Summative School Ratings: Not So Great

Chad Aldeman took to the Bellwether blog to make his case for summative school ratings (grades) under the loaded headline "Summative Ratings Are All Around Us. Why Are We Afraid of Them in K-12 Education?"

Of course, plenty of us, maybe even most of us, are not "afraid" of slapping a grade on schools. There just don't appear to be many benefits, and plenty of harm done. Aldeman provides a list of his positives. Let's see how they stack up.

1. Summative ratings are all around us. 

Perhaps Aldeman somehow skipped that part of childhood where some adult authority figure said, "If everyone else jumped off a cliff, would you do it, too?" He correctly notes that ratings are all the rage, from Amazon to Rotten Tomatoes. But he also notes that customers who are interested in purchases will read the reviews, and reading through all the reviews on Amazon or Yelp is pretty much the opposite of a summative rating.

Of course, this sort of system doesn't always work out well. TripAdvisor, an app and service that collects reviews (and makes summative ratings) of hotels and motels, ironically itself gets a one star rating from Consumer Affairs, backed up by hundreds of tales of the rating service being skewed in any number of ways, often because of one sort of relationship or another with those being rated.

Aldeman might also have noted the long-standing summative rating used in the investment world, where investments are rated A or AAA or some lesser letter. If you think back to 2008 and all the people who lost their shirts, pensions, or homes because a whole lot of highly summatively rated investments turned out to be the result of big fat lies-- well, that summative rating system failed as well.

So there are lots of summative rating systems out there-- and many of them kind of suck. And yes, some folks on my side of the debate table sometimes trot these summative ratings out-- I don't like it any better then.

2. Summative ratings are popular

No doubt about it. When it comes to some low-stakes decisions, people just like a simple up-or-down rating system. But the higher the stakes, the less satisfactory a simple summative rating system (I'm just going to start calling this SRS because I'm a lazy typist). Lots of people would say, "Let's just go to a five star restaurant, whatever it is." Hardly anybody says, "I would sign up for a romantic match site that just rated all the people with stars, and I would marry any five-star person, sight unseen."

Summative ratings are popular because people don't like to agonize over low-stakes decisions. But when it comes to high stakes decisions, they want as much information as they can get, not a quick summary. Schools, for most parents, are not low-stakes decisions.

3. Summative ratings are simple and easy to understand, but they’re not one-dimensional.

Here Aldeman and I disagree. Of course summative ratings are one-dimensional. That's the whole point-- to take a whole bunch of dimensions and simplify them to one quick, easy rating. Now, here's where we agree:

Inevitably, there’s no one “best” car for everyone, and there will never be one “best” school for all kids, but that doesn’t mean we should throw up our hands and give up in trying to help families weigh their options.

True enough. I just don't believe that a SRS is a useful tool in this circumstance. If you are reading through the Amazon reviews or the Consumer Reports descriptions or the college guide narrative paragraphs of description, that is not a summative rating.

4. If states don’t rate their schools, someone else will.

Oh, Chad Aldeman. I've read lots of your stuff, and you are definitely better than this argument, which can also be used to establish the State Department of Graffiti, the State Meth Production Lab, and the State Office for the Production of Bad Fan Fiction. These are all things that someone else will do anyway.

For that matter, shouldn't a right-tilted thinker like Aldeman prefer that someone else do it? After all, do we look to McDonald's for a rating of their own menu, or depend on car reviews from car manufacturers? I'm not an advocate of SRS for schools at all, but I would think that the same folks who think most education functions should be run by private enterprise would not also suggest that private enterprise run the rating system. After all-- whether we're talking public schools or charter schools, the state is certainly not a disinterested party.

No, this idea fails twice.

5. ESSA’s authors clearly envisioned states creating summative ratings. 

Absolutely agree. ESSA clearly calls for a SRS. Of course, ESSA clearly respects the right of parents to opt out of the Big Standardized Test while also clearly demanding that states force at least 95% of all students to take that test. And that's before we get to the spirited arguments between Congress and the USED about what ESSA says. So I think it's safe to say that ESSA is still working out some of its issues.

6. Summative ratings force schools to improve. 

 If there’s one thing that’s clear from 13 years of No Child Left Behind, it’s that schools respond to external accountability pressures. They sometimes respond in unhelpful ways, of course, so the challenge is to design accountability systems that encourage schools to focus on measures that truly matter (which is all the more reason states should be involved).

Let me edit that down a bit: If there's one thing that's clear from 13 years of No Child Left Behind, it's that schools pretty much always respond to bad external accountability pressures in terrible ways.

NCLB, RTTT, and RTTT Lite (Waiver edition) all made test-and-punish the centerpiece of accountability, and that predictably narrowed the focus of every school in the country to "whatever is on the test." Schools did not improve. Some schools got their test scores to go up, but there isn't an iota of evidence that test score increase has anything in the world to do with a school getting "better." All of this guaranteed that SRS would be a joke, a letter grade based on how students did on a bad, narrow test.

Furthermore, this point falls back on the old notion that if we want schools to improve, we will have to force them to do it with threats and coercion. Reformsters really need to catch on that approaching schools and teachers with an attitude of, "You guys suck, so we are going to beat you into shape," really isn't helping.

A Few Points of My Own

There's a whole discussion to be had about whether SRS actually tell us anything or are just one more way to say "This school is rich, and this school is poor." In other words, data already readily available. And as always, I'd feel better about "finding" these troubled school is the response was more, "Let's get this school the support and resources it needs" and less "Let's turn this school over to a charter operator or a turnaround expert."

But let me skip those issues and just list three objections to the idea of summative school ratings.

1. Campbell's Law Again 

The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.

If this law hadn't already existed, ed reform would have sparked someone to invent it. If high stakes are attached to these kind of school measures, they transform schools from an institution whose primary purpose is to educate students into an institution whose primary purpose is to keep the numbers of its measure up.

2. Reductive Measurement Further Warps That Which It Measures

If we decided that the summative measure of buildings was going to be based only height and width, we would end up with really cool buildings not deep enough to actually step into. If we decided the summative measure of food would be based strictly on how many colors were displayed, we would end up with garish food that tasted terrible.

When your SRS is based on an over-simplified measurement that ignores several dimensions of whatever's being rated, you end up with useless ratings and screwed-up things being measured. And when you are trying to come up with a simple summative rating for something as complicated as a school, it's absolutely guaranteed that your rating will ignore a huge number of critical dimensions. We've already seen this in thirteen years of schools being rated on math and English scores, and so cutting everything from recess to science to arts.

A school is a hugely complicated system of live human beings, each one of which is also highly complex. There is no way to some up with a summative rating that is not reductive well past the point of usefulness and not well into the realm of destructiveness.

3. School Turned Upside Down

One of the side-effects of the past decade-plus of  accountability has been to turn schools upside down. Because the school must keep its numbers up and meet its accountability requirements, the school is no longer there to serve the student-- the students are there to serve the school. Is Chris dragging us down with lousy test scores? We'd better pull Chris out of a bunch of classes and park Chris in the land of remedial test prep every day until that score comes up.

Charters have always recognized this-- let a bad student in to ruin your numbers and there's hell to pay. Better to counsel them out or keep suspending them till they give up. And public schools are not immune. In Upper Darby, PA, where the district is discussing moving the school attendance boundaries, parents are objecting because Those Students will hurt our school rating.

When the primary objective of a school is to make its numbers so that its summative rating doesn't take a hit, it's very easy to start seeing students as obstacles or problems-- not the whole purpose of the school.

Ultimately my objection to summative ratings for schools is that instead of giving schools one more tool for helping students, they get in the way of doing that job-- the most important job we have in schools.

Standardized Character

Here we go again.

Eight states are going to launch a program for social and emotional learning in their classrooms. A collaborative group has been put together to craft the whole business. I'm going to get in early here with a prediction that nothing good will come of this.

I understand the impulse. On top of the usual rantings about Kids These Days, we see the references to research that today's students are more self-centered, less empathetic. A big story in the Atlantic just last month questioned if increased concern about academics have pushed morality and empathy out of classrooms. And every classroom teacher can tell tales of students who are stunningly, sometimes terrifyingly, lacking in the most basic empathy-- socially and emotionally adrift or broken.

And we know that employers, neighbors, co-workers, friends and family put a huge value on social and emotional factors. When we're trying to sound all edu-sciency and professional, we call this stuff "non-cognitive skills," but civilians more commonly refer to behaving like "a decent human being" or at least "not such an asshole."

So there's absolutely no question that these things are important. I would even argue that it's impossible NOT to teach them in some way shape and form in your classroom. It's a group of humans, so intentionally or not, consciously or not, you (and your students) are modelling various social behaviors and skills.

However, absolutely none of the above means that what we need is a set of Decent Human Being Standards that are a subject of both instruction and assessment.

The problems with doing so are like the problems with coming up with a standardized description of an educated person, only a thousand times more so. That is self-evident in the culture right this minute-- we cannot agree whether Donald Trump is a huge asshole and a terrible person, or the kind of strong, tough leader that exemplifies the best kind of man (spoiler alert: it's the former-- but my point is that not everyone thinks so). The ed reform movement itself has invested heavily in the notion that democracy is a snare and an obstacle, and what schools need is a strong visionary CEO, a notion that challenges the very idea of what the best kind of people are.

"Decent Human Being" is a social construct, and it's always a subject of debate, which means any kind of standardized program built around DHB will reflect its creators choices. And this is why I can't believe we're headed down this road again, because every time we try, the same thing happens.

But let's look at the work of that coalition. What have they decided about what makes a Decent Human Being?

The Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL) has a list of five core competencies for social and emotional learning (yeah, this is also shaping up as one more competency based learning program).

* Self-awareness
* Self-management
* Social Awareness
* Relationship Skills
* Responsible Decision Making

For those keeping score, Social Awareness will be the one to spark the controversy that eventually kills this-- that's the one that means the ability to "empathize with others from diverse cultures and backgrounds." Remember all the people who thought Common Core was evil because it would teach their children to tolerate gay people? They will be hollering "Told you so!" and tweeting Glen Beck en masse.

But basically, yeah, these are generally desirable skills for human beings to have.

What are the outcomes of this supposed to be? CASEL sees it like this:

And again-- the predicted outcomes are unobjectionable and probably generally true. So why are you getting the impression that I do not welcome CASEL's work?

If we poke around the CASEL site, we start finding language like these mentions under the policy recommendations section. CASEL highlights several bills that they think were good steps forward. Some of the bills are dumb, with aims like making sure that future teachers are taught about social and emotional learning. Are there teacher programs that don't mention SEL? Because those would be unusually crappy programs.

But other bills keep taking us back to language like "evidence-based social and emotional learning programming" or making sure that pre-teachers learn about SEL programs with "demonstrated effectiveness."

Ed Week notes that this SEL emphasis dovetails nicely with ESSA's requirement for more factors to be measure in defining "school success."

Social and emotional health, emotional intelligence, growing into a better and more mature human being-- these are all admirable and worthwhile goals, and they must be on our radar as teachers if we are going to teach the entire child.

But. But but but but but but BUT!

These qualities (or skills or competencies or whatever you want to call them) cannot be taught or measured in any sort of standardized manner.

CASEL has a brief about evidence-based strategies that just hints at how a few states are already using SEL standards to engineer more betterer human beings. It's not super-encouraging.


We can try to help each of our students to become a better person, but we cannot require them all to become the same person.

The attempts, of course, are already being made. A pilot version of the fourth grade NAEP (the Nation's Report Card) includes, along with several pages of personal questions about what your home is like and what work your parents do, a section of self-assessment of personal qualities. Here's just one block:

There are several pages of questions that assess the student's character (of course, this kind of self-assessment only works if the student has already mastered the self-awareness competency). It's personal and intrusive and kind of creepy. But I doubt that the intent is nefarious. As the debate moves more and more toward the roles of personality and character in education, I have no doubt that there are plenty of researchers, policy makers, and eduwonkists who simply think that it would be interesting, even useful, to collect and study a bunch of information about student personality and character.

CASEL has a brief about evidence-based strategies that just hints at how a few states are already using SEL standards to engineer more betterer human beings.

But I have two thoughts in response. 

One is that just because we would be interested to know something, it does not automatically follow that we are entitled to know it. There are undoubtedly many folks who would like to hear the conversations that Bill and Hillary Clinton have as they go to bed, or see a picture of Princess Kate in her underwear, or, God help us, gawk at a picture of Donald Trump's penis. Before I marry you, I might find it useful to hire a PI to unearth every single detail of your life ever. It would be useful, in terms of keeping society safe, for the authorities to be able to monitor all citizens at all times. But those are all bad ideas, no matter how much someone wants access to those things. And this is a double bad idea because we are talking about children. But I have no doubt that for the cradle-to-career folks, the ones who want students to emerge from school with full-stuffed data backpacks that tell future employers and the government everything they could possibly want to know about those young humans-- for them, collecting and assessing this non-cognitive data is a must. Do they want it? Sure they do. Our appropriate response to that as a society should be, "So you want that data. So what."

Second is that you cannot standardized humanity. You cannot develop a standardized picture of what a Decent Human Being is, and therefor, you cannot measure or assess how closely someone matches that profile, just as you cannot say, "Here is the perfect man profile-- anybody who married this man would have a happy marriage." It is simply not possible.

And it's certainly not possible to reduce Decent Human Being to a checklist of competencies. You can't hand a child a list of performance tasks to knock off and then declare, once the list is all completed, declare, "Now you are a Decent Human Being."

Deja Vu All Over Again

If you remember Outcome Based Education from twenty-five years ago, then you may recall that this is exactly the sort of thing that killed it. The states said, "Well, of course, we want to see that students display the right values and behavior," and a whole bunch of parents said, "Umm, exactly whose idea of right are we talking about" and a great hubbub ensued, and when the dust cleared, OBE was in the dustbin of educational history. I see no signs that the current crop of human designers retained any lessons from that earlier debacle.

So what should we do?

I am not going to try to write a few paragraphs about How To Create a Decent Human Being. Some religions have spent fruitless centuries on the problem.

There's no question that as teachers, we need to be aware of our students' social and emotional needs, development, and challenges. This is not news. But both the development and judgment of human decency comes from direct human-to-human contact, not from a program designed and standardized tests that are given.

The eight states currently involved in this initiative are California, Georgia, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Washington. If you're in one of those states, you might want to check around and see what they're up to. 

Reuters: SAT, ACT, and Test Insecurity

A Reuters investigative team has been taking a look at the ACT and SAT testing industry, and finding a huge mess. We had already seen hints of the problems with, among other things, whistleblowing posts from SAT insider Manuel Alfaro. But this Reuters series, now at five articles plus sidebars, is sort of jawdropping.

The articles have maintained a remarkably low profile, so I'm going to give you links to all five with a short peek at each so you can pick and choose your faves. Bookmark this-- it may take you a while to work through all of these, but it's worth it.

Part One: Multiple Choices

Turns out the SAT has been breached, big-time and many times, overseas. And the College Board knew it. And they went ahead and used the compromised tests anyway. These "content thefts" is eastern Asia are a huge part of that regions test prep industry. Further, the investigation shows that the College Board knew that a Chinese website was the source of much leakage, but they still failed to limit seatings at Chinese administrations of the test (it would have cost them over a million dollars in revenue). Most interesting takeaway here-- the highly compromised nature of the SAT in Asia suggests that US students might be losing out on college spots to Asian students who have cheated for high SAT scores. And you know it's bad when the ever-hubristic David Coleman chooses not to comment.

Part Two: Cheat Sheet

Security for the new SATs released in March lasted roughly five minutes. The traditional low-tech solutions were used, of course-- test prep companies waiting outside test sites to ask students what was one the test. The internet was also not kind to SAT security. But the College Board's antiquated and long-porous security measures also buckled immediately. Chinese tipsters showed Reuters whole chunks of the test that had been hacked from College Board's computers. This is particularly damaging because the College Board routinely uses the form of the test given in the USA in overseas countries. And all of this despite being repeatedly warned that their security was not holding up. These security issues were clear before David Coleman implemented his "beautiful vision" of a new SAT. The College Board should have been ready to protect the new test. They weren't.

Sidebar: College Board Responds

Having been caught with their cyber-pants down, the College Board offered their own response, which breaks down basically to

A) Hey, nobody's perfect and we're working real hard on this stuff

B) We're totally working with Reuters on this because we certainly have nothing to hide

C) Look at how many people are taking our test! We makin' the money!

Part Three: Deception 101

Well, this is a new one on me. There is apparently an entire Chinese underground industry that helps students cheat to get into US schools, and then helps them cheat to get through the US schools. The story focuses on the University of Iowa, where Chinese nationals receive messages from a coaching service that will help them with homework, papers, and even take their exams for them. But Iowa is not even close to the only school where this goes on.

Part Four: Special Access 

The Global Assessment Certificate Program is supposed to help non-US students develop the skills to succeed in US schools. Turns out it also gives them an early look at the ACT so they can better succeed on that as well. The program costs about $10,000 for a student enroll, and says Reuters, "has emerged as one of many avenues in Asia used to exploit weaknesses in the U.S. college admissions process."

Oh yeah. And the GAC is owned by ACT. Reuters talks to a student who practiced the actual ACT he took a week before he actually took it. And they talk to a former GAC teacher who was sacked over complaints that he was cracking down on plagiarism and cheating. And the ACT has recently benefited from the SAT's belated attempts to create some semblance of test security in Asia.

Part Five: At Risk

When the College Board set out to redesign the SAT, they hired a consultant who told them, "Your security sucks. You need to fix that crap." (I'm paraphrasing). But that didn't happen, and a month after the new SAT was unveiled, someone came to Reuters with hundreds of leaked and/or stolen test items. Reuters sent them to the College Board to ask, "Are these real?" The College Board replied via attorney, saying that publishing the items would be Very Bad (presumably the implication was "sue-ably" bad).

Part of the issue can be laid on a procedural shift. Previously, test-manager ETS had housed test development, test items and the question bank, but under David Coleman, more of this work and storage was done in house. So, less "lock these nuclear codes in the super-secure bank vault" and more "I'll just put this in the locked drawer in my desk."

Bottom Line

There may be more to come, but this sure seems like plenty. For a guy whose "beautiful vision" of the test was one that related to the real world, David Coleman sure seems to have bungled the real world problem of test security. And how does anybody do business in China and not realize things are different there. Even Bill Gates eventually figured it out over a decade ago-- charge the Chinese too much for your intellectual property or designs, and they will just steal it and make it themselves for cheap.


The solution to the College Board's problems is simple-- they just don't like it. Most of these issues get much if every single SAT administration involves a completely different test. But the College Board doesn't want the expense involved in generating that much test material.

So here we sit, with an SAT that is increasingly useless and pointless, yet which has successfully sold itself to some states as a test for every single student in school. Coleman has, for the moment, converted his junk into highly profitable junk, but if the wheels keep coming off the car, he won't be able to drive it forever. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, two more prestigious universities announced they were dropping a portion of their SAT requirements.

ICYMI Hooray for August

Plenty of goodies for you this week.

Snuffing Out Democracy

Out in Seattle, the battle is on over mayoral control, because if the school board won't follow the policies you want them to, can't you just get rid of the whole elected mess?

Bless Your Heart, Stand for Children

Dad Gone Wild provides a good summary of what happened in Tennessee and how Nashville thoroughly humiliated outsiders trying to buy a school board.

The Ambitious Education Plan of the Black Lives Matter Movement

Black Lives Matter has spoken out on education. It's a bold plan, and well worth a look.

Policy Can Foster Positive Relationships

Wendy Lecker looks at the ways in which policy can improve student relationships. Guess what-- guidance counselors are actually money-savers!

Slay the Monster

Kathleen Dudden Rowlands at NCTE with a practical, research-based take-down of the five paragraph essay, plus a look at what to replace it with. Must-read for teachers of writing.

Ten Non-Standard Ideas about Going Back to School

Nancy Flanagan with ten great ideas for approaching the start of another year. Not the same ideas they taught you in teacher school

Foundations Unfiltered

Edushyster gets some straight inside poop from the world of philanthropists.

NY State Test Result Shenanigans

Leonie Haimson has, as usual, been playing close attention while the state of New York has been [playing games with test result data. This link will take you to some great information as well as links to even more.

The Band of Florida's Education System

You'll never guess what Florida's education honcho Kim Stewart thinks is the bane of education. Books. Seriously. Here's an excellent rebuttal at Accountabaloney.

America Desperately Needs To Redefine College and Career Ready

From Market Watch, of all places, a call to prepare students for a life, and let the rest take care of itself.

How Compliance Hurts All Learning

Short but sweet.

Decenter Yourself

Jose Vilson with a reminder of how-- and why-- to take yourself out of the center of your classroom. And a critical question-- are we change agents, or agents of the state? A good high note on which to finish the reading list for the week.

MI: Charter Demonstrates Need for Tenure

Charters are fond of at-will staffing, where all teachers may be hired or fired at any time, for any reason. Sort of the exact opposite of tenure or due process. Here's a story out of Detroit of just how bad that can be-- not just for teachers, but for students and community.

Michigan has been a playland for charters. There are well over 300 charter schools operating in Michigan (the number varies a bit depending on who's counting). The vast majority are for-profit, and almost none have organized teacher unions.

Universal Academy is located in Detroit, and as reported by the Detroit Metro Times, their problems began with Etab Ahmed, a Yemeni immigrant. Ahmed, age twenty, was called into the office and encouraged to sign a paper. She thought it was about graduating, and it was-- sort of. She had written and signed, as coached by the principal, the following:

"I am Etab Ahmed want to finish the high school through GED. And do not want to continue at Universal Academy - Etab Ahmed 11/10/15"

As soon as she returned to her classroom, she asked the teacher, Asil Yassine, what a GED was, and was shattered to discover she had just signed away her dream of a high school diploma.

But Ahmed was twenty, which meant that Universal Academy had gotten as much money as they ever could out of her enrollment.

Yassine, a second-year teacher, decided to follow up.

"I am struggling to understand how this incredibly bright, hard-working student who fully deserves a diploma from Universal Academy can be removed so suddenly from her education," Yassine wrote in a Nov. 14 email to Nawal Hamadeh, the superintendent of the school and CEO of Universal Academy's management company, Hamadeh Educational Services.

"Could you please send me a copy of the federal or state law or HES board policy that describes why this student is too old to stay in school?"

Yup. You have immediately realized that this is going to end badly for Yassine, and you are correct. She received no answer from Hamadeh. Nawal Hamadeh has been in the biz as a while, hailed as an innovative educator and pillar of the Arab-American community. Yassine did not even have two years of teaching under her belt.

Shortly thereafter, at the end of January, Yassine and several other teachers attended a board meeting to bring attention to issues that they felt were having a bad impact on students and school culture. A little over two weeks later, on a Friday evening, the teachers were informed by e-mail that they were fired.

The e-mails gave no explanation for the firing, simply reminding the teachers that they were at will employees who could be fired at any time for any reason. The community and parents pressed for more information, but the school would say no more than it was a "safety" issue. When pressed for explanation of what safety issues exactly was involved, the school said it could not discuss personnel issues. School administrators also pulled student body president Tekwa Itayem in to grill her over a video she had supposedly taken at the public meeting and demand that she turn the video in.

Universal continued to stonewall the story.

"What's the story? I fail to see an issue with (at-will) employees being dismissed. No federal (or) state laws were violated," Universal's hired public relations consultant, Mario Morrow, says in an email to MT when asked for an interview with Hamadeh. The CEO declined the request.

But they did eventually update Ahmed's transcript-- she now magically had enough credits for a diploma after all. Amazing!

The Metro Times notes repeatedly in the article that charter supporters insist that unhappy parents can just vote with their feet. But for members of the community, it was not that simple. And it would make business sense to create a mechanism that would actually allow student and parent voices to be heard. That, of course, would conflict with the all-powerful CEO model of charter schooling.

What else would help a situation like this? Teachers who could speak up and advocate for their students without losing their jobs. Of all of the side-effects of a system with no job protection for teachers, this is perhaps the worst-- a school in which students have no trusted adults they can approach with concerns or problems, because the trusted adults can't speak up for students without losing their jobs.

This particular story is not over yet. A complaint was filed with the National Labor Relations Board, and the NLRB filed a complaint which alleges

... that the management company interfered with and violated the teachers' Section 7 rights — which guarantees employees "the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other  or other mutual aid or protection" — by, in addition to other things, referring to some teachers as "trouble employees," and interrogating them about their protected concerted activities (such as speaking up at the board meeting). 

The NLRB demands that the fired teachers be offered their jobs and paid back pay. None of the fired teachers have expressed any desire to return, but are hoping this sent a message to the Hamadeh management group. Well, that's a sweet hope, but here's the Hamadeh statement on the complaint:

Hamadeh Education Services (HES) strives to maintain a positive work environment for all its teachers in support of its mission to provide quality education for students. HES has not discriminated against employees, and will defend the pending complaint consistent with the NLRB procedures. HES is confident that the charge has no merit.

The charter management has about a month left to respond. If they do not, hearings will be held in late September. Stay tuned. 

If you're thinking of sending your child to a charter school, there are many questions to ask, but one of the most important is this-- if the school treats my child in an unjust or unfair manner, will any teachers in that school be free to speak up for my child? Because the answer for charters like Universal in states like Michigan remains, "No."

Big Money Loses, But Doesn't Give Up

This story has been covered extensively, but it's one of those stories that needs to be covered extensively, so if this post seems a little redundant, that's okay. As teachers and marketers both learn, if you really wnat a message to get through, repetition is key.

In Tennessee, Stand for Children and other outside pro-reform charter-pushing groups sank about three quarters of a million dollars in attempts to buy themselves more compliant school boards, with the main push landing on the Nashville board race.

It was ugly. Mailers defaming candidates. A push poll insinuating that one candidate defended child molesters and pornographers. Newspapers throwing their weight behind the reformsters.

And standing against them, a completely disorganized array of moms and dads. No spokesperson, no point person, no strategy meetings-- just a whole bunch of people pissed off that outsiders were coming in to try to buy an election as a way to buy themselves a slice of the education biz, a sweet shot at charter money.

You can read newspaper accounts of the aftermath here and here. And for a local close up summary of the whole sorry mess, I recommend this account from Dad Gone Wild.

The events of Nashville are worth paying attention to because this is the way the game is now played. Reformsters sink big money into local races all across the country. Setting state and federal policy is hard and expensive, but making sure that you have board members or other officials in place who will see things your way-- that can be more cost-effective.

It's happening all across the country:

In Massachusetts, charter profiteers, frustrated at the cap on charter school proliferation, are mounting a huge PR offensive to convince the public that charter schools (always called "public" charter schools, mind you) should get more money and more space, including snappy ads from the same firm that brought you the Swiftboating of John Kerry.

In Connecticut, DFER and other privatizing reformster groups are dumping money into school board  and general assembly races. We are again talking about millions and millions of dollars for local or regional elections. But Gov. Malloy has had a hard time selling his pro-privatizing agenda, and he needs more people in office on his side, and if those folks can't sell themselves to local voters-- well, someone from outside will just have to finance the push.

In Washington State, charter boosters have been repeatedly frustrated in their attempts to sell a charter bill. When they finally succeeded, the bill was ruled unconstitutional. Solution? Not to come up with a bill or approach that would be legal, but to get a judge elected who would have a more favorable notion of what "legal" is.

Increasingly, public education supporters can not afford to think that they are too small to matter, that all the important battles will be fought at the state and federal level. Attacking on that level has brought reformsters some success in the past, with the successful suspension of democracy for education in cities like New Orleans, Detroit and Chicago. But big money is patient, and where it's necessary to chip away a few elected offices at a time, big money is willing to take that approach.

What the outcome in Nashville reminds us is that big money doesn't automatically win just because it can commandeer the media and the mail slots. Nashville also reminds us that citizens, taxpayers, voters and parents don't have to be highly trained perfectly co-ordinated political activists to be effective. Money is powerful, but it is not the only source of power that exists, and sometimes, it's not even the greatest source of power.

Don't forget. Stand up. Make a difference.

Data-Driven Racism

Upper Darby is a school district in the Philly part of Pennsylvania with problems deep enough that I will not attempt to sort them out from the other end of the state. Financial issues, segregation, proposed new schools, and a ballbusting superintendent who was put on leave by the board in a non-public meeting-- it's clearly a huge mess with several local issues intersecting.

But one of the issues is clearly that some folks want other folks to stay on their own side of the tracks. This is the quote that jumped out at me from coverage of the story:

"I think the Drexel Hill families do not want the kids from the other sides of the tracks to come over there," Johnson said. "Because of its different nationalities, they feel they're going to bring their schools' ratings down."

So that's what test-based school ratings get us.

It's no longer necessary to find some sort of thinly-veiled, socially sort-of-acceptable reason to discriminate. No muttering about Those Kinds of People or concern-trolling "Wouldn't they be happier with their own kind" or racist comments about how Those People don't really know how to behave. No dog whistles or codes ("The property values, you know").

School ratings give us a legit, data-driven means of keeping Those People out. It's not that they're brown or black or poor-- it's that they get low test scores and that will drag down the rating of our schools. Hey, that's not racist-- it's right there in the data print out.


Never mind that race and SES are strong predictors of standardized test results. All we're looking at are the test results, and according to these data, there are some people that we just don't want to have redistricted into our school.

We have to keep Those People out of our school. It's not racism. It's not classism. It's just data.