Charter Villains

It is one of the reliable tropes of the ed debates (isn't it fun that we've been at this so long we now have reliable tropes).  After some negative charter publicity, some reformsters will step up to offer a smattering of defense with a side order of "Why does the media pick on us?"

Alexander Russo offers a weak-sauced rendition of this old standard at Washington Monthly, where he tries to defend Rocketship Academy against the NPR piece from Anya Kamenetz. He thinks that Kamenetz did not include enough happy talk from the Rocketship press kit, though most of his complaint is focused on Kamenetz's use of the word "company" to describe Rocketship. He says this term is "controversial," a term that is "extremely sensitive" in the education world, but which should really just be used for "private, non-profit businesses." He notes that unnamed "defenders" of the piece say that non-profits "often rely on for-profit companies for services and materials and that the difference in tax status is unimportant" which is a bit of a mis-statement, as this defender would say that non-profit charters still function like businesses. They are non-profits like modern hospitals are non-profit, as in , non-profit technically by virtue of the fact that there are no stockholders. But Russo is far too savvy and informed not to know that many, many, many non-profit charters have found ways to make lots of people rich.

But more importantly, we think of a charter school as a "company" or a business precisely because charter supporters have all along claimed that their business-focused nature is part of what makes them better. Eli Broad started his Faux Superintendent Academy precisely because he thinks that public education has a business problem, not an education problem.

In short, it wasn't the opponents of charters who brought up the idea of thinking of charters as businesses. They did that themselves.

This is a frequent feature of the picked-on charter trope. Charter defenders pretend that the oppression they're feeling just came out of the blue, and wasn't the predictable outcome of actions they themselves took.

Neerav Kingsland, charter champion on New Orleans, tries his hand at the genre with "Who is the Villain? Why?" which covers the NPR Rocketship piece as well as Kate Taylor's NYT piece about a Brooklyn school being forced to co-locate and Kate Zernike's brutal look at Detroit charters. He breaks each piece down, doing a nice job of parsing the language used to indicate that charters are the villains in these stories.  And this leads him to a question:

Why do they  go out of their way to find a villain other than the very schools that are currently failing children?

And there's your problem right there, charter folks. Because the better question to ask is, "Why is nit necessary to create a narrative with villains in it?" And charter fans can find the person to ask by just looking in the mirror.

I'll get back to that. But first, Kingsland offers three possible explanations.

1) Charter fans over-promised, and so even if they do well, it's not what they promised, so they look bad.

2) Reporters naturally sympathize with students and the teachers who teach them

3) "While charter schools are generally educator led non-profit organizations, many billionaires support charter schools, and I think this support creates a suspicion that charter will increase educational inequality, akin to how the economy has seen a spike in inequality over the past two decades."

#1 is sort of true, except that charters really haven't got all that much success to point to whether you're thinking of their promises or not. #2 would be nice if it were true, but if it were true, the last ten years of news coverage of education would surely have looked a lot different. #3? Kingsland is too smart to actually believe #3. Modern charters are not remotely "generally educator led" (no, you don't get to count people who were in TFA for two years), and if every hedge fund in the country got out of the charter business today, the charter industry would be dead.

So no, none of these explain the journalistic reversal of fortune. Let me take a shot at it.

First, the news outlet oppression of charters is not remotely a thing. Reformsters in general and the charter industry in particular have had great success in getting news outlets to uncritically present their version of reality. Furthermore, despite the reported complaints of some reform fans, there is a tremendous imbalance of power. All around the country today, a dozen or more guys will sit down in an office and work on pieces supporting various aspects of the charter business, and then send those out to ready and willing publishing outlets. They will do this in a comfortable office because it is their job, what they are paid to do. Meanwhile, I start this blog this morning after cleaning up dished from yesterday's party, while wrangling two dogs (my own, and my visiting son's) and waiting for my wife to get up so we can run errands, because this is not my job. Guys like me are not even allowed to be full members of the Education Writers Association. So if we're going to weight the advocacy efforts on either side, I don't see it tilting toward us public ed folks.

Nor do the articles in question exactly bristle with pro-public ed bias. The pro-charter point of view is present in each article-- it just isn't allowed to dominate the article without challenge. Suck it up, buttercup.

But I think there's another factor a play, and it is totally of the charter camp's own making.

Since the beginning of the modern charter movement, proponents have tried to propel their movement with a hero-villain narrative. Students had to be rescued from terrible, terrible public schools, schools that would always be terrible because they were under the control of the evil, money-grubbing teacher union. Anyone who defended public schools was probably a union shill, possibly and incompetent fool, likely a racist. States were told repeatedly that there was a crisis under way, that students had to be rescued from terrible public schools, right now, today.

Modern charters were sold with the rhetoric of crisis, the language of war, the narrative of Good Guys trying to rescue children from the clutches of villainous public schools.

If you want to see that rhetoric in action, just look at today's Dad Gone Wild, in which our intrepid blogger goes to the charter convention in Nashville. There he hears Roland Martin declare "We will fight you until hell freezes over, and then we will fight you on the ice," addressing the public school advocates on whom he is declaring war. Then Nina Rees upped the ante with “We are still busy in this movement making the academic case for charter schools when our opposition is out to destroy us. We cannot let our future growth depend on people who oppose us. We need to play better offense.” Dad noted that he met many great people at the convention-- but the tone of the whole group was dark and combative.

Charter fans here need the same advice as the GOP. When you convince people that there's a crisis and that the crisis has been caused by Very Evil People, you have to consider the possibility that for some people, you will end up on the wrong side of things, that people won't automatically cast you in the role you've chosen for yourself.

When you insist that there is a villain, and particularly when you insist that there's a readily visible black-hatted villain in a situation that is actually considerably more complicated, people will keep looking for a villain, and they may well decide it's you. This is particularly true if, in your zeal to convince them to see things your way, you start shading and spinning and even lying.

Are people on the public school side of the debate also engage in such extreme language and thinking? Sure. But at the risk of sounding like a five-year-old, I am going to point out that reformsters punched us first, and they did it right out where everyone could see it. There are reformsters who saw this was a mistake almost immediately, and kept saying things like, "You can't just accuse everyone who doesn't buy common core and charters of being a crazy evil whack job," but none of those guys were delivering speeches in Nashville, apparently.

The model of heroes versus villains was imposed on the charter debate by charter fans. Charter fans started this game, and they started it by attacking and attacking hard, and they have never let up. At this point, they are people who have repeatedly poked the bear in the face and as the bear proceeds to attack, demand a more reasonable conversation, claiming they are the victims of unreasonable bear behavior. And while some of them are wising up, some just keep jabbing away with the stick.

Charters are sometimes treated as villains, in part, because they have worked so hard to sell a narrative in which there must be a villain. Then some of them have proceeded to act like villains.

This whole dynamic reveals modern charter fan motives. Whether it's a sincere belief in free markets, a sincere belief in a need for complete system change to uproot systemic racism, or just plain old-fashioned greed and opportunism, many charter boosters have set a goal of replacing public education, sweeping the old public schools away, and that kind of grand ambition needs a narrative that justifies that wholesale destruction. The narrative telegraphs charter intent as clearly as pounding a shoe on a podium and yelling, "We will bury you!"

I sometimes try to imagine a different universe. Imagine that at the beginning of the modern charter movement, charter operators had floated a narrative like, "We see some real problems in the education system, and we want to be part of the solution. We think we have a new perspective to offer, and we think we can partner with public schools-- which are, after all, where you find all the people who wanted to commit their lives and careers to educating our children-- to improve education in America. This is a problem we can help solve, and working together, we can make great strides." Imagine if that were the narrative, and not a narrative set in a black and white world where somebody must be the villain. But of course, to have that conversation, charter fans would need to have different motives. I don't know what conversation that would have gotten us, but it wouldn't be this one.

PA: More Charter Christmas

PA House Bill 530 is yet another attempt to make life happier for charters in the Keystone State. As usual, it's a poop sandwich, a simple legislative trick where lawmakers include something in the bill that makes a good PR hook (This bill proposes to give the state the right to punch Mean People in the nose) with the hopes that the PR will cause folks to overlook other details of the bill (This bill would also award Mean People $1 million of taxpayer dollars).

Reading about proposed bills is a huge pain, in part because people on both sides of the discussion do their best to stampede voters, using write-ups that are tilted enough that sometimes you're not sure that you're reading two pieces about the same bill. The solution is always to go read the text of the bill but-- oh, lordy, HB 530 is freakin' 218 pages long.

Here's the thing-- when you start reading the bill, you find things that are even worse than what you've been reading about it. So I'm going to sort through this, but I am not going to try to create a sparkly smooth bunch of transitions.

The Charter School Funding Advisory Commission. If you are thinking, "Hot damn! It's about time somebody looked at how the funding formula for Pa charters sucks money away from public schools--" well, think again. The commission is supposed to examine charter funding, specifically "The commission shall examine how charter school entity finances affect opportunities for teachers, parents, pupils and community members to establish and maintain schools that operate independently from the existing school district structure..."

In other words, the commission is supposed to make sure that enough money is getting to the charter sector. And the commission is stacked, with eight legislators, the PA secretary of ed, the PA chairman of the state board, four public ed representatives, and FIVE charter school reps.

Those five charter reps will include the business manager of a cyber charter-- because PA is deeply committed to supporting cybers, even though everything we know about them is that they don't work and even other folks in the charter business want cybers to be slapped down. Throughout HB 530, language is tweaked to make sure that charters and cyber charters are included on the list of school-like institutions receiving various benefits and recognition.

Hidden in the commission language is more bad news. Among the issues on which it will make recommendations will be the establishment of a state-level charter oversight board that will make sure charters are behaving and will have the power to authorize charters. 

This is a favorite proposal in PA, because right now charters need the authorization of the local board, and no local board  A)in its right mind or B) not controlled by charter school people wants to voluntarily attach a bloodsucking leech to its own neck. So charter fans and lobbyists would love to see some mechanism where charter operators don't have to get the permission of the elected representatives of the taxpayers whose pockets the charters would like to pick.

A cyber charter school shall only be subject to the laws and regulations as provided for in section 1749-A, or as otherwise provided for in this act. We aren't section yet, but kudos to cyber and charter lobbyists for continuing to get themselves excused from all sorts of school laws.

Good news. Charter trustees and administrators shall be public officials in the sense that they must file ethics and financial disclosures.Administrators can't be paid by another charter or ed management company unless they file a sworn statement saying they're doing so. Also, administrators can't be voting members of the charter boards-- and neither can their family members. And any charter administrator or trustee who has been convicted of crimes like fraud, theft or mismanagement of funds will be fired. And charter boards must include five "unrelated" members (so we're really going after the mom and pop charter frauds). Oh, and you can't be paid by the charter organization and serve on the board that authorizes the charter. It tells you something about the state of charters in PA that folks thought we'd better add these parts to the law.

Standard application. The state will create a standard application for charter operators. This sounds like a swell, efficient idea, but it means that the state will decide what the authorizing process will look like. Granted, this will be inconvenient for districts where the authorizing process might have become tainted, but it will hamstring everyone else, too. The list of things on the form is extensive and seems aimed at closing many of the loopholes through which some fraudsters have previously snuck.

Authorizing period. Charters will be authorized for five years. No word on what penalty charter operators must pay if they decide to bail before the five years are up. Charters that have been meeting their academic numbers can be authorized for ten years. however if they have been failing to meet academic marks, they are only authorized for five years. Why that part of the law says "five years" instead of "not at all" beats me. The old law allowing a one-year re-authorization if the local board feels they don't know enough-- that law is intact.

Charter School Appeal Board Changes. The bill tweaks the make-up of the charter appeals board. Now the parent member must be a charter parent (and can only be a member as long as their kid is in a charter school). Three new member slots include a charter board member, a charter administrator, and a public school principal.

Charter Real Estate Takeovers. After your school district has to close a building because you've been bled dry by charters, you have to sell or lease that building to the charters. The law awards them "right of first refusal" to a whole building-- or part of a building-- that a school district decides to close. Actually, it just has to be a building-- or part of a building-- "which is no longer in use by the property titleholder" so presumably this law would mean that a charter could say, "Hey, there are six classrooms you're not using. You have to lease them to us." The law would guarantee the district would get "fair market value" for the real estate, but what exactly is the fair market value on six classrooms in a school building?

Unilateral expansion. Way down here in paragraph d-- a charter may decide to operate in more than one location and "may not be required to obtain permission to expand." Yikes. "Surprise! We just doubled our financial strain on your district, and you didn't get to even say boo."

Waiting lists. Charters with waiting lists must give preference to students within the district. The bill gives a specific layout of what the standard charter application form may and may not ask. After it enrolls all the waiting list students from within the district, it can start enrolling students from outside the district

Now, see what you make of this. 

If a charter school or regional charter school and the school district from which it is authorized have voluntarily capped enrollment or the district attempts to involuntarily cap enrollment of resident students and the charter school or regional charter school has enrolled the maximum number of resident students, the charter school or regional charter school may enroll students residing outside of the district.

I guess this means that a charter can stock up on lots of students from outside the district thereby allowing taxpayers within the district to pick up the tab for educating students that aren't even from their community. I'd love to imagine this resulting in a charter situated in a nice rich neighborhood pulling in all sort of poor inner city students, but I'm guessing that's not how this would work out.

More unilateral expansion. If a charter wants to add more grades, they can. Basically, the bill is loaded with language designed to thwart any attempts to cap charter schools in any way shape or form. There can be no caps on enrollment "unless agreed to by the charter school." Which means there are no limits to money that charters can drain from a local district.

Pre-K. Good news. If your district doesn't have a public pre-K school, you don't have to pay for the four year olds who go to a charter pre-K.

Cyber school payment formula. The bill offers a new formula for figuring out how much the student's district of residence must pay to the cybers:

the budgeted total expenditures per average daily membership of the prior school year, as defined in section2501(20), minus the budgeted expenditures of the district of residence for nonpublic school programs; adult education programs; community/junior college programs; school library services; nonpublic support services; tax assessment and collection services; nonpublic health services; forty-five percent (45%) of operation and maintenance of plant services; student transportation services; community services; for special education programs; facilities acquisition, construction and improvement services; and other financing uses, including debt service and fund transfers as provided in the Manual of Accounting and Related Financial Procedures for Pennsylvania

For special ed students, it's that number plus, basically, the special ed budget divided by the number of special ed students.

That's an improvement. However, in one of the more incredible moves of the bill, the proposed law also tells districts what they have to do with money they "save" from cyber-school enrollment. It's a pretty list, but seriously-- "cyber-school savings"?

Charter Special Ed Assistance. Charters could, under this law, contract their special ed services from the local district or the IU. This kind of reminds me of how FedEx will take your money to deliver a package, but if it's a package they don't really want to deliver, they just sub-contract the United States Postal Service to deliver it.

Charter Enrollment Lies. If the school district thinks that the charter lied about enrollment, the burden of proof is on them (because I guess the state doesn't care whether the charter is lying or not).

Good news. Local school boards will have ongoing access to the charter financial and personnel records. Also, charters have to submit to full audits. Which is good, but do you mean to tell me we never had this in the law before? Also, the charter annual budget has to be on its website.

Bad News for Charter Teachers. The bill makes it clear that charter teachers will be subject to the same bad evaluation system as public school teachers.

Charter Consolidation. I've sort of been expecting this. How can you take over the charter market if you can't "consolidate" with other charter businesses? Now it's possible.

Fund Balance Limits. The bill proposes some clear and specific limits on how much money the charter can park in the bank. Public schools in PA have had this for a few years now; it's hard on Scrooge McDuck-style business managers, but it guarantees that taxpayer dollars are actually doing something. I mean, if the money is just going to sit in a bank somewhere, it can sit in my bank and make interest for me, not some school entity.

Charter Evaluation. You've undoubtedly read about this in pro-bill PR, because it's a big selling point. The bill proposes to create a whole big evaluation "matrix" for judging charter performance. While I like the general principle, I don't believe for a minute that the state has a clue about how to evaluate a school, whether it's a public school or a charter school. But I can't help being happy to see charters suffer under the same baloney as the rest of us. However, if the selling point of charters is freedom from government red tape, this will surely not help them.

What would help charters handle the pain of this new red-tapey evaluation system? How about we make the evaluation system carry no actual consequences, like losing your charter or facing non-renewal because your matrix looks so ugly? Yes, we'll evaluate you, but no, we won't allow anyone to do anything with the results. Feel better, charters?

More leeching. Public schools or IUs or colleges have to provide cyber charters with a nice, quiet place to administer the Big Standardized Tests. They can charge rent.

Educational Tax Credits. And look-- alllllll the way down at the bottom are these damn things again. We're going to call them "opportunity scholarships" this time, but these are an ALEC favorite. Sometimes called "tuition tax credit" programs, they're just the newest way to try to implement vouchers.

See, in a voucher program, Pat McVoucher pays $2,000 in taxes to the state, and the state gives Chris a $500 voucher to spend on school. But in a tuition tax credit program, Pat gives $500 to Chris to spend on school, and the state only collects $1,500 in taxes from Pat. So, you know, totally different.

There are pages and pages laying out the smoke and mirrors to be set up (which I'll bet look pretty much exactly like similar laws proposed by other ALEC legislators in other states). It's a voucher program, and just like any other voucher program, it has all the usual voucher problems (including, but not limited to, using tax dollars to fund private religious schools).

This portion is all by itself reason enough to dump this bill, no matter what small virtues it may contain.

Bottom line up side. The good news that will be sold to some folks is that this bill finally proposes some forms of charter oversight and attempts to tackle the hugely unpopular cyber-charter payment set-up. Cyber charter payments were the kind of policy issues that nobody really paid attention-- but then everyone started to figure out that their own school district was cutting programs and closing buildings so that cyber-schools could be paid, and now people are paying plenty of attention, and none of it is happy. So the bill does address some issues that need to be addressed.

Bottom line down side. The deal here appears to be that we will put a collar on the charter schools, but we won't actually attach that collar to a leash or anything else. Charters get unchecked growth and the chance to do as they please. Charter opponents and fans of public education get to wave some paperwork around impotently. And if you want to put it in conservative terms, this bill strips local school boards and local taxpayers of their local control.

This bill has everything but the kitchen sink, as well as everything but actually restraints and accountability for charters. Plus vouchers.

If you are in Pennsylvania, contact your legislator. And if you can't do anything else, here's a handy action network site courtesy of the Network for Public Education that will let you fire off a letter to your representatives. Speak up. Speak out. HB 530 is bad news.

ICYMI: Kick Off July with These Great Reads

Lots of worthwhile reading from last week. And remember-- you can keep up on many worthwhile bloggers just by using the links in the lefthand column.

Debunking the Belief that Earlier Is Better

Rae Pica, known for her work at BAM Radio, comes to Parent Toolkit with a great explanation of why earlier is not, in fact, better.


The Politics of the Paragraph

I wrote about this article last week, and if you didn't click through and read the whol thing, here's your chance to correct that oversight.

Why Can't My New Employees Write

Same thing. I wrote about this piece last week and you really should read this look at writing instruction.

Teach for America Has Gone Global, and Its Board Has Strange Ideas About What Poor Kids Need

"By promising innovative classroom techniques and inspirational leadership, the Teach for All model seeks to transform tremendous material deficits into a problem of character." A super-solid look at one more attempt to expand the TFA model, and how that fits into the privatization agenda.

A New Argument for More Diverse Classrooms

I actually have mixed feelings here. I'm not sure we need an argument for mixed classrooms any more than we need an argument for co-ed schools-- school needs to look like the world, period. But if you need an argument for diversity, here's a good one.

Advanced Stage Charter Syndrome

Nancy Flanagan has been quietly kicking ass in the edu-blogging world for years. Here is a great piece from her about the ways in which the charter biz must inevitably show an ugly side.

It's Like Invisible Drones

Nancy Bailey shows one more way to think of the data mining in schools and its bad effects.

How Can I Make My Students Republicans?

Clever, and worth a read. That's all I'll say.

Amidst a Catastrophic Budget Crisis, Louisiana Legislators Vote To Fully Fund a Charter Boarding School Forever

Do you have time to read one more example of charter school shenanigans? From Crazy Crawfish, one more example of how the charter biz can turn into a nest of vipers.

Dem Platform: Public Ed Can Get Stuffed

Somebody leaked a copy of the Democratic platform draft to Diane Ravitch, and so now we can all see that trajectory of public ed in the Democratic party plan.

It looks pretty much like this.





 





Now, there are two things to note before we start. One is that there are no surprises here to anyone who has been paying attention to the Democratic Party, which has been clear on what it would like to do with its historic concern about public schools and the teachers who work there.

 No, I didn't make a mistake and post the same picture twice










The second-- and this is the important one if we want to keep our blood pressure down-- is that party platforms are quite possibly the most meaningless political documents ever. "Although I am not personally very committed to this policy, I am going to aggressively pursue it because my party put it in the plaform at the last convention," said no President in the history of the United States.

That said, it does tell us a little bit about where the hearts and minds of the party are, and since it appears we're going to have a race between the two worst candidates for President in the entire history of anything ever, we might as well pay attention to what the party is up to. So what does this draft version of the platform tell us about the heart and mind of the Democratic Party?

Well, education does get a subheading, so I guess that's something. The heading says "Provide Quality and Affordable Education" and since this is a rough draft, I'm not going to subtract points for coming up with a subtitle that doesn't exactly sing.

First up-- higher education. The Democratic Party wants you to know that they noticed that a whole bunch of folks were excited about Bernie Sanders, and they think that might have had to do with the college thing. So they're going to come out for free community college, and "strengthen" historically "minority-serving" colleges. Strengthen how? Who knows. Have them all do a lot of push ups, maybe. Everybody should get a college education without going broke.

College debt. Those who have some, the Dems think you should get to refinance "at the lowest possible rate," which-- lowest possible according to whom? Because according to some people that's where we are right now. And I say "we" because I am still paying off a couple of college educations, and I can tell you in the last twelve years nobody has ever called me up to say, "Yeah, it's possible for you to get a lower rate, but we're just not going to do that." Also, the Dems want borrowers to get a Student Borrower Bill of Rights, because one more piece of jargon-encrusted paperwork is just what the college loan process needs ("Sign right here to certify that I showed you this damn thing.") The Dems want to hold lenders to "high standards," too. And they'd like to bring back the bankruptcy emergency exit from college loanery. So, mostly platitudes and baloney. That's what you guys took away from Bernie Sanders? Damn.

Minority-serving institutions. And may I just say that you guys may want to take a look at that whole "minority" thing, since particulary in schools "minority" also means "white" at this point. Maybe it's just me, but "minority" seems like a way to keep the non-white folks down in their place linguistically speaking. Anyway, the Dems would like to throw a lot of money at these schools, because diversity in the workplace is good.

For-profit schools. The Dems want you to know that Donald Trump had one of these, and it was Very Naughty. "Democrats will not tolerate this type of fraud," they say, and I would be so much happier if it didn't raise the question of what sorts of fraud they will continue to tolerate, because it's not like it's strictly GOP politicians who are aiding and abetting profit-based school fraud in places like New York and Connecticut. The Dems also promise to "continue" to crack down on for-profit colleges, except I don't know what they're talking about since so far "crack down" has meant "carefully safeguard the investors who are backing these places."

"We will go after for-profits that engage in deceptive marketing, fraud, and other illegal practices," say the Dems, which I take to mean that they otherwise think for-profit schools are perfectly okay. That is the incorrect answer; the correct answer is that profiteering has no place in the education world, even if the profiteers aren't Donald Trump. Particularly when those profits come at the expense of the US taxpayer.

Early childhood, pre-K, and K-12. "Democrats believe we must have the best-educated population and workforce in the world. That means making early childhood education a priority, especially in light of new research showing how much early learning can impact life-long success." What new research is that, exactly? I mean, pre-K and early childhood are great things-- done right-- but I have a feeling the Democratic Party is speaking out of its butt here. Somebody ask them what research they're looking at, please.

But hey-- if you want some other great buzzwords, we've got them. There will be a great school in every zip code (the zip code thing is a popular piece of charter rhetoric), and every child will have access to a great education (and I'll ask once more-- why "access"?  Everyone on the Titanic had access to a lifeboat, but only a few actually got to ride in one. Why not just have every student in a great public school?)

I will give the Dems credit for some language here that talks about public education as both an economic "propeller" and a means for the whole child to achieve his/her dreams-- which is better than suggesting that the only purpose of education is to get students ready to be useful to future employers.

But then we're back to the baloney. We're going to have high standards, and we're going to hold schools, districts, communities and states accountable for raising achievement for poor, ELL, etc etc students (but not, I guess, legislators for making sure schools have necessary resources). And Dems want to "strike a better balance on testing" so that it "informs" instruction but does not "drive" it. Which is a perfect piece of political rhetoric, because it really sounds like a cool distinction but has absolutely no meaning in how testing works in the real world. The perfect balance on Big Standardized Tests is to do away with them and trust the trained and experienced professional educators in our classrooms. But a second choice would be to remove all stakes from the testing and replace the current battery of BS Tests with tests that actually provide useful information in a timely manner, because if the tests were actually useful, teachers would use them without threats and punishment. So there's an actual policy proposal for you, Democrats.

You could say, "Well, a platform doesn't get so specific" except that the very next paragraph is a highly specific proposal about getting mentors for poor kids! Which is a great idea because it is a "low-cost high-yield investment." Which genius on the committee has a bunch of money sunk in some mentor-consultant business?

Oh, and now teachers. Democrats know teachers are important, so they will launch a national campaign to "recruit and retain high quality teachers" as well as making sure teachers get really swell professional development. "We also must lift up and trust our educators, continually build their capacity, and ensure that our schools are safe, welcoming, collaborative, and well-resourced places for our students, educators, and communities." Man-- someone knows you need three things for a list, but they could only think of two nice promises to make about teachers, so we threw in a third promise about the buildings instead. It would be nice to be trusted, but I don't see anything anywhere else on the platform to suggest that's actually happening, and I don't know how you plan to build my capacity, but you can just take a step back. Build my capacity? What the hell is the supposed to mean? Fix it so I can teach more students? Work a longer day? Special stomach surgery so I can eat more corn on the cob at Fourth of July picnics?

STEM is swell, we think. No more school-to-prison pipeline. And let's end bullying. These get cramped together in one short paragraph, like leftovers in the last Tupperware container, while damn mentoring gets its own twice as long paragraph.

And finally, let the Democrats re-affirm their love for school choice and charter schools. "We support great neighborhood public schools and high-quality public charter schools, and we will help them disseminate best practices to other school leaders and educators." This overlooks the fact that under current policy, charter schools (which are not public schools, but we don't understand that, either) can only exist at the expense of neighborhood schools. It's like saying we support both healthy internal organs and cancer-- you can't really support both, and the game is rigged in favor of the cancer. Democrats want you to know that they totally don't support for-profit charters, but non-profit charters are mostly for-profit charters with good money laundering systems. Democrats oppose for-profits making profit off public resources, but if Eva Moskowitz wants to pay herself a half-million dollar salary with taxpayer money, that's totally cool. But the Democrats are just going to support charter transparency and call it a day. Basically, the Democrats have a plank here that would fit comfortably in the GOP platform; I would love to hear Democratic Party leadership explain how they are the slightest bit different from the Republicans when it comes to charters and choice.

So if you were hoping for a sign that the Democratic Party even knows what the issues in public education are or has any interest in addressing them, the early draft is not encouraging. They could more honestly address toxic testing, or they could make an actual commitment to the institution of public education instead of the business of charter schools. They could speak out against the privatization of a historic and foundational public resource. They could express some sort of meaningful support for the teaching profession. And they could make a commitment to getting each school the funding that it needs and deserves. Who knows? Maybe they'll do all that in the next draft.

But mostly I'm afraid that if you had hopes that the Democratic Party would emerge as a champion of public schools and the teachers who work there, well, I think I know where those hopes can go.

Writing Junk

First, we need to understand that the state of writing instruction has never been great.

If you are of a Certain Age (say, mine) you may recall a type of writing instruction that we could call the Lego Building Approach. In this method, students are first taught to construct sentences. Then they are taught how to arrange a certain number of sentences into a paragraph. Finally, they are taught to assemble those paragraphs into full essays.

This is junk. It assumes that the basic building block of a piece of writing is a sentence. No-- the basic building block of a piece of writing is an idea. To try to say something without having any idea what you want to say is a fool's errand.

Not that the Lego Building Approach should feel bad for being junk. The instructional writing landscape is littered with junk, clogged with junk, sometimes obscured by the broad shadow of towering junk. And on almost-weekly basis, folks try to sort out what the junk is and how best to clear it away.

Here's John Warner at Inside Higher Ed trying to answer the question, "Why can't my new employees write?" Warner reports that he hears that question often from employers. With a little probing he determines that what they mean by "can't write," is "They primarily observe a fundamental lack of clarity and perceive a gap between the purpose of the writing and the result of what’s been written, a lack of awareness of audience and occasion."

In other words, they don't seem to get the idea that they are supposed to be communicating real ideas and information in a real way to real people. It's not a question of rigor or expectations, Warner notes. It's that they were trained to do something else entirely.

I believe that in many cases, these young professionals have never encountered a genuine and meaningful rhetorical situation in an academic or professional context. They are highly skilled at a particular kind of academic writing performance that they have been doing from a very early age, but they are largely unpracticed at that what their employers expect them to do, clearly communicate ideas to specific audiences.

My students’ chief struggle tends to be rooted in years of schooling where what they have to say doesn’t really matter, and the primary focus is on “how” you say things.

This is the flip side of our current bad ideas about reading-- the notion that reading is a set of skills that exist independent of any actual content. Current writing standards and therefor instruction assume the same thing-- that a piece of writing involves deploying a set of skills, and the actual content and subject matter are not really important. This is not so much a pedagogical idea as a corporate one, somehow filtered down form the world where it's believed that a great corporate manager will be great whether the company makes lubricating oil, soup, soap, or fluffy children's toys.

Michelle Kenney at Rethinking Schools talks about how this skills-based writing turns to junk in "The Politics of the Paragraph." Innumerable schools have found ways (or borrowed or bought ways) to reduce writing to a simple set of steps, providing a checklist for students to follow when writing (and for teachers to use when scoring). Kenney writes about the inevitable outcome of this approach, even when using a procedure developed in house:

I also noted a decline in the overall quality of thought in these paragraphs. Students had more confidence in their writing, but they were also less invested in their ideas. Writing paragraphs and essays was now a set of hoops to jump through, a dry task only slightly more complex than a worksheet. 

Mediocre writing starts with the wrong questions, and a focus on a set, proscribed structure and process encourages students to ask the wrong questions. Hammer them with writing templates, and students start to see an essay as a slightly more involved fill in the blank exercise. "I have to have five paragraphs-- what can I use to fill up the five paragraph-sized blanks?" "I need three sentences to make a paragraph-- what can I use to fill in the the three sentence-shaped empty spaces." This gets you junk.

The appeal of the template is easy to see-- teaching writing is hard and grading writing is even harder. Every prompt has an infinite number of correct answers instead of just one, and every piece of writing has to be considered on its own terms. The very best writing includes a unique and personal voice, and teaching a students to sound like him- or herself is tricky. Much easier to teach them all to sound like the same person.

The important questions for writing are what do I want to say, who do I want to say it to, and what's the best way I can think of to say it. But the results of those are really hard to scale up, if not impossible. So it comes as no surprise that the Age of Common Core College and Career Ready Standards has provided us just with more junk writing instruction.

Here's Madeline Will over at Education Week, trying to make the case that the Core somehow "include detailed writing expectations that go well beyond previous state requirements. Specifically, they call for proficiency in argumentative, explanatory, and narrative writing that draw connections from and between texts."

This is a tricky claim to respond to because, first, if the standards did include detailed writing expectations, that would not be a good thing. "Detailed expectations" is just another way to say "template," and a template is junk writing instruction. But the writing standards are, by and large, gibberish. I'm going to take a look at the Original Common Core State [sic] Standards for writing. In your state the standards may have been rewritten a bit (or simply rebranded), but the original flavor standards certainly capture the essence of what we're dealing with. But we need to go back to the standards because Will makes the usual Common Core mistake-- "Okay," says some consultant or state official or district administrator, "Let's put these yellow yarmulkes on our heads, because that is totally what the standards say to do." In the unpacking stage, lots of folks have added their own versions of ideas about interpretations about readings of the standards and we end up with classrooms haunted by the pedagogical ghosts of standards that never really lived.

Let's start with a second grade standard for writing.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.2.1
Write opinion pieces in which they introduce the topic or book they are writing about, state an opinion, supply reasons that support the opinion, use linking words (e.g., because, and, also to connect opinion and reasons, and provide a concluding statement or section.

First, let me get a pet peeve out of the way-- the Core repeatedly talks about giving "reasons" for opinions, when I suspect what they actually mean is "evidence." I think this liver casserole stinks. What's my reason? I hate liver. I'm pretty sure that the standards want me to provide evidence about the nature of the casserole, but my "reason" for having an opinion is that I have that opinion. Asking me for the reason I love my wife is a whole different question from asking for evidence that my wife is lovable.

Here we also see the standards' focus on specific vocabulary to connect ideas in a very specific way. And the implication here in this standard for seven year olds is that there is just one correct way to write about your opinion, which is the death of decent writing.

Ten years later, that standard has morphed into this standard for 11-12 graders.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.11-12.1
Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts, using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence.

Emphasis mine. Because as a writer, my first thought is, "Oh, you want me to use valid reasons. I'm glad you said something, because I was totally going to use stupid, irrational, insufficient reasons." My second thought is "substantive, valid, relevant, and sufficient" according to whom?

Because one of the underlying themes of the writing standards is that writing is a set of skills that you perform to someone else's satisfaction. It's not about you saying what you have to say; it's about you saying what somebody else wants you to say, the way they want you to say it. It is about jumping through hoops.

And that's just the "master" standard. Here are the sub-standards.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.11-12.1.a
Introduce precise, knowledgeable claim(s), establish the significance of the claim(s), distinguish the claim(s) from alternate or opposing claims, and create an organization that logically sequences claim(s), counterclaims, reasons, and evidence.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.11-12.1.b
Develop claim(s) and counterclaims fairly and thoroughly, supplying the most relevant evidence for each while pointing out the strengths and limitations of both in a manner that anticipates the audience's knowledge level, concerns, values, and possible biases.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.11-12.1.c
Use words, phrases, and clauses as well as varied syntax to link the major sections of the text, create cohesion, and clarify the relationships between claim(s) and reasons, between reasons and evidence, and between claim(s) and counterclaims.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.11-12.1.d
Establish and maintain a formal style and objective tone while attending to the norms and conventions of the discipline in which they are writing.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.11-12.1.e
Provide a concluding statement or section that follows from and supports the argument presented.

Again, my emphasis on some of the terms that are not objective, but will have to be set by whoever is judging the writing. But here we have a template for the essay, right down to sentence structure. Some of these (heck, most of these) represent very specific requirements for an essay, even more of a straightjacket than the templates that Kenney discusses, and they also represent matters of personal style and choice. For instance, the standards love conclusions. Gotta have a conclusion. Which would not fly with my college professor who said that a bad, generic conclusion is worse than no conclusion at all-- if you don't have a good finish, then just make your point and then stop talking. But no-- to write an Essay According To The Standards, you must fill in the conclusion blank with something.

And we also have the usual weird mix of the obvious and the specific. "Use words, phrases, clauses or syntax" to connect the ideas-- which rules out, what, semaphore? Arrows drawn on the page? But that is followed by a list of three specific relationships that must be covered in your essay, because no good essay about opinion can be written without showing the relationship between your reasons and your evidence? Ever?

Of course the writing standards also cover informative/explanatory essays and narrative writing, and the mere division of writing into three separate types suggests a set of rules that don't really exist in the world of actual writing, but are created for the convenience of people who want to test and measure writing. The narrative standards are particularly restrictive and terrible and arbitrary and would disapprove of much of the great works that we teach in English classes-- but that's an issue for another day

Most of all, meeting these standards would not help a single one of the employers who asked Warner why the new employees can't write. The standards provide a set of hoops to jump through so that the students can display certain writing skills-- but not any thinking or communication skills. A student can satisfy all of these standards and still not grasp that writing is about figuring out what you want to say, who you're going to say it to, and the best way for you to say it. The standards foster junk writing.

Will highlights one single true benefit of the standards-- they call for writing frequently, which is smart. If you made your students write twice a week for a year and never even graded any of it, that would probably still be better than the classic four week long Writing Unit in April.

I know there are teachers who think these standards are swell. I've met some. Here's why some teachers like these writing standards:

1) They are teaching their own set of standards and pretending that their own standards have something to do with the Core standards.

2) They don't like to teach writing, and what they want someone to do is just reduce it to some simple rules so that they can just go through the motions and be able to say they're teaching writing without having to suffer through the hard work.

3) They don't know how to teach writing.

I'm sorry, but if you tell me that you think the standards are great for writing instruction, I will judge you. I'm not proud of it, but there it is (especially in Pennsylvania, where we have found ways to make the writing standards even worse). Will argues that teachers need more support, that there are "veteran teachers who had no practice in teaching the kind of writing, particularly argumentative writing, that the standards call for," and that's probably true, but I'm okay with that, because the standards call for junk. Teachers do need "support" in the teaching of writing (I do love how "needs support" is now our code word for "needs to be whacked upside the head and straightened the hell out"), but the standards are not the place to find it, and they're not the foundation on which to base it. I promise that I'll present my Writing Instruction Professional Development in a Can but this is already a long post, so we'll save that for another day.

But I will give you Step One, because summer is the perfect time to work on it.

Write. Write for a blog. Write letters to the editor of your newspaper. Write long thoughtful letters to friends. You can no more teach writing without actually doing writing than you can teach reading if you've never cracked open a book. So go do that. And don't consult any standards or templates when you do. Just ask yourself-- what do I want to say? That's the only thing you need to get started.

Discovering Gloria Jean Merriex

Gloria Jean Merriex grew up in Gainesville, Florida. Gainesville is a city of extremes; on the one hand, it's the home of the University of Florida and has many of the features of a big college town; on the other hand, the southern and eastern neighborhoods of Gainesboro are home to crushing poverty. Charles Duval Elementary School is located in the center of an eastern neighborhood filled with crime and poverty.

Merriex saw teaching as a path out of the poverty of her neighborhood, but she did not choose to leave the neighborhood itself. Once she had her degree, she chose to teach at Duval Elementary, where for about twenty-five years she was a middle-of-the-road, competent-but-not-exceptional teacher.

I became acquainted with Merriex through the work of filmmaker Boaz Dvir; my nephew, who studied film at Penn State, had Dvir as a teacher and thought we might have a few things to say to each other. But years ago, Dvir was a professor in Florida who heard about Merriex and decided to tell her story. The result is a documentary in progress entitled "Discovering Gloria." I've watched a rough cut of the film, and it is a challenging and moving story.

Photo Courtesy of Discovering Gloria



The story, of course, is not about the first twenty-five years of Merriex's career. The story really starts with Florida's reform efforts, Florida's Big Standardized Test (FCAT), and Florida's assignment of letter grades to schools, back in the days when No Child Left Behind was the hot, new thing.

Duval scored a big fat F, and Merriex was troubled. Couldn't-sleep-at-night troubled.

The school having "failed," the state stepped in with strict pacing guides and mandated materials so that the school would be working toward Meeting the Standards. Meanwhile, Merriex faced the realization that she could not keep teaching as she had. It was a transformative moment for her, not just as a teacher, but as a person. She began to think about what she really had to do.

She dumped the state pacing guides and teaching materials. When she got caught, she begged Duval principal Lee McNealy for a chance to give her methods a try, and McNealy had the guts and trust to give it to her. So Merriex developed materials and approaches of her own, and for the early 2000s, her choices were a bit out there. She wrote raps and dances to do with her students for learning math vocabulary and basic processes. She used call and response in the classroom. She was stern and demanding in a classic sense, but she did constant outreach and made family connections in the modern teacher-counselor sense. She visited homes, saw to students' non-academic needs, provided instruction to entire families. Cooked classroom meals. mended school uniforms. Held Saturday classes for FCAT prep.  She refined and reflected, developed and grew more materials.

Duval became a miracle school, getting spectacular test results. Duval scored A after A, Merriex's students posting the greatest test score gains in the state. The school was filled with pride, the students confident and accomplished. Duval-- and Merriex--  became one of Florida's great success stories. Merriex created a math team, a group of students who toured and demonstrated their math rap and math skills. Merriex herself was in increasing demand, speaking and demonstrating her techniques for teachers and administrators from all across the state and country.

Merriex's story defies simple categorization. There is frankly much here that reformsters will like. The letter grade system shocked Merriex and her school out of their old ways. And once it was clear that Merriex was on to something, Duval's administration packed her classroom, having her teach forty or fifty students at a time. And the rough cut of Dvir's film tells the story of a student previously labeled learning disabled who blossoms and succeeds under Merriex's tutelage, an apparent confirmation of the "replace special ed with high expectations" reformster camp.

At the same time, reformsters should also note that Merriex completely dismantled and dismissed the state plan for how the courses should be taught. The pacing guide? Out the window. Dvir talks to one of the many academics who came to watch Merriex to try to figure out what she was doing; one striking feature was that Meriex would work completely out of the "normal" sequence and jump from one math subject to another in ways that defied conventional approaches. Yet somehow they worked.

Merriex met her students where they were, creating her materials to match their own concerns and interests. Her techniques defied "scaling up" because they were developed for the children of that neighborhood-- a neighborhood that she had known her whole life. It would never be possible to take five weeks to teach a bunch of college kids the Merriex Method and send them out into schools all across the nation in communities that they've never set foot in before. Merriex's techniques were custom made for students in that community by a lifelong member of that community.

Nevertheless, the Lastinger Center for Learning at the University of Florida decided to study her, even mounting cameras in her classroom intending to stream her lessons around the world. And the Kellogg Foundation-- one of the great reformster money-spreaders-- awarded the center grants to help fund the study. But Kellogg went one better-- in May of 2008, they awarded Merriex a grant to develop a national math curriculum.

Merriex appeared to be living proof of concept for the Hero Teacher.

On the day after the awarding of the Kellogg grant, Merriex suffered a diabetic stroke. She died at the age of 58. It is hard not to conclude that in order to be a Hero Teacher, Merriex had worked herself to death.

What are the lessons of Merriex's story? Dvir does a good job of providing some balance. The fact that he's been wrestling with this film for several years is, in part, a testament to how tricky a story this is to tell. If you watch the trailer, you'll note that the film is funded in part by the ever-reformy Kellogg Foundation, about which Dvir has this to say:

Although I received a grant from Kellogg., I’ve had 100 percent editorial and creative control. I never had even one conversation with Kellogg about the making of the film. I interviewed a Kellogg rep as part of the filming process, but he never asked me about what I was doing. He simply answered my questions. I’ve never even screened the rough cut for Kellogg! As I said, I’ve had complete editorial and creative control over this film – as I have and continue to have on all my films. I’m as strict as any documentary filmmakers get about this. Part of it is my journalistic DNA. Another part is that I do this work purely for scholarship and making a difference.

I've talked to him (and I trust my nephew as a judge of character) and I see the documentary as objective and journalistic in character. I don't smell reformy agenda here. 

As I suggested above, I think reformsters may rush to learn the wrong lessons from this story-- that you just need to find a super-teacher and clone her, that BS Tests are great for measuring and fixing education (a premise that everyone in the film accepts and nobody actually challenges), that if you just believe and try real hard then poverty and race don't really matter. But I think there are far more important lessons to be learned from Merriex's story.

One is the power of administration to protect teachers from bad state and federal policy. Merriex's story of transformation and achievement would never have happened if, in the very beginning, her principal had said, "Dammit, no. We scored an F, so there will be no experimenting. You get back in that classroom and follow the pacing guide the state sent us, and you follow it to the letter." But Merriex's principal trusted her, trusted her professional judgment, and trusted her commitment to her students, and so that principal let Gloria Jean Merriex do her thing. It was easy for everyone to fall in behind Merriex after the fact, and therefor it's easy to forget that Merriex and her principal were risking their careers and bucking the district, the state and the feds.

Another lesson is the limits of the administrative power-- the school still had to face having its success measured by the BS Test and a single letter grade.

Another lesson is the value of community connection. Merriex could figure out what needed to be done because she was of that community, in that community. She knew the language, the values, the streets and neighborhoods, the families. It mattered that she grew up there as a young black girl, to become a teacher in a 99% black school. All the fresh-scrubbed ivy league honor roll graduates in the world could not substitute for what Merriex knew by being of her community. There's a moment (it's also in the trailer) where Merriex's former principal tells the story of letting the teacher know that the school received an F and she appears to almost says "She just turned white" and then catches herself. If you like extra-close readings of moments, it's a resonant moment because if Gloria Jean Merriex had turned white, her success would never happen. If anything, Merriex achieved success in that school by turning less white, by more fully rejecting what the classically white education system told her she was supposed to do and by more fully embracing the culture of her community.

Also-- sitting each of those students down with a computer to work on their interactive adaptive education software would also have failed as a substitute for Merriex.

That points to another huge lesson- while reformsters may say, "Look, high standards and hard work erased the effects of poverty," that overlooks the fact that for Merriex, offsetting the effects of poverty was a second full-time job on top of her teaching job. Working with families, providing concrete support for students, providing emotional support for students and families and co-workers-- Merriex was doing all those non-teaching duties with every spare hour she had so that her actual teaching would have a chance of actually being effective. And ultimately, her second full time job of offsetting the effects of poverty required everything she had. To say that Merriex overcame the effects of poverty "just" with high standards and high expectations would be a lie.

I found it humbling to watch her story, to realize that while I can talk about dedicating my life to teaching, I don't mean anything like what Gloria Jean Merriex meant. I've written about the limits of what we can do as teachers, and most of us who teach are aware of those limits, but few of us push ourselves as close to (or over) those limits like Merriex did.

I will be sure to let you know when the completed film is finally released. In the meantime, here's the trailer for what is, for better or worse, a teacher story for the new millennium.

Teach for Privatization in India

If you ever wanted to see how the pieces of the privatization movement in ed reform fir together (though nobody really wants to see that any more than they want to get a close look at road kill or watch video of an operation on their own pancreas), then I have the article for you.

The Nation has a new piece by George Joseph looking at the spread of the spread of Teach for America's operating philosophy into India. This is apparently a different group than Teach for All, Teach for America's own multinational brand. But the founder of TFI met with Wendy Kopp and McKinsey consulting, so it's not exactly a completely independent entity, either.

India's education system is one of the most grossly underfunded systems in the world. Even though they are booming economically, Joseph reports that the most they have ever spent on education is just 4.4% of their GDP (and that peak came sixteen years ago). In 2013-2014, the country had over half a million vacant teaching positions. Only one in five teachers working had ever received in-service training. Half of all schools could not meet the requirement of no more than thirty students to a classroom. And over 91,000 schools had only one teacher.

But TFI features the same old TFA theory of change, which Joseph has summed up as clearly as anyone I've ever read:

 By promising innovative classroom techniques and inspirational leadership, the Teach for All model seeks to transform tremendous material deficits into a problem of character.

His article repeatedly cites individuals who say that India's schools do not need more money, but basically just need somebody smart to whip these kids into shape. Meanwhile, the TFI board includes guys like Ashish Dhawan, an exceptionally wealthy guy who has thrown his money and power behind successful efforts to have public schools simply turned over to private businesses to operate (and profit from).

Against that background of spreading privatization of education, TFI is very clearly not meant to provide students with an education, but instead is to provide field training for the people who are going to become  the movers and shakers and money-makers in the new privatized education business. Though Joseph does not say so, one gets the impression that India's reformsters feel far less pressure to pay lip service to the idea that this is all For the Poor Children.

It's a fascinating look at what the Same Old Reformy Stuff looks like when played out in another culture and country. Follow the link above and read this.