice that involved a whole lot of restrictions and rules that cyber charters should have to follow.
It did not take long for the cyber charter industry to fire back.
K12 Inc, one of the very largest cyber chains. It was founded by banker and McKinsey alum Ronald Packer and got its initial stake from Michael and Lowell Milken (Michael is famous as the junk bond king who went to prison for fraud) and also a chunk of change from Andrew Tisch, big cheese at Loewe's (his wife served on the reformy Center for Education Innovation board and opened an all-girls school in Harlem in the late nineties). In addition to running their own cyber-empire, K12 has also been the force behind spectacular cyber-failures like the Agora cyber charter chain. Oh, and they are fully unabashedly for profit, like most of the cyber charters.
K12 Inc did not much care for the Cyber Shape-Up report, and they issued a press release to say so.
"Not collaborative," they say of the report. Nobody invited cyber-charters to come participate in the scolding of cyber-charters. Speaking for most public school teachers of the last decade, let me just express our sympathy for how annoying it is when people want to attack your work without even talking to you.
K12 also attacks the study that is most of the basis for the scolding of cybers because the data is old and doesn't include points that the cybers think are important (like why the student left her original school). K12 claims that at least one cyber school in Ohio is had some really good data a year ago. So there's that.
"Most troubling" is the reports call for an end to open admissions. The report suggested that only students who demonstrated the factors linked to cyber-school success (self-motivation, involved parents) be allowed to enroll. But K12 argues forcefully for open enrollment with the usual bogus claim to being public schools.
They should be open to all eligible families and every child should be treated equally. Policies that restrict parent choice, or create perverse incentives for schools to turn away at-risk children or others deemed not to likely to succeed, should be rejected. They have no place in the school choice movement.
Actually, I agree with all of that-- and it's a nice shot from K12 at the brick-and-mortar schools that with few exceptions do take steps to control exactly who gets into them, from the Got To Go lists of Success Academy to them many cities where only actively involved and motivated parents can hope to navigate the "lottery" process.
K12 argues that many students "fleeing" their public school have no other choice but cybers, which underlines that cybers have been a great way in states like mine to extend charter reach into markets that could never sustain a brick-and-mortar charter. It also sidesteps the larger issue of what a lousy job cybers actually do for those students. But never mind-- charters want to make sure they can pack students in.
In fact, packing them in is the business model, as well as packing in lots of at-risk students who don't expect much form school (and remember-- you only have to keep them on the rolls until counting day). In fact, K12 is a bold choice to speak up in defense of the cyber charter industry, because you can follow links to K12 horror stories all day (if you want to play that game, just start with the two articles linked in this paragraph).
K12 goes on to make their goose-and-gander point-- if the accountability measures advocated are good for cybers, then why not apply them to all charters? And at this point, K12 has smoothly slipped right past other issues raised by the report, like the gross overpayment of cybers.
But K12 is now reduced to the vaguest and thinnest of defenses-- we work hard For The Children, and we are totally working hard to "meet these challenges." Also, look at all the teachers we have employe4d, jobs we have created, and students we have
It's pretty weak sauce, but it does signal that the cyber-charter industry is not just going to knuckle under their bricks-and-mortar brethren, nor are they going to 'fess up to their increasingly obvious failures. But if they are going to just keep stinking up the charter school business, the bricks-and-mortar charters will just have to come after them with a bigger stick. I would just settle back with my bag of popcorn, were it not for all the real, live students who will continue to be collateral damage in the cyber-battle to keep a bad business model afloat just so some rich guys can get richer.
Bill Gates & His Chickens
Bill Gates believes in chickens.
He took to one of his blogs to extol the virtues of chickens as engines of economic improvement for the Very Poor of the world. In fact, he's pretty sure that the Poor Folks should be raising chickens; he's pretty sure it's their path to a better world.
When I was growing up, chickens weren’t something you studied, they were something you made silly jokes about. It has been eye-opening for me to learn what a difference they can make in the fight against poverty. It sounds funny, but I mean it when I say that I am excited about chickens.
Well, no. It sounds funny if you are a lifetime privileged rich white guy who occasionally takes little philanthro-tourist trips to Poorville. "Look, Melinda! They really do eat some of these things. And-- goodness-- I don't think they have any running water here! Imagine!!" Yes, life is rough in Poorville. It's almost enough to make a person wonder why poor people choose to be poor!
So Gates decided to give chickens to the Very Poor of the world. I found that an interesting logistical issue. Where does one get hundreds of thousands of chickens? How does one ship them all around the world? How does one distribute them when they get there? How will the Very Poor, who have trouble feeding themselves, feed the chickens? I'm curious about how this will actually work.
But the government of Bolivia isn't curious. It's pissed off.
As initially reported by Reuters and as picked up by every news outlet that wanted to A) poke fun at Bill Gates and B) wring some kind of hilarious headline out of the story, the Bolivian government revealed itself to have a little local pride:
"How can he think we are living 500 years ago, in the middle of the jungle not knowing how to produce?" Bolivian Development Minister Cesar Cocarico told journalists. "Respectfully, he should stop talking about Bolivia."
Bolivia's agricultural department says that the country produces 197 million chickens annually and has the capacity to export 36 million. Bolivia's economy has almost tripled in strength in recent years, though Forbes says the country has a lower GDP than every state except Vermont.
No other chicken recipients have rejected Gates' offer, but the Bolivia flap underlines again the problem with the Bill Gates approach to fixing the world-- decide what other lesser people need, and spend a bunch of money to get it to them. Go ahead and skip the part where you actually talk to them about how you could best help them. And don't look at any of the systemic reasons that they need any sorts of things in the first place.
I mean, I can't look into Bill Gates' heart. I don't know him. But I have to wonder-- when he's playing with things like chicken charities, does he ever consider with wonder or amazement or gratitude the circumstances that made him rich and other people poor, or does he just see that as how the cosmos administers justice to the deserving and the undeserving? Does he think, well, raising chickens is so economically responsible that even a rich guy like me should do it, and so he builds a chicken coop in the back yard and stops buying factory farmed chicken? Does he see the wall between himself and the less rich people of the world as a proper part of a just and orderly world, or does he contemplate how to knock that wall down.
And of course the chicken story evokes all the feels to those of us in education because it seems.... familiar. Kind of like the time Gates decided what the public education system needed without ever talking to the people who live and work there. Of course, we've been trying to tell him where to stick his chickens, but he hasn't listened to us, either.
He took to one of his blogs to extol the virtues of chickens as engines of economic improvement for the Very Poor of the world. In fact, he's pretty sure that the Poor Folks should be raising chickens; he's pretty sure it's their path to a better world.
When I was growing up, chickens weren’t something you studied, they were something you made silly jokes about. It has been eye-opening for me to learn what a difference they can make in the fight against poverty. It sounds funny, but I mean it when I say that I am excited about chickens.
Well, no. It sounds funny if you are a lifetime privileged rich white guy who occasionally takes little philanthro-tourist trips to Poorville. "Look, Melinda! They really do eat some of these things. And-- goodness-- I don't think they have any running water here! Imagine!!" Yes, life is rough in Poorville. It's almost enough to make a person wonder why poor people choose to be poor!
So Gates decided to give chickens to the Very Poor of the world. I found that an interesting logistical issue. Where does one get hundreds of thousands of chickens? How does one ship them all around the world? How does one distribute them when they get there? How will the Very Poor, who have trouble feeding themselves, feed the chickens? I'm curious about how this will actually work.
But the government of Bolivia isn't curious. It's pissed off.
As initially reported by Reuters and as picked up by every news outlet that wanted to A) poke fun at Bill Gates and B) wring some kind of hilarious headline out of the story, the Bolivian government revealed itself to have a little local pride:
"How can he think we are living 500 years ago, in the middle of the jungle not knowing how to produce?" Bolivian Development Minister Cesar Cocarico told journalists. "Respectfully, he should stop talking about Bolivia."
Bolivia's agricultural department says that the country produces 197 million chickens annually and has the capacity to export 36 million. Bolivia's economy has almost tripled in strength in recent years, though Forbes says the country has a lower GDP than every state except Vermont.
No other chicken recipients have rejected Gates' offer, but the Bolivia flap underlines again the problem with the Bill Gates approach to fixing the world-- decide what other lesser people need, and spend a bunch of money to get it to them. Go ahead and skip the part where you actually talk to them about how you could best help them. And don't look at any of the systemic reasons that they need any sorts of things in the first place.
I mean, I can't look into Bill Gates' heart. I don't know him. But I have to wonder-- when he's playing with things like chicken charities, does he ever consider with wonder or amazement or gratitude the circumstances that made him rich and other people poor, or does he just see that as how the cosmos administers justice to the deserving and the undeserving? Does he think, well, raising chickens is so economically responsible that even a rich guy like me should do it, and so he builds a chicken coop in the back yard and stops buying factory farmed chicken? Does he see the wall between himself and the less rich people of the world as a proper part of a just and orderly world, or does he contemplate how to knock that wall down.
And of course the chicken story evokes all the feels to those of us in education because it seems.... familiar. Kind of like the time Gates decided what the public education system needed without ever talking to the people who live and work there. Of course, we've been trying to tell him where to stick his chickens, but he hasn't listened to us, either.
Friday, June 17, 2016
A Reformster Manifesto
While they stump for all the usual suspects, the Center for Education Reform is not really a full on reformy group. They are first, last, foremost, and always, a group that pushes hard for charters.
Their founder, president, and chief spokesperson Jeanne Allen graduated from Dickerson with a degree in political science, then moved on to study political philosophy at the Catholic University of America. She was the "youngest political appointee to serve at the pleasure of the president, Ronald Reagan, at the US Department of Education." She's currently working on an Educational Entrepreneurship masters at University of Pennsylvania in a program that offers what I once called "a degree in soulless profiteering." She announced her intention to step out of the president role in 2013, but no successor was named and apparently, she stayed right in place.
CER is packed with charter groups, charter operators, and investor groups from their board to the advisors to their contributors. Oddly enough, the smallest group is The Team. On her LinkedIN page, she describes her organization thus:
With well over 100 million media impressions annually and a national base of grassroots partners and agitators in every state, CER cultivates new reformers daily and cuts the learning curve for those entering reform and sustains strong, challenging advocates for real reforms that ensure choice is paramount, that parents have power and that schools are focussed on students and not adults.
Allen is an expert lobbyist and advocate. She knows politics and business. She bills herself as "one of the nation’s most accomplished and relentless advocates for education reform, and a recognized expert, speaker and author in the field." She has no background or experience in actual educating. But she does know how to brand herself. If you want to see her in action, you can watch this 2012 clip, but chances are that by the time she says, "You can't have parent power and have teacher union power" and says "teacher union" with the same tone of voice one would use for "rotting cockroach carcasses," you will want to say unkind things to her.
With considerable fanfare, Allen this week unveiled a Manifesto for Reform-- Innovation + Opportunity = Results. It is a big fat slice of baloney, and I almost didn't make it through. But I have read it so that you don't have to. Ready? Here we go.
Preamble: A Movement At Risk
This is a clarion call.
That's the first sentence, and it echoes the high-dudgeon tone of the last handful of properly civilized people beset by ignorant barbarians that is Allen's hallmark. If you like your reformsters unapologetic, uninterested in compromise, and unwilling to be remotely reasonable, Allen is your woman.
From the clarion call we go straight to a block quote from A Nation At Risk (the one about unilateral disarmament), and then we're off and running:
Nearly half a century later, a wave of amnesia has taken hold of American minds. Many have forgotten, or never knew, what this report’s message was and why it was so impactful.
It is possible, I think, that people are no longer as moved by Nation at Risk because it predicted imminent national collapse-- and it predicted it thirty-three years ago. When someone screams that the sky is falling FALLING OMGZ DO SOMETHING RIGHT NOW!!!! and then for thirty years, the sky doesn't actually fall, it's possible that some people will lose their sense of urgency.
But Allen sets the Wayback Machine so that we can relive how "historic" the committee was that ginned up ANAR, and she waxes nostalgic for the good old days of the nineties when reformy impulses led to charters and standards and choice and charters. From the nineties into the early oughts, things were great in Reformsterland. Oh, but then...
By 2008, the unity and the results were both dwindling. The American people were upset about wars and political battles. It was as if the terrorist threat didn’t just change our way of life externally, but also our ability to unite over important domestic issues, indeed, the most important domestic issue of our time.
2008 is an interesting choice, because I remember it no so much as a time of special wars and political battles as a time of banksters managing to trash the entire economy. But Allen is gifted with spectacular tunnel vision, so somehow we draw a straight line from terrorism to troubles with ed reform programs.
Allen says that education has never been more important in terms of solving domestic and international turmoil, and if you are on the edge of your seat wondering how having more charters in Detroit would help us defeat ISIS, just back that truck up, hoss, because Allen is never going to explain the connection-- just holler dramatically that it is so. And that's so she can create a proper sense of urgency in the Big Finish of this preamble:
And yet the movement to ensure educational attainment for all is at a crossroads. We are losing ground in part because we are losing the argument. And our hopes of systemic change — our progress — will be lost, and we will be a nation at even greater risk, if we do not refocus our collective energies and message to connect with the broad universe of education consumers and citizens
everywhere.
Pro tip, ma'am. It will not help you win the argument if you continue to conceive of education as a commodity that has consumers.
But kudos for recognizing you're losing the argument. The big question hovering over this paper is this: Do you have any idea why you are losing the argument?
Allen declares that the reformster movement is at a crossroads. "A decision must be made. A path must be chosen." Now that we have been goaded into a proper attitude of fear and panic (what better way to consider an important choice), let's read on to see what the choice might be.
Where We Are
It shouldn’t take a hurricane. But sometimes it takes a tragedy to help remind us what’s important — and not to take it for granted.
Sigh. Yes, Allen is going to take us to the magical land of New Orleans, where the wonderful charter operators, with the aid of the state, rescued education from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The "success" of New Orleans has been so thoroughly and repeatedly debunked at this point, one has to admire Allen's nerve here. She throws some stats around (and at this point, faux NOLA stats are their own cottage industry) and holds New Orleans up as the ultimate charter exemplar. For her it is the closest we've come "to realizing the groundbreaking vision of education innovator Ted Kolderie, who first wrote about the critical nature of breaking the exclusive franchise of traditional school districts holding parents captive based on zoned attendance." Because Allen and CER are not just pro-charter-- they are strongly and not very subtly anti-public education.
She goes on to laud the full history of charter growth, praising "the moral leadership of national advocates like Howard Fuller" which is an interesting choice, given that Fuller has far more complicated view of charters than Allen does (he described NOLA's charter revolution as "something done to us, not with us").
She feels so strongly about the NOLA miracle and its place as an exemplar that she offers this pull quote twice in the course of the entire article:
Perhaps the most troubling sign of reform’s place in the debate is the sudden unraveling of the New Orleans revolution. Instead of being feted and replicated, the path breaking and life-changing Recovery School District is being assaulted from all sides by the opponents of change.
And do you know how bad it has gotten in New Orleans?
Even worse, in the name of “local control” the fate of the charter sector is about to be put in the hands of an institution — the school board — which historically opposes giving any power to schools and autonomy to individual school leaders.
Allen also trots out the DC voucher system as an example of awesomeness that has been greeted with unfair, unenlightened opposition from anti-charter yahoos. Okay, she does say that some opposition is "well-intentioned" but that the opponents just don't understand why policies were put in place and how they are making the world better. And then she pivots to compare all this to the fate of Common Core. It suffered a similar fate, mired in a debate that drained everyone's energies:
Opponents rarely took time to understand how the standards were adopted, why and how they were being used, and what they actually said, while proponents regularly dismissed concerns without examining their cause or intent, resulting in a more fractured community of once powerful advocates, whose alignment on issues such as opportunity and innovation is now secondary.
That's about the closest Allen comes to admitting that Core fans bear any responsibility for the fate of the Core. But in Allen's universe, all opponents of reformy ideas are uninformed and/or ill-intentioned. She is holding up the Core a a cautionary tale-- see how much damage the yahoos can do when we don't stop them? But she misses (or ignores) that actually, Core opposition grew as people came to understand better and better exactly how they were adopted, where they came from, and how they were being used. The Core was not brought down by ignorance, but by better understanding. Yes, there were some tin hat "the Core will turn your child into a gay communist" opponents out there, but they would have been lonely voices in the wilderness if the Core had not been poorly developed by a handful of educational amateurs and shoved down the throat of US education by a combination of federal extortion and philanthropic PR blitzing.
The Core didn't die because of some evil oppositional plot. It died because it is junk that doesn't work, imposed by people without any educational expertise (but lots of financial aspirations). If Allen wants her cautionary tale for charters, it's in that sentence. The best way for charters to survive would be for them to prove worthy of their huge costs.
Allen sees a movement in trouble-- "off message, losing ground at the national level, losing fights in communities across the country, and struggling to hold on even in the places where we have demonstrated the most dramatic success." She lists many places where reformsters have been pushed back (and that includes places where states have imposed regulation on charters), and then she asks what should be a critical question--
How did we get here?
This question gives Allen the chance to display some self-awareness and insight. Spoiler alert: that is not going to happen. The story of How Reformsters Lost Ground is a bit off.
The truth is, we have lost the change-forest for the choice-trees, too often pushing charters and vouchers as an end in and of themselves rather than a means to spur innovation and opportunity and ultimately deliver on the promise of a great education for all children.
Okay-- good start. Advocates did in fact get focused on implementing choice, even if the choices were crappy. It's almost as if many charteristas were more interested in cracking open the market and getting a shot at all that cash than in providing actual education (or that they thought the education part was a simple product that any shmoe could provide). But now we enter the realm of fantasy. Allen says that a decade ago, reformsters had the resistance pinned down under "incontrovertible evidence" of achievement gaps and resistance to change. But then --
But after spending millions of dollars on polling, testing, and training, the defenders of the indefensible found a way to turn the tables by turning our rhetoric against us, relentlessly portraying the reform movement as rich, separatist corporatists who want to privatize our public schools.
Millions of dollars? Exactly who did that? When? And lets remember that phrase "defenders of the indefensible." Do you suppose, Ms. Allen, that the picture of rich corporate privatizers might have been related to the actual reality of who reformsters are and what they did?
It’s an ugly, phony caricature, but sadly it’s one we have been complicit in creating.
So, yes and no. Allen says that the reform movement has been dominated by the white faces of "Walmart and Wall Street," but that grass roots reality is not that at all. The grass roots must reside in the same alternate universe as the pro-public ed people spending millions on research. Allen says it's a problem reformsters are aware of, but have "inexplicably" failed to act. I don't think it's all that inexplicable. The reform movement looks like its mostly rich white guys because it is, in fact, mostly rich white guys. We don't hear much from grass roots reformsters for the same reason we don't often see Yetis parading through mid-town Manhattan.
Now that we are on the defensive, we have been caught in a vicious cycle of concession and capitulation. We attribute much of this to the fact that full-time advocates are outnumbered.
So Allen rejects compromise. And in her alternate universe, the many many many full-time advocates, lobbyists and agitators for ed reform are outnumbered by-- who, exactly? Guys like me who run a blog for free and post in our own free time while holding down a real teaching job? Because there are many of us. Not so many (or even any) examples of, say, a blogger with a $12 million budget to run an advocacy group, like Peter Cunningham and Education Post.
I've heard this so many times that I believe that reformsters believe it-- their message is just being jammed by a huge army of enemies and if they could just get the word out, people would see. But I wish they would consider an alternate explanation-- when you keep telling people that their hair is on fire and the keep failing to react, it's possible that you're just wrong.
But she wants to go back to the day: "Our message back then was education of all constituencies, at all levels combined with a willingness to engage directly with those who may oppose our efforts, but are not the enemy." Just a thought, but maybe if you didn't characterize opponents with phrases like "defenders of the indefensible," you might have a better basis for dialogue.
Where We Need To Be
So how, Allen wonders, do reformsters get back to being big, bold and holistic? Holistic?
She wants a return to first principles, which in her case means the writing of "founding father" Ted Kolderie. He had four basic characteristics for charters (because when Allen talks about reform, she really just means charter schools): Innovation, Accountability (outcome based, not process), Autonomy, and Choice.
Herein lies the foundation and formula for righting our reform movement, getting back on offense, and ultimately mounting a winning argument. We have to show the public that we are focused on the success of all students and all schools, and that our support for charter schools is part of a larger mission to drive systemic change and progress in public education. The best way to do that, we believe, is to ground our message and agenda in the universal and interdependent values of innovation and opportunity.
Reformsters have too small a circle and use too little of the research that is out there, particularly when it comes to outcome based adaptive stuff. Did your ears just perk up, opponents of competency based education? Good.
Allen further says (and I'm going to do some very close reading here, so other close readers might disagree) that charter operators need to stop settling in once they've gotten their own operation up andmaking money running smoothly, but instead should keep powering away with that creative disruption until the public ed system have been creatively disrupted into submission.
How Do We Get There? The New Opportunity Agenda
Still with me? God bless you. Get a drink of something-- we've still got a ways to go.
Allen is a big fan of purple prosey blather, and there's a bunch of this here. She thinks Paul Ryan's plan for the future opens a door for education awesomeness, and she's dreaming, but okay. She's going to try to draw a line between increased upward mobility and improved student outcomes (which still just means better test scores on a narrow badly designed standardized math and reading test) which is hard when the research says, no, not so much.
But Allen wants to usher in the New Opportunity Agenda and its four core principles. And we'll sure enough look at them, but I'm beginning to suspect that what we're doing here is finding a way to market charter schools without talking about charter schools and instead hiding them behind bigger, vaguer principles, because when your brand is in trouble, you can change your product, or you can change the marketing. Maybe that's the choice she was talking about earlier. At any rate, let's look at the four pillars of the rebranding New Opportunity Agenda.
Innovation
Question everything, from five day weeks to year-round calendars. Sure. Reconsider everything. And if you're still with me, you can now experience the horror that is this next paragraph:
We do not need a thousand flowers to bloom, as the saying goes. What we need is to have a thousand (or tens of thousands) of seeds planted. Those that are watered by parents and students and teachers, with money and time and loyalty, will succeed. The rest will become part of the fertile soil that will make more and better innovations possible in the future.
So there you have it. Some are destined for success and greatness, and some are destined to be dead, decomposed fertilizer. But don't worry fertilizer students at fertilizer schools-- you have given up your youth and education so that better people can achieve greatness.
Flexibility
Let's have government take off the handcuffs. For public schools, sure, but especially for charters, who face all sorts of "onerous" regulations. For instance "unlike traditional public schools, for instance, charter schools in most states must pay for their own facilities." Um, yes. Public schools get buildings for free. Nobody has to pay for them at all. What a fun dimension Allen lives in. In the meantime, she might want to check with some of her charter friends, who are calling for more regulation for some charters.
Also, Allen would like philanthropists to stop worrying so much about scaleable models. Fair enough.
Opportunity
She just means vouchers. She throws some words at it, but she just wants good old money-follows-the-student vouchers. And as for regulation
While we think there is an important role for accreditors in the process of opening new schools, we believe that those schools that are not performing up to parents’ expectations will close. No accrediting agency has more of an incentive to keep kids out of bad schools than mothers and fathers.
Again, she might want to take a look at the cyber charter industry, which is failing spectacularly despite the oversight of moms and dads.
Transparency
Put Big Standardized Test scores and NAEP scores on line. Tell parents how much money is being spent per student. That's pretty much it. What else do parents need to know.
Bonus History Moment
Somehow she picks this moment to throw in a cheerleading sentence with a history bonus:
Our movement will never be perfectly harmonious, but it can and has been productive. Its strength comes from its uniqueness politically: Forged under Reagan, sharpened under Bush 41, boosted under Clinton, supported by Bush 43, and aided by President Obama. With a presidential election year that promises to challenge and upset even our best successes, we must succeed.
How Will We Do This?
So what's the action plan here? Looks like there are just a few simple steps:
Have conversations about EdReform I O, or Innovation + Opportunity = Education-- I don't know, I get the feeling that the branding still needs polishing. But at any rate, conversations with anyone who might care.
Leverage the media to build momentum. Hey, I'm already helping! You're welcome, Ms. Allen!
They've already launched the Innovation in Opportunity project (okay, branding definitely needs work) which has something to do with getting technology into schools.
Work "in tandem" with groups around the country to create the next generation of eduleaders. Probably non-white non-wealthy ones.
And she invites anyone who, like the group that produced A Nation At Risk, wants to put aside differences and work on Important Stuff. I suggest that step one be a visit to Dr. Phil, who might ask Allen if she wants to take ownership of any part of this troubled relationship, because if she's going to keep calling public education and the people who work there names, she might be part of the whole "putting aside differences" problem. Not that I think she can see that from the veranda in her alternate dimension.
Their founder, president, and chief spokesperson Jeanne Allen graduated from Dickerson with a degree in political science, then moved on to study political philosophy at the Catholic University of America. She was the "youngest political appointee to serve at the pleasure of the president, Ronald Reagan, at the US Department of Education." She's currently working on an Educational Entrepreneurship masters at University of Pennsylvania in a program that offers what I once called "a degree in soulless profiteering." She announced her intention to step out of the president role in 2013, but no successor was named and apparently, she stayed right in place.
CER is packed with charter groups, charter operators, and investor groups from their board to the advisors to their contributors. Oddly enough, the smallest group is The Team. On her LinkedIN page, she describes her organization thus:
With well over 100 million media impressions annually and a national base of grassroots partners and agitators in every state, CER cultivates new reformers daily and cuts the learning curve for those entering reform and sustains strong, challenging advocates for real reforms that ensure choice is paramount, that parents have power and that schools are focussed on students and not adults.
Allen is an expert lobbyist and advocate. She knows politics and business. She bills herself as "one of the nation’s most accomplished and relentless advocates for education reform, and a recognized expert, speaker and author in the field." She has no background or experience in actual educating. But she does know how to brand herself. If you want to see her in action, you can watch this 2012 clip, but chances are that by the time she says, "You can't have parent power and have teacher union power" and says "teacher union" with the same tone of voice one would use for "rotting cockroach carcasses," you will want to say unkind things to her.
With considerable fanfare, Allen this week unveiled a Manifesto for Reform-- Innovation + Opportunity = Results. It is a big fat slice of baloney, and I almost didn't make it through. But I have read it so that you don't have to. Ready? Here we go.
Preamble: A Movement At Risk
This is a clarion call.
That's the first sentence, and it echoes the high-dudgeon tone of the last handful of properly civilized people beset by ignorant barbarians that is Allen's hallmark. If you like your reformsters unapologetic, uninterested in compromise, and unwilling to be remotely reasonable, Allen is your woman.
From the clarion call we go straight to a block quote from A Nation At Risk (the one about unilateral disarmament), and then we're off and running:
Nearly half a century later, a wave of amnesia has taken hold of American minds. Many have forgotten, or never knew, what this report’s message was and why it was so impactful.
It is possible, I think, that people are no longer as moved by Nation at Risk because it predicted imminent national collapse-- and it predicted it thirty-three years ago. When someone screams that the sky is falling FALLING OMGZ DO SOMETHING RIGHT NOW!!!! and then for thirty years, the sky doesn't actually fall, it's possible that some people will lose their sense of urgency.
But Allen sets the Wayback Machine so that we can relive how "historic" the committee was that ginned up ANAR, and she waxes nostalgic for the good old days of the nineties when reformy impulses led to charters and standards and choice and charters. From the nineties into the early oughts, things were great in Reformsterland. Oh, but then...
By 2008, the unity and the results were both dwindling. The American people were upset about wars and political battles. It was as if the terrorist threat didn’t just change our way of life externally, but also our ability to unite over important domestic issues, indeed, the most important domestic issue of our time.
2008 is an interesting choice, because I remember it no so much as a time of special wars and political battles as a time of banksters managing to trash the entire economy. But Allen is gifted with spectacular tunnel vision, so somehow we draw a straight line from terrorism to troubles with ed reform programs.
Allen says that education has never been more important in terms of solving domestic and international turmoil, and if you are on the edge of your seat wondering how having more charters in Detroit would help us defeat ISIS, just back that truck up, hoss, because Allen is never going to explain the connection-- just holler dramatically that it is so. And that's so she can create a proper sense of urgency in the Big Finish of this preamble:
And yet the movement to ensure educational attainment for all is at a crossroads. We are losing ground in part because we are losing the argument. And our hopes of systemic change — our progress — will be lost, and we will be a nation at even greater risk, if we do not refocus our collective energies and message to connect with the broad universe of education consumers and citizens
everywhere.
Pro tip, ma'am. It will not help you win the argument if you continue to conceive of education as a commodity that has consumers.
But kudos for recognizing you're losing the argument. The big question hovering over this paper is this: Do you have any idea why you are losing the argument?
Allen declares that the reformster movement is at a crossroads. "A decision must be made. A path must be chosen." Now that we have been goaded into a proper attitude of fear and panic (what better way to consider an important choice), let's read on to see what the choice might be.
Where We Are
It shouldn’t take a hurricane. But sometimes it takes a tragedy to help remind us what’s important — and not to take it for granted.
Sigh. Yes, Allen is going to take us to the magical land of New Orleans, where the wonderful charter operators, with the aid of the state, rescued education from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The "success" of New Orleans has been so thoroughly and repeatedly debunked at this point, one has to admire Allen's nerve here. She throws some stats around (and at this point, faux NOLA stats are their own cottage industry) and holds New Orleans up as the ultimate charter exemplar. For her it is the closest we've come "to realizing the groundbreaking vision of education innovator Ted Kolderie, who first wrote about the critical nature of breaking the exclusive franchise of traditional school districts holding parents captive based on zoned attendance." Because Allen and CER are not just pro-charter-- they are strongly and not very subtly anti-public education.
She goes on to laud the full history of charter growth, praising "the moral leadership of national advocates like Howard Fuller" which is an interesting choice, given that Fuller has far more complicated view of charters than Allen does (he described NOLA's charter revolution as "something done to us, not with us").
She feels so strongly about the NOLA miracle and its place as an exemplar that she offers this pull quote twice in the course of the entire article:
Perhaps the most troubling sign of reform’s place in the debate is the sudden unraveling of the New Orleans revolution. Instead of being feted and replicated, the path breaking and life-changing Recovery School District is being assaulted from all sides by the opponents of change.
And do you know how bad it has gotten in New Orleans?
Even worse, in the name of “local control” the fate of the charter sector is about to be put in the hands of an institution — the school board — which historically opposes giving any power to schools and autonomy to individual school leaders.
Allen also trots out the DC voucher system as an example of awesomeness that has been greeted with unfair, unenlightened opposition from anti-charter yahoos. Okay, she does say that some opposition is "well-intentioned" but that the opponents just don't understand why policies were put in place and how they are making the world better. And then she pivots to compare all this to the fate of Common Core. It suffered a similar fate, mired in a debate that drained everyone's energies:
Opponents rarely took time to understand how the standards were adopted, why and how they were being used, and what they actually said, while proponents regularly dismissed concerns without examining their cause or intent, resulting in a more fractured community of once powerful advocates, whose alignment on issues such as opportunity and innovation is now secondary.
That's about the closest Allen comes to admitting that Core fans bear any responsibility for the fate of the Core. But in Allen's universe, all opponents of reformy ideas are uninformed and/or ill-intentioned. She is holding up the Core a a cautionary tale-- see how much damage the yahoos can do when we don't stop them? But she misses (or ignores) that actually, Core opposition grew as people came to understand better and better exactly how they were adopted, where they came from, and how they were being used. The Core was not brought down by ignorance, but by better understanding. Yes, there were some tin hat "the Core will turn your child into a gay communist" opponents out there, but they would have been lonely voices in the wilderness if the Core had not been poorly developed by a handful of educational amateurs and shoved down the throat of US education by a combination of federal extortion and philanthropic PR blitzing.
The Core didn't die because of some evil oppositional plot. It died because it is junk that doesn't work, imposed by people without any educational expertise (but lots of financial aspirations). If Allen wants her cautionary tale for charters, it's in that sentence. The best way for charters to survive would be for them to prove worthy of their huge costs.
Allen sees a movement in trouble-- "off message, losing ground at the national level, losing fights in communities across the country, and struggling to hold on even in the places where we have demonstrated the most dramatic success." She lists many places where reformsters have been pushed back (and that includes places where states have imposed regulation on charters), and then she asks what should be a critical question--
How did we get here?
This question gives Allen the chance to display some self-awareness and insight. Spoiler alert: that is not going to happen. The story of How Reformsters Lost Ground is a bit off.
The truth is, we have lost the change-forest for the choice-trees, too often pushing charters and vouchers as an end in and of themselves rather than a means to spur innovation and opportunity and ultimately deliver on the promise of a great education for all children.
Okay-- good start. Advocates did in fact get focused on implementing choice, even if the choices were crappy. It's almost as if many charteristas were more interested in cracking open the market and getting a shot at all that cash than in providing actual education (or that they thought the education part was a simple product that any shmoe could provide). But now we enter the realm of fantasy. Allen says that a decade ago, reformsters had the resistance pinned down under "incontrovertible evidence" of achievement gaps and resistance to change. But then --
But after spending millions of dollars on polling, testing, and training, the defenders of the indefensible found a way to turn the tables by turning our rhetoric against us, relentlessly portraying the reform movement as rich, separatist corporatists who want to privatize our public schools.
Millions of dollars? Exactly who did that? When? And lets remember that phrase "defenders of the indefensible." Do you suppose, Ms. Allen, that the picture of rich corporate privatizers might have been related to the actual reality of who reformsters are and what they did?
It’s an ugly, phony caricature, but sadly it’s one we have been complicit in creating.
So, yes and no. Allen says that the reform movement has been dominated by the white faces of "Walmart and Wall Street," but that grass roots reality is not that at all. The grass roots must reside in the same alternate universe as the pro-public ed people spending millions on research. Allen says it's a problem reformsters are aware of, but have "inexplicably" failed to act. I don't think it's all that inexplicable. The reform movement looks like its mostly rich white guys because it is, in fact, mostly rich white guys. We don't hear much from grass roots reformsters for the same reason we don't often see Yetis parading through mid-town Manhattan.
Now that we are on the defensive, we have been caught in a vicious cycle of concession and capitulation. We attribute much of this to the fact that full-time advocates are outnumbered.
So Allen rejects compromise. And in her alternate universe, the many many many full-time advocates, lobbyists and agitators for ed reform are outnumbered by-- who, exactly? Guys like me who run a blog for free and post in our own free time while holding down a real teaching job? Because there are many of us. Not so many (or even any) examples of, say, a blogger with a $12 million budget to run an advocacy group, like Peter Cunningham and Education Post.
I've heard this so many times that I believe that reformsters believe it-- their message is just being jammed by a huge army of enemies and if they could just get the word out, people would see. But I wish they would consider an alternate explanation-- when you keep telling people that their hair is on fire and the keep failing to react, it's possible that you're just wrong.
But she wants to go back to the day: "Our message back then was education of all constituencies, at all levels combined with a willingness to engage directly with those who may oppose our efforts, but are not the enemy." Just a thought, but maybe if you didn't characterize opponents with phrases like "defenders of the indefensible," you might have a better basis for dialogue.
Where We Need To Be
So how, Allen wonders, do reformsters get back to being big, bold and holistic? Holistic?
She wants a return to first principles, which in her case means the writing of "founding father" Ted Kolderie. He had four basic characteristics for charters (because when Allen talks about reform, she really just means charter schools): Innovation, Accountability (outcome based, not process), Autonomy, and Choice.
Herein lies the foundation and formula for righting our reform movement, getting back on offense, and ultimately mounting a winning argument. We have to show the public that we are focused on the success of all students and all schools, and that our support for charter schools is part of a larger mission to drive systemic change and progress in public education. The best way to do that, we believe, is to ground our message and agenda in the universal and interdependent values of innovation and opportunity.
Reformsters have too small a circle and use too little of the research that is out there, particularly when it comes to outcome based adaptive stuff. Did your ears just perk up, opponents of competency based education? Good.
Allen further says (and I'm going to do some very close reading here, so other close readers might disagree) that charter operators need to stop settling in once they've gotten their own operation up and
How Do We Get There? The New Opportunity Agenda
Still with me? God bless you. Get a drink of something-- we've still got a ways to go.
Allen is a big fan of purple prosey blather, and there's a bunch of this here. She thinks Paul Ryan's plan for the future opens a door for education awesomeness, and she's dreaming, but okay. She's going to try to draw a line between increased upward mobility and improved student outcomes (which still just means better test scores on a narrow badly designed standardized math and reading test) which is hard when the research says, no, not so much.
But Allen wants to usher in the New Opportunity Agenda and its four core principles. And we'll sure enough look at them, but I'm beginning to suspect that what we're doing here is finding a way to market charter schools without talking about charter schools and instead hiding them behind bigger, vaguer principles, because when your brand is in trouble, you can change your product, or you can change the marketing. Maybe that's the choice she was talking about earlier. At any rate, let's look at the four pillars of the
Innovation
Question everything, from five day weeks to year-round calendars. Sure. Reconsider everything. And if you're still with me, you can now experience the horror that is this next paragraph:
We do not need a thousand flowers to bloom, as the saying goes. What we need is to have a thousand (or tens of thousands) of seeds planted. Those that are watered by parents and students and teachers, with money and time and loyalty, will succeed. The rest will become part of the fertile soil that will make more and better innovations possible in the future.
So there you have it. Some are destined for success and greatness, and some are destined to be dead, decomposed fertilizer. But don't worry fertilizer students at fertilizer schools-- you have given up your youth and education so that better people can achieve greatness.
Flexibility
Let's have government take off the handcuffs. For public schools, sure, but especially for charters, who face all sorts of "onerous" regulations. For instance "unlike traditional public schools, for instance, charter schools in most states must pay for their own facilities." Um, yes. Public schools get buildings for free. Nobody has to pay for them at all. What a fun dimension Allen lives in. In the meantime, she might want to check with some of her charter friends, who are calling for more regulation for some charters.
Also, Allen would like philanthropists to stop worrying so much about scaleable models. Fair enough.
Opportunity
She just means vouchers. She throws some words at it, but she just wants good old money-follows-the-student vouchers. And as for regulation
While we think there is an important role for accreditors in the process of opening new schools, we believe that those schools that are not performing up to parents’ expectations will close. No accrediting agency has more of an incentive to keep kids out of bad schools than mothers and fathers.
Again, she might want to take a look at the cyber charter industry, which is failing spectacularly despite the oversight of moms and dads.
Transparency
Put Big Standardized Test scores and NAEP scores on line. Tell parents how much money is being spent per student. That's pretty much it. What else do parents need to know.
Bonus History Moment
Somehow she picks this moment to throw in a cheerleading sentence with a history bonus:
Our movement will never be perfectly harmonious, but it can and has been productive. Its strength comes from its uniqueness politically: Forged under Reagan, sharpened under Bush 41, boosted under Clinton, supported by Bush 43, and aided by President Obama. With a presidential election year that promises to challenge and upset even our best successes, we must succeed.
How Will We Do This?
So what's the action plan here? Looks like there are just a few simple steps:
Have conversations about EdReform I O, or Innovation + Opportunity = Education-- I don't know, I get the feeling that the branding still needs polishing. But at any rate, conversations with anyone who might care.
Leverage the media to build momentum. Hey, I'm already helping! You're welcome, Ms. Allen!
They've already launched the Innovation in Opportunity project (okay, branding definitely needs work) which has something to do with getting technology into schools.
Work "in tandem" with groups around the country to create the next generation of eduleaders. Probably non-white non-wealthy ones.
And she invites anyone who, like the group that produced A Nation At Risk, wants to put aside differences and work on Important Stuff. I suggest that step one be a visit to Dr. Phil, who might ask Allen if she wants to take ownership of any part of this troubled relationship, because if she's going to keep calling public education and the people who work there names, she might be part of the whole "putting aside differences" problem. Not that I think she can see that from the veranda in her alternate dimension.
Thursday, June 16, 2016
Can Cyber Schools Be Saved?
Say what else you like about them, but the charter school industry has a pretty keen sense of where its own vulnerabilities lie, and at the moment, there is no underbelly softer than the virtual charter sector-- what the rest of us call cyber-charters. Multiple studies have made it clear-- cyber charters do not deliver much of anything except giant truckloads of money to the people who operate them.
So we have this newly-released report, "A CALL TO ACTION TO IMPROVE THE QUALITY OF FULL-TIME VIRTUAL CHARTER PUBLIC SCHOOLS"-- yes, the call to action is so urgent that the report HAS TO YELL ITS NAME!!
The report was co-created by the National Alliance for Public [sic] Charter Schools, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, and 50CAN. So we know that the report is not about examining the value or viability of cyber-charters-- this is going to be about figuring out which exercise program might build a six-pack on that soft underbelly and thereby decrease the vulnerability of the charter industry.
This is a double-problem. First, we know that cybers are not making their numbers and instead are having an "overwhelming negative impact" on students, suggesting that students would literally be better off playing video games for a year. On top of that, the majority of cybers are for-profit, so they're barely pretending that they're in this For The Children.
Now, I will say this in cybers' defense. First, their ineffectiveness is being measured with standardized test scores and bogus units like years or months of learning. Second, non-profit charters are just as capable of being money-grubbing profit engines as a for-profit charter-- they're just sneakier about it.
But let's take a look at the report and see what advice the charter industry family will offer to the black sheep of the family. Will it be tough love or a bug cuddle? The report is only sixteen pages long, but I have read it so that you don't have to. Here we go.
Fun Facts:
There are 135 cybers operating in twenty-three states plus DC, serving about 180,000 students. Last fall about 50.1 million students headed off to school, so that's about a third of 1% of all the students in the US.
Around 90,000 of those students are accounted for by the big three of cyber-schooling-- California, Ohio and Pennsylvania. One quarter of the cyber schools enroll about 80% of all cyber students. Put another way, about 80% of cyber students are enrolled in a school with over 1,000 students.
Cybers enroll far more white students and far fewer Hispanic students than public schools. They enroll more students in poverty, but fewer English Language Learners.
They are no more mobile than the general population of students, so the story about how cybers enroll students who are having a hard time because they've been moving all over the place-- that doesn't fly.
More Tough Love and Truth Talk
Well, this report isn't out to sugar-coat anything. As it moves into a section about results, the report lays out pretty bluntly some of the less-than-stellar outcomes of the cyber charters.
* Exceptionally weak academic results compared to bricks and mortar. They're going to go ahead and talk about "days of learning," which is baloney, but the bottom line remains the same.
* Cybers do worse than public schools in almost every state.
* Subgroups also do worse in cybers than in public schools.
* Students stay in cyber schools, on average, only about two years. In other words, virtually all virtual students vote against cybers with their virtual feet
* Cyber students are far more mobile after their cyber experience than before. Interesting and unexpected-- though if students are using cybers as schools of last resort, that might explain it. For that matter, if cyber students emerge from their cyber experience significantly behind their peers, that may lead to some school shopping as well.
Bottom line-- cyber charters are doing a lousy job. So what can we do?
Policy Options
First of all, the writers of the paper want to be doubly clear that they have always stood up for high standards for charter schools of all shapes and sizes.
We believe that states should have clear minimum academic performance standards for charter schools in renewal. We also believe that states should have enforcement mechanisms in place to make sure that all charter schools, including full-time virtual charter schools, meet those minimums. There is no reason why a full-time virtual charter school shouldn’t be able to meet all the academic standards that other schools meet. Were such standards being properly enforced for all schools, it would certainly address some of the shortcomings we see in full-time virtual charter schools.
And-- well, okay. Read the fine print. That "in renewal" prepositional phrase is big, as in some states it turns out to mean "you can bring up our performance in a renewal year, but the rest of the time we want to be free to suck just as much as we feel like." This might also be a place to close the loop and note that the reason that Pennsylvania, Ohio and California might be such cyber charter breeding grounds is precisely because there's not much oversight. This would also be a great time to address the charter free marketeers who are (or were, back in the younger days of charter-choice cheerleading) certain that minimal regulation was needed because the marketplace and the invisible hand and the power of choice as exerted by parents would be all that anyone needed to keep charters in line.
In fact, the failure of virtual charters is a pretty glaring demonstration of how the free market does not create excellence in the education biz. But I don't think this paper is going to address that issue.
But it is oddly ironic that the above paragraph calls for more strictly enforced government standards. Let's get into the specific rules they have in mind.
First, in Big Letters in front of a Big Blue Box
Authorizers should close cyber schools (full time virtual charters) that chronically suck, which they could do now, without any law changes. "Get the hook. Kick their butts. Come on, guys. You're killing us."
Authorizing Structure
If you want to start a cyber school that draws students from across district lines, you should have a state-level authorizer. If you are a district that wants to start a cyber, you should only be able to get students from within the boundaries of your district. Maybe that state-level authorizer should be a state charter board.
You know, it almost seems as is this rule is designed to keep public school districts from horning in on the cyber charter biz. Which is definitely a thing that happens in some places (like PA) where a district gets tired of watching all that charter money going out the door, and so they set up something in house. It can start as a funds-retainer, but can easily be tweaked into a fund-raiser. But then public school tax dollars would just go to public schools
Also, they'd like to cap the fees charged by authorizers, because that takes money away from the charter. They also suggest, and this is a good point, that if you're making big bucks from authorizing Cyber Baloney High School, you will be reluctant to shut CBHS down no matter how much they stink.
Enrollment Criteria
This is so special, I'm just going to quote it directly:
We recommend that states study the establishment of criteria for enrollment in full-time virtual charter schools based on factors proven necessary for student success.
We love open enrollment. We really do. And we would hate to introduce the idea of openly creaming students. But that's what we're going to suggest. Because not everybody is a good fit for cyber school.
While I don't applaud any allegedly public school advocating creaming, I get their point. In Pennsylvania, we have the common issue of a student who doesn't like to get up in the morning, doesn't like to come to school, doesn't like to do work, and doesn't have much self-motivation-- that student, that entirely human and recognizable student, saying "I'm just going to cyber school." As the report notes, students lacking in self-motivation or involved parents are unlikely to do well with a cyber-school setting. So not admitting them to cyber school in the first place would definitely save everyone-- the charter, the student, the parents, and the public school to which the student will return after failing for a year-- some time and trouble.
But it is a slippery slope. "Willing to get up and do work" is certainly a factor proven necessary for student success. But so is being highly intelligent and wealthy. At what point will we draw the Picking and Choosing line?
Also, this would be a good place to address cyber charter marketing, which is not exactly calibrated to filter out the less likely-to-succeed portion of the market. Instead we get pitches along the lines of "Would you rather play basketball all day than do stupid English assignments."
And this would also be a good place to discuss another question-- if the cyber school requires heavily involved parents and self-motivated, independent students, exactly how much of a public school-- or any kind of school-- is it? It's a school in the same way that a pot luck for which all the guests must bring dishes is a restaurant. Kind of, but not really.
Enrollment Levels
Basically, the point here is that a cyber school should prove it can succeed with a few students before it starts cramming them in at ridiculous levels (e.g. Ohio Virtual Academy with over 10K students, or Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow with over 15K).
Accountability for Performance
Authorizers should contract with cyber charters for particular outcomes and the cyber should be closed if it doesn't make its numbers. Isn't that already a thing, you ask? Come visit Pennsylvania or Ohio, I reply. It's theoretically sort of a thing, but practically speaking, not so much.
Funding Levels Based on Cost
Damn! This is tough, tough love. I've often used PA as an example, because opening a cyber charter here is like printing money. Our laws inspire Producers-level misbehavior, because what the cyber receives has nothing to do with its actual costs-- they just get the per-capita costs for the sending school. If my district sends you a cyber student, we'll also give you about $10K. You, cyber school, will give that students a $400 computer and access to 1/400th of a teacher. In short, if you can't clear an easy $5-6K on that student, you aren't trying very hard; this report suggests it's more like $3-4K. Either way, it's a hell of a markup. (And that's before we get to the fun wrinkle where you, as a cyber school, can test the student, declare she has a learning disability of some sort, and get an extra several thousand for her.)
Many many many people have suggested that it makes way more sense for cybers to get paid based on what their service actually costs to provide. For these charter organizations to suggest it is pretty special.
Performance Based Funding
Well, here's an interesting new wrinkle. You've heard about competency-based education. Here's the flip side of it.
In CBE, Chris gets to advance to the next unit when Chris passes the test or assessment or performance task. So how about we do the funding so that Chris's successful completion of a module is also how the school gets paid.
This is, of course, a budgeting nightmare. It is also a huge incentive for the school to help Chris cheat. This may not be such a good idea.
Their Conclusion
We think cyber charters are swell, but if they don't get their damn act together and stop making the rest of us look bad, we will personally hand the government a paddle and hold its coat while it spanks cyber charters into oblivion.
My Conclusion
Impressively brutal, though the charter organizations involved manage to ignore all of the implications for the charter industry as a whole. They would like all of these problems to be strictly cyber problems. They aren't.
Most notable is total and abject failure of the invisible hand of the free market to successfully manage the cyber charter biz, and the brick-and-mortar folks to call for the fat hand of government interference to get in the game and shape up those cyberites.
That said, they're not entirely wrong. I will never call for the complete destruction and end of cyber charters-- I personally know families that have been hugely helped by cybers in a way that brick and mortar schools could not have helped-- but there is no denying that the cyber charter business is mostly a disaster that is stealing money from taxpayers and years from children's educations. Someone had better slap a leash on them, and soon.
So we have this newly-released report, "A CALL TO ACTION TO IMPROVE THE QUALITY OF FULL-TIME VIRTUAL CHARTER PUBLIC SCHOOLS"-- yes, the call to action is so urgent that the report HAS TO YELL ITS NAME!!
The report was co-created by the National Alliance for Public [sic] Charter Schools, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, and 50CAN. So we know that the report is not about examining the value or viability of cyber-charters-- this is going to be about figuring out which exercise program might build a six-pack on that soft underbelly and thereby decrease the vulnerability of the charter industry.
This is a double-problem. First, we know that cybers are not making their numbers and instead are having an "overwhelming negative impact" on students, suggesting that students would literally be better off playing video games for a year. On top of that, the majority of cybers are for-profit, so they're barely pretending that they're in this For The Children.
Now, I will say this in cybers' defense. First, their ineffectiveness is being measured with standardized test scores and bogus units like years or months of learning. Second, non-profit charters are just as capable of being money-grubbing profit engines as a for-profit charter-- they're just sneakier about it.
But let's take a look at the report and see what advice the charter industry family will offer to the black sheep of the family. Will it be tough love or a bug cuddle? The report is only sixteen pages long, but I have read it so that you don't have to. Here we go.
Fun Facts:
There are 135 cybers operating in twenty-three states plus DC, serving about 180,000 students. Last fall about 50.1 million students headed off to school, so that's about a third of 1% of all the students in the US.
Around 90,000 of those students are accounted for by the big three of cyber-schooling-- California, Ohio and Pennsylvania. One quarter of the cyber schools enroll about 80% of all cyber students. Put another way, about 80% of cyber students are enrolled in a school with over 1,000 students.
Cybers enroll far more white students and far fewer Hispanic students than public schools. They enroll more students in poverty, but fewer English Language Learners.
They are no more mobile than the general population of students, so the story about how cybers enroll students who are having a hard time because they've been moving all over the place-- that doesn't fly.
More Tough Love and Truth Talk
Well, this report isn't out to sugar-coat anything. As it moves into a section about results, the report lays out pretty bluntly some of the less-than-stellar outcomes of the cyber charters.
* Exceptionally weak academic results compared to bricks and mortar. They're going to go ahead and talk about "days of learning," which is baloney, but the bottom line remains the same.
* Cybers do worse than public schools in almost every state.
* Subgroups also do worse in cybers than in public schools.
* Students stay in cyber schools, on average, only about two years. In other words, virtually all virtual students vote against cybers with their virtual feet
* Cyber students are far more mobile after their cyber experience than before. Interesting and unexpected-- though if students are using cybers as schools of last resort, that might explain it. For that matter, if cyber students emerge from their cyber experience significantly behind their peers, that may lead to some school shopping as well.
Bottom line-- cyber charters are doing a lousy job. So what can we do?
Policy Options
First of all, the writers of the paper want to be doubly clear that they have always stood up for high standards for charter schools of all shapes and sizes.
We believe that states should have clear minimum academic performance standards for charter schools in renewal. We also believe that states should have enforcement mechanisms in place to make sure that all charter schools, including full-time virtual charter schools, meet those minimums. There is no reason why a full-time virtual charter school shouldn’t be able to meet all the academic standards that other schools meet. Were such standards being properly enforced for all schools, it would certainly address some of the shortcomings we see in full-time virtual charter schools.
And-- well, okay. Read the fine print. That "in renewal" prepositional phrase is big, as in some states it turns out to mean "you can bring up our performance in a renewal year, but the rest of the time we want to be free to suck just as much as we feel like." This might also be a place to close the loop and note that the reason that Pennsylvania, Ohio and California might be such cyber charter breeding grounds is precisely because there's not much oversight. This would also be a great time to address the charter free marketeers who are (or were, back in the younger days of charter-choice cheerleading) certain that minimal regulation was needed because the marketplace and the invisible hand and the power of choice as exerted by parents would be all that anyone needed to keep charters in line.
In fact, the failure of virtual charters is a pretty glaring demonstration of how the free market does not create excellence in the education biz. But I don't think this paper is going to address that issue.
But it is oddly ironic that the above paragraph calls for more strictly enforced government standards. Let's get into the specific rules they have in mind.
First, in Big Letters in front of a Big Blue Box
Authorizers should close cyber schools (full time virtual charters) that chronically suck, which they could do now, without any law changes. "Get the hook. Kick their butts. Come on, guys. You're killing us."
Authorizing Structure
If you want to start a cyber school that draws students from across district lines, you should have a state-level authorizer. If you are a district that wants to start a cyber, you should only be able to get students from within the boundaries of your district. Maybe that state-level authorizer should be a state charter board.
You know, it almost seems as is this rule is designed to keep public school districts from horning in on the cyber charter biz. Which is definitely a thing that happens in some places (like PA) where a district gets tired of watching all that charter money going out the door, and so they set up something in house. It can start as a funds-retainer, but can easily be tweaked into a fund-raiser. But then public school tax dollars would just go to public schools
Also, they'd like to cap the fees charged by authorizers, because that takes money away from the charter. They also suggest, and this is a good point, that if you're making big bucks from authorizing Cyber Baloney High School, you will be reluctant to shut CBHS down no matter how much they stink.
Enrollment Criteria
This is so special, I'm just going to quote it directly:
We recommend that states study the establishment of criteria for enrollment in full-time virtual charter schools based on factors proven necessary for student success.
We love open enrollment. We really do. And we would hate to introduce the idea of openly creaming students. But that's what we're going to suggest. Because not everybody is a good fit for cyber school.
While I don't applaud any allegedly public school advocating creaming, I get their point. In Pennsylvania, we have the common issue of a student who doesn't like to get up in the morning, doesn't like to come to school, doesn't like to do work, and doesn't have much self-motivation-- that student, that entirely human and recognizable student, saying "I'm just going to cyber school." As the report notes, students lacking in self-motivation or involved parents are unlikely to do well with a cyber-school setting. So not admitting them to cyber school in the first place would definitely save everyone-- the charter, the student, the parents, and the public school to which the student will return after failing for a year-- some time and trouble.
But it is a slippery slope. "Willing to get up and do work" is certainly a factor proven necessary for student success. But so is being highly intelligent and wealthy. At what point will we draw the Picking and Choosing line?
Also, this would be a good place to address cyber charter marketing, which is not exactly calibrated to filter out the less likely-to-succeed portion of the market. Instead we get pitches along the lines of "Would you rather play basketball all day than do stupid English assignments."
And this would also be a good place to discuss another question-- if the cyber school requires heavily involved parents and self-motivated, independent students, exactly how much of a public school-- or any kind of school-- is it? It's a school in the same way that a pot luck for which all the guests must bring dishes is a restaurant. Kind of, but not really.
Enrollment Levels
Basically, the point here is that a cyber school should prove it can succeed with a few students before it starts cramming them in at ridiculous levels (e.g. Ohio Virtual Academy with over 10K students, or Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow with over 15K).
Accountability for Performance
Authorizers should contract with cyber charters for particular outcomes and the cyber should be closed if it doesn't make its numbers. Isn't that already a thing, you ask? Come visit Pennsylvania or Ohio, I reply. It's theoretically sort of a thing, but practically speaking, not so much.
Funding Levels Based on Cost
Damn! This is tough, tough love. I've often used PA as an example, because opening a cyber charter here is like printing money. Our laws inspire Producers-level misbehavior, because what the cyber receives has nothing to do with its actual costs-- they just get the per-capita costs for the sending school. If my district sends you a cyber student, we'll also give you about $10K. You, cyber school, will give that students a $400 computer and access to 1/400th of a teacher. In short, if you can't clear an easy $5-6K on that student, you aren't trying very hard; this report suggests it's more like $3-4K. Either way, it's a hell of a markup. (And that's before we get to the fun wrinkle where you, as a cyber school, can test the student, declare she has a learning disability of some sort, and get an extra several thousand for her.)
Many many many people have suggested that it makes way more sense for cybers to get paid based on what their service actually costs to provide. For these charter organizations to suggest it is pretty special.
Performance Based Funding
Well, here's an interesting new wrinkle. You've heard about competency-based education. Here's the flip side of it.
In CBE, Chris gets to advance to the next unit when Chris passes the test or assessment or performance task. So how about we do the funding so that Chris's successful completion of a module is also how the school gets paid.
This is, of course, a budgeting nightmare. It is also a huge incentive for the school to help Chris cheat. This may not be such a good idea.
Their Conclusion
We think cyber charters are swell, but if they don't get their damn act together and stop making the rest of us look bad, we will personally hand the government a paddle and hold its coat while it spanks cyber charters into oblivion.
My Conclusion
Impressively brutal, though the charter organizations involved manage to ignore all of the implications for the charter industry as a whole. They would like all of these problems to be strictly cyber problems. They aren't.
Most notable is total and abject failure of the invisible hand of the free market to successfully manage the cyber charter biz, and the brick-and-mortar folks to call for the fat hand of government interference to get in the game and shape up those cyberites.
That said, they're not entirely wrong. I will never call for the complete destruction and end of cyber charters-- I personally know families that have been hugely helped by cybers in a way that brick and mortar schools could not have helped-- but there is no denying that the cyber charter business is mostly a disaster that is stealing money from taxpayers and years from children's educations. Someone had better slap a leash on them, and soon.
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