Not Okay

What do you say when you need to say something and there is nothing to say.

Well, there's lots to say, but literally everything that could be said has been said, and at this point is has been said over and over. It turns out that when you have too much exposure to the banality of evil, you start having trouble with banality in the response to evil.

I can't promise that this will be clear or cogent or organized. But I can say this much.

It's not okay.

It's not okay that black lives are repeatedly taken for no good reason. It's not okay that they are taken so often that the seemingly endless series of killing seems to take on a narrative shape of its own, as if we're being presented with a series of hypothetical variations on a scenario-- "so, if it's okay to kill a black man who has priors, is it okay if he doesn't?" We get suckered into discussing exactly which black people can be legitimately killed. It is heartbreaking to read (I cannot watch it-- I just can't) Diamond Reynolds crying that her boyfriend was not a gang member, had no prior arrests-- as if any of these would have justified the shooting of Philando Castile.

It's not okay.

It's not okay that several Dallas policemen are dead, shot down while showing how police departments can have a positive relationship with protestors, shot down while keeping those protestors safe and secure. That's how tense and angry our nation is, that this happened at a peaceful protest, in a city that is in many ways a model for positive police relationships with the community.

It's not okay.

It's not okay that the line of murdered black citizens runs so far back that people, searching for something to say, just pull up and repost essays from a year ago.

It's not okay.

It's not okay that we are so confused and muddled in our relationship with guns that we read that folks would be safer if everyone carried a gun, except for these black men  who shouldn't have been carrying guns. Should we all be armed, or not?

It is not okay.

It is not okay that there is apparently no death that is upsetting enough in this country to actually stir up the political will to do anything at all. Groups of small children. Cops. Innocent black men on a daily basis. We are like a drunk who wrecks a new car every single day, and never once thinks, "Maybe I have some sort of problem."

It is not okay.

It is not okay that I keep seeing articles about how if folks don't want to have trouble with the police, they should just comply and be cooperative. Yesterday there was literally less than an hour between the moment that I read a repost of a piece by a black man talking about how he had been stopped by police and he politely told the policeman about his legal concealed carry weapon and everything went just fine-- literally less than an hour between reading that and reading about Philando Castile, shot dead after a traffic stop and informing the officer that he had a legal concealed carry.

So it's not okay that the advice clearly does not work for some folks. It just doesn't.

But beyond that, why should it have to? "Comply or die" is unacceptable to me.

Listen, I am not a raving anarchist. As a teacher, I exercise government-issued authority on a daily basis. But it is so not ok to say that in our country, if you don't respond to authorities with the proper respectful compliance, they may execute you on the spot. That's not okay. That is so not okay.

It is not okay.

I don't have clever answers to the resurgence of racism in our country. I don't have new thoughts about the omnipresence of deadly violence. I don't know a quick and easy way to bring us to a place where we can look at each other and see individual human beings with individual stories and histories and hopes and dreams. I am particularly frustrated because in my life I aspire to and lean on empathy and understanding, but there is simply no way for me as a small town middle-aged white guy to really feel what I must be like to live in a situation where my family and I must learn a whole set of ways to behave just to avoid being shot dead. How does someone live like that? Nobody should have to.

It is not okay.

It is not okay that this is our current normal, that we can expect news of a new death or murder or execution every day, and simply fade into a routine. We decide how much outrage is required. We argue about whether it is more or less worthy of outrage than this other killing. We try to find something to say. We quietly take a pass because we're just so tired of the endless parade of unnecessary death.

And we try to understand, or we give up trying to understand, or we actively resist trying to understand, how this is still a nation where how safe you are depends on your race.

It is not okay.

There's a lesson to be learned from the Trump campaign. Trump has lots of ways to communicate racism and ignorance, but his simplest technique is silence. A person in his crowd says something awful, and Trump says nothing. Say what you want about John McCain, but I will always remember how he shut down a person at one of his rallies and made it absolutely clear that certain attacks on Barack Obama were not okay. Trump just smirks and shrugs and with his silence makes it clear that he thinks that's okay.

I think of how that would translate to my classroom, if one student attacked another and I did nothing. My silence would send a message, and the attacks would continue because my silent message was, "That's okay."

We want novelty and newness from our media, but I think of my childhood, when the network news hammered away at the fighting and death in Vietnam every night, night after night telling the American people, "This is happening, and as you can see, it's not okay." It was monotonous, but it was the truth. These days, we want something new. Give me death and carnage on Game of Thrones, but give me new carnage every week.

It is not okay.

As I said, I have nothing new to say, nothing really to ad to this conversation that we've been having for far too long. But I can't just stay silent, as if I neither know nor care. If I say nothing to the news of the death of the Dallas police, of Philando Castile, or Alton Sterling, or Michael Brown, or all the other people on the list too long to include here-- if I say nothing, it might leave the impression that I think it's all okay.

It is not okay.

I don't want black men shot at traffic stops. I don't want cops shot by snipers. I don't want kids shot at school. I don't want any of this.

— EM Simpson (@charlie_simpson) July 8, 2016

Amazon Inspire Off To Rocky Start with Piracy Problems

Amazon Inspire is intended to be Amazon's entry into the teacher resource market, a place where teachers could find "tens of thousands of free lesson plans, worksheets and other instructional material," all accessed through the familiar Amazon interface, complete with searches and starred reviews. As laid out by the NYT, this venture is meant to be the point of the spear for Amazon, driving straight for the heart of the ed tech industry (plus one more great way to collect lots of user data).

Teachers can already get in on the Beta ground floor and reap the many benefits, including one more opportunity to give teacher plans away to a for-profit company. It's a business model that is all over the place-- as a teacher I'm supposed to give away my self-developed teaching materials and ideas while making use of other teachers' materials and some company makes money off the both of us, either through selling advertising, collecting data and selling that, or in the ballsiest approach, charging me for the materials that another teacher handed over for free. The Amazon model (like the Microsoft and Google and Apple models) is also about developing brand loyalty and getting you used to shopping at one particular outlet where you become accustomed to meeting all your teacher needs.

The foundation here is the foundation of most internet business models-- if you can get a bunch of people to work for you for free and create content for you for free, you can make a ton of money (and yes, I fully recognize that by blogging on a google-owned platform as well as contributing to Huffington Post, I contribute to that model-- we all make our own compromises in this world). 

But Amazon is in trouble already.

As reported last week at EdSurge and the New York Times, it became immediately apparent that some of the materials on the site were not so much donated as stolen:

One day after Amazon announced that it would introduce Amazon Inspire, a free instructional resources site where teachers could share lesson plans, the company said it had removed three items from the site after educators complained that the products were copyrighted materials

From Edsurge:

One educator, Laura Driscoll of the Social Emotional Learning Workshop, left a comment on our story about Amazon Inspire expressing strong feelings about the theft of materials:

"There a number of resources available on the site which are clear copyright infringement not uploaded by the owners of the material. Rather than open source, it strikes me as a pirated material market that Amazon collects ad revenue and buyer habits on."

To add to the embarrassment, two of the pirated sets of materials apparently came from teacherspayteachers.com, another site competing for the same market.

 I'm going to let Amazon contribute their logo to this blog









And all of that was basically within the first twenty-four hours. What are the odds that more pirated material is going to turn up?

Users of Amazon Inspire upload materials to the site, so Amazon is somewhat at the mercy of users' A) good will and honest intentions and B) users' ability to know the difference between open source and copyrighted materials. That means that Amazon is also at the mercy of its own ability to monitor and screen the Inspire site. They may have wanted to create a teachers' Youtube, but ended up with the teachers' Napster instead.

My Election Position : The Trump Clinton Yardstick.

So today's Sign of the Presidential Apocalypse was coming across a facebook argument about whether Trump or Clinton is the more racist. That's where we are-- we're ready to elect a racist as President and all that's left is to quibble over how much of which style of racism.

I am fifty-nine years old, and have read and studied history most of my adult life. I'm prepared to call this as the worst pair of Presidential candidates in the nation's history. The worst. Mind you, I don't really care about Clinton's e-mail misbehavior, and I really don't care about the manufactured Benghazi anguish. But I do care that she is so completely bought and paid for by Big Money. I really care that she represents the Democrats' continued abandonment of any and all traditional constituencies. And Trump is an astonishing dumpster fire, a fraud and scam artist who appeals strictly to the basest and worst in humanity. Our country is uglier because of his candidacy.

Neither is an acceptable choice for President, a fact tacitly acknowledged by the vast amount of campaigning based on slamming the opposition. The weird irony of these two terrible candidates is that neither one would have a hope in hell against any other candidate.

This is beyond "hold your nose and vote." I held my nose and voted for Obama II vs. Romney. This is way, way worse. It's trying to figure out which apocalypse would be more survivable.

There are so many things at stake here, but one is the survival of each party. A Clinton victory will mean the end of the Democratic Party. It will be read as "proof" that they should go all in on neo-liberalism, that the only party constituents who matter are the ones who can write big fat checks. A Trump victory will mean the death of the GOP as anything but a slobbering rant-fest for racist constitution-rejecting dopes. Yes-- as I read it, if you want your party to survive this election, you should vote for the other party's candidate.

In the education world, we have to have to have to come to grips with the fact that whatever happens, we are screwed (again). There is not a speck, not a sliced-thin scintilla of evidence to suggest that Clinton will do anything except continue straight down the same road that Bush and Obama took us. And there's no telling what Trump will do about education, but it's a safe bet that it will be huge, it will be business oriented, and that it will involve blustery hair-brained ignorance.

It is probably time for education advocates to just drop out of this race. Maybe if Clinton agrees to meet with Diane Ravitch and listen I might perk up for a second or two, but mostly I think it's time for us to step back from this clusterfarfle of an lection and start working on how to continue fighting for public education under the next destructive administration.

We can lay some of that groundwork by paying attention downticket, and this is where the Clinton and Trump candidacies can be marginally useful as yardsticks. If you are supporting Trump, making claims for his business acumen, his tell-it-like-it-is-ness, then I absolutely will not vote for you. If you endorse Trump for any responsible position at all, you are either an opportunist or a fool, and either way I don't want you in elected office. Ditto for Clinton. If you are trying to ride her coattails or applaud her judgment or, God help me, claiming she's for the little people in this country, then you also have some sort of impairment that disqualifies you for public office.

Clinton and Trump are trainwrecks as Presidential candidates, but that makes them a good measure of other politicians' judgment. Too many people from both parties have made it clear that they would vote for a paper bag full of dog poop if it just had the "right" party designation stamped on the outside. That's not okay. Especially not now.

I don't know what's going to happen ion November, but whatever it is, the result will be a White House occupied by the most-despised, least-acceptable President we have ever elected. That means we had better have some functional grownups in Congress. I can't stand to pay attention to the Presidential race, but I can't afford to ignore the other races going on.

Vander Ark & The Trouble with Charters

If you don't already, you should know who Tom Vander Ark is. Vander Ark has one of the oldest membership cards for the Ed Reform Club. He ran education initiatives for the Gates Foundation, then went on to work with investment capitalists, technocrats, and big-name competency based education groups like iNACOL.

As reader Les Perelman noted the last time I wrote about TVA, there's a chapter in his story that tells us a lot about Vander Ark and a lot about the charter business as well.

One of Vander Ark's moves after finishing his stint at the Gates Foundation was to set his sights on a slice of the charter business. (For the following account, I am leaning heavily on Anna Phillips' coverage in the New York Times as well as Mercedes Schneider's excellently detailed account of TVA's many adventures-- you should read both)

In 2008, Vander Ark set out to follow what has become the modern charter classic business model-- start a few non-profit charter schools, and start a for-profit charter consulting company. It's a sort of chicken-and-egg puzzle-- do you start the charter management business so that you have a way to make money from your school, or do you start the school so that you'll have somebody to hire the charter consulting company?

Vander Ark had a literal three-ring circus going. In ring one, the actual schools including Brooklyn City Prep and two other NJ charters. In ring two, the charter management organization, City Prep Academies. In ring three, the consulting firm eventually named Open Education Solutions.

But by 2011, the circus was in trouble. Well, that's not accurate. The circus had always been in trouble. It's just that nobody knew it except Tom Vander Ark.

City Prep Academies turned out to be nothing but a paper company, a piece of corporate vaporware. Worse, they did not have any money with which to start the charter schools they had committed to launching. From the NYT:

In a phone call on April 21 that Mr. Wiley [the school's board chairman] characterized as “explosive,” Mr. Vander Ark and Ms. Littmann acknowledged that City Prep Academies Northeast had no money to pay for Brooklyn City Prep’s opening costs and would not sign a management agreement.

Mr. Vander Ark had been unable to get any money from the Charter School Growth Fund or other similar national organizations. He had basically abandoned the idea of beginning a charter management organization and left the three schools-in-progress to find outside help on their own.

Vander Ark walked away. People had been hired, families were expecting a school in September, school boards were in place and doing all the work to make their school successful, and Vander Ark simply said, "No, there's no money. I'm outies. Good luck, y'all." He claimed bad economy and bad business climate, but other folks had a different theory. From the NYT:

“He’s flying 30,000 feet on the air, but can’t do it on the ground,” said Joshua Morales, a former official with the New York City Education Department who was hired by Mr. Vander Ark to develop the schools.

Then whole incident might suggest that Vander Ark is kind of a tool, but it also reminds us of a few features of the modern charter school business.

Mr. Tillotson, the consultant, said: “It signals what’s wrong with the so-called charter school community. Somebody who doesn’t deserve a charter gets a charter. Somebody who doesn’t deserve a building gets a building. And then somebody who doesn’t care about the communities can turn their head and walk away.”

This is one of the fundamental problems with trying to run public education as a business-- businesses only stay open as long as it makes business sense to do so. That is not the way to run public education. Bad economy, ugly business climate, financial troubles, rain, sleet, deep snow through which we must walk uphill both ways-- despite any and all of those, a public school still has to stay on the job. There is no benefit to the community or country to have a public school system that says, "Yeah, the whole finance thing seemed tight and it was hard work and all, so we just decided to close the place down, quit, and go do something else."

Businesses do not primarily commit to customers. Businesses do not promise to stay in business even if it makes no business sense to do so. Businesses sometimes try to show a commitment to a community-- but with the rare exception of very moral leaders, mostly they do it because it's good business to act community-oriented. But we expect public schools to be there no matter what. We expect public schools to be committed to the community, to reflect a commitment by the community to its own children.

This story is not unique-- charters close all the time. That's a natural feature of treating education like a business. Tom Vander Ark may be a giant tool, but he has always been mostly a businessman, and he makes decisions based on his commitment to his business interests. That's what modern charter operators do.

For HRC: Profit Vs. Non-Profit Charters

So this is how we're going to play it.

As all the interwebs now know, Hillary Clinton got herself booed at the NEA conference today by mentioning charter schools (she also drew jeers for GOP dumpster-fire/candidate Donald Trump). But in language mimicked by the many folks who read Politico, Politico said

The presidential hopeful won back the crowd by making a distinction between charter schools in general, and those schools run by for-profit companies. Clinton said people on the outside are pushing “for-profit charter schools on our kids.”

This mirrors a plank in the Democratic Platform Draft, which also directs its disapproval fully and only at those nasty For Profit charters. The theory here is that it's just those for-profits that are trying to make a bundle by privatizing education and redirecting public tax dollars into private pockets. This is a distinction without a difference.

Let's consider all the ways that private companies and individuals profit from non-profit charter schools.

Management companies.

In this scenario, I set up my non-profit school-- and then I hire a profitable management company to run the school for me. The examples of this dodge are nearly endless, but let's consider a classic. There's the White Hat management company that was being dragged into court way back in 2011. This particular type of arrangement was known as a "sweeps contract,' in which the school turns over close to all of its public tax dollars and the company operates the school with that money-- and keeps whatever they don't spend. The White Hat story is particularly impressive, because the court decided that White Hat got to keep all of the materials and resources that it bought with the public tax dollars.

Or consider North Carolina businessman Baker Mitchell, who set up some non-profit charter schools and promptly had them buy and lease everything-- from desks to computers to teacher training to the buildisng and the land-- from companies belonging to Baker Mitchell. From Marian Wang's 2014 profile:

To Mitchell, his schools are simply an example of the triumph of the free market. "People here think it's unholy if you make a profit" from schools, he said in July, while attending a country-club luncheon to celebrate the legacy of free-market sage Milton Friedman.

Real estate grabs

All charter schools-- even the non-profits-- can get into the real estate business as a tasty sideline for providing a school-like product. Charter producers can find money to fund a building and then-- voila-- they own a tasty piece of real estate. Remember-- thanks to some Clinton-era tax breaks, an investor in a charter school can double the original investment in just seven years!

In fact, there are real estate companies in the charter school business. And this can be a particularly terrible deal for the taxpayers. Bruce Baker lays out here how the public can pay for the same building twice-- and end up not owning it. Read the whole thing-- it's absolutely astonishing.

Write a big fat check 

If you have the giant cojones for it, you can just write yourself a big fat check with all those public taxpayer dollars. To use one of everyone's favorite data points-- Carmen Farina is paid $200,000 to oversee 135,000 employees and 1.1 million students. Eva Moskowitz's Success Academy chain handles 9,000 students, for which Moskowitz is paid almost half a million dollars. And while Moskowitz gets plenty of attention, she is by no means unique. 

And that's just the legit stuff

Depending on the state you're in, all of the above may be perfectly legal. Right now in Pennsylvania, we're considering a law to make it illegal to hire family members to work in your charter school, because apparently that has been perfectly okay for as long as we've had (non-profit) charter schools.

But because all charter schools are largely unsupervised and remain accountable to nobody, all manner of shenanigans have occurred. We've got the Gulen charter schools, which appear to exist mainly to raise money for an out-of-favor political movement in Turkey.

Search for charter fraud, and the reports just roll in. Here's just one that includes classics such as charter operator using charter funds to finance their other businesses, or not feeding students, or faking enrollment.

The fraud and misbehavior are bad enough that even some charter fans will say, quietly, that regulators need to clamp down on the bad actors, because their acting is really, really bad.

And that's just the profit issue

This is before we talk about every anti-democratic, school-destroying, segregation-spreading, education-failing, community-disrupting, and achievement-gap-increasing aspect of charter schools. As readers of this blog know, while charters can (and once were) a good thing, the modern charter movement has turned them into one of the most destructive forces in education today.


But we're going to maintain focus

We're going to stick to one point, and the point is this-- to pretend that there is a substantive difference between profit and non-profit charter schools is either willfully ignorant or deliberately misleading. I've said it many times-- a modern non-profit charter school is just a for-profit school with a good money-laundering plan.

Clinton clearly intends to use this distinction-without-a-difference to keep both her anti-charter constituents and her pro-charter financiers happy, but what she's attempting to do is just weaseling around an important issue. It is impossible for someone as savvy as Clinton not to know the truth behind her hair-splitting. It's disingenuous and dishonest. There's no news or surprises here-- Clinton is a BFF of the financial interests and privatizers behind the modern charter movement, and she has always been a fan and supporter of charters. Her charter school boos at the NEA convention were earned; her endorsement by NEA was not.

I don't know if Clinton and the Democratic Party are kidding themselves, but they're definitely trying to kid the rest of us. Does that make her a worse choice than a ignorant racist squawking hairball-encrusted cheeto?  Maybe not-- but let's not kid ourselves that HRC is on our side. The odds are 100% that public education is going to get screwed in November; there's no reason to needlessly volunteer to have our hearts broken again, too.

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.