Duncan Stops Pretending

As the head of the United States Department of Education, Arne Duncan must have felt some pressure to be supportive of public education in this country. But now that he's a private citizen and name-for-hire, he is held by no such restraints.

That's made extraordinarily clear in his piece for Atlantic, in which he "examines the issues at the heart of the charter-school debate." It would appear that the issue at the heart of the debate is that charter schools are freaking awesome.

He can finally grow that mustache he always wanted

Duncan opens by gushing effusively about Richard Whitmire's book-length PR release for charters., saying that it helps take a stand against "the pernicious notion that high-performing schools for disadvantaged students are isolated flukes, dependent on a charismatic educator or the cherry-picking of bright students."

Duncan himself has visited lots of "gap-closing" charters in Chicagoland, and he applauds the bravery and dedication and sheer educational awesomeness that charters embody.

I have never heard a charter-school leader describe his or her school as a “miracle school” or claim to have found the silver bullet for ending educational inequity. The truth is that great charter schools are restless institutions, committed to continuous improvement. They are demanding yet caring institutions. And they are filled with a sense of urgency about the challenges that remain in boosting achievement and preparing students to succeed in life.

I feel certain that these qualities can be found in plenty of public schools, too, but Duncan's eye is on the charter prize alone. He recaps the history of charters in a couple of paragraphs, and then touts their greatest achievement:

Nevertheless, what stands out for me is that high-performing charter schools have convincingly demonstrated that low-income children can and do achieve at high levels—and can do so at scale.

Scaleability has always been important to Duncan because reasons. His holy grail remains the One Size that will Fit All. If we can just make everyone in school Expect hard enough, all students will get high scores on standardized tests, and then those students will graduate and high-paying jobs will appear for them to fill. And in his heart, Duncan seems to know that only charter schools can perform this magic.

As with his devotion to Common Core, his love of charters admits no reasonable, thoughtful, evidence-based, educationally-committed opposition. No reasonable people could possibly oppose him. Where Core opponents were silly flakes who didn't want to face reality, charter opponents are ideologues and (you knew it was coming) union devotees who are not concerned about children at all, but only care about their personal political hobbyhorse:

Sadly, much of the current debate in Washington, in education schools, and in the blogosphere about high-performing charter schools is driven by ideology, not by facts on the ground. Far too often, the chief beneficiaries of high-performing charter schools—low-income families and children—are forgotten amid controversies over funding and the hiring of nonunion teachers in charter schools. Too often, the parents and children who are desperately seeking better schools are an afterthought.

People can argue about the difference between charters and public schools, but Duncan is sure that children don't care about the distinction, and neither does he. I am not sure I agree about the distinction. I think children care when their school suddenly closes and leaves them adrift, and only charters do that. I think children care when their public school cuts programs because it has lost too much money to charter schools. I think children care when their school mistreats them or won't hear them and they have nowhere to turn because a charter school board doesn't have to answer to them.

Our common enemy is academic failure. Our common goal is academic success.

For Duncan, this claim has never been true. His goal has been high scores on a single narrow standardized test. And while there are charter folks who are in it for the right reason, it would take an exceptional level of willful blindness at this point not to notice that many charter operators are simply in it to make a buck and educating children is a minor consideration at best.

Of course, Duncan does admit that some charters fail to produce academic results, and here's what he thinks about that:

...it is absolutely incumbent on the charter sector to be vigilant about policing itself and closing down low performers.

Notice that he doesn't even go as far as admitting there are come bad actors and fraudsters in the charter sector, nor does he see a role for government in protecting students, families, and taxpayers from fraudsters. Nope-- just let the charter sector police itself.

There was never any doubt that Duncan was a charter fan, but this piece puts him in line with some of the most pie-eyed charter lovers. All pretense is gone, and in a way, it's impressive that Duncan could pretend to be even semi-supportive of public education for as long as he did. But now he can stop pretending, and be the charter-loving, public school dismissing PR flack he always wanted to be.

[Update: Gary Rubinstein caught that this is a slightly modified version of Duncan's gushing introduction for  Whitmire's book, and points out that what he removed for this Atlantic piece is itself telling. Also, be sure to visit the comments area for more illuminating linkage.]

The Struggles of Boy Teacher

Dylan Felton is an English teacher in his sixth year, working at Collingswood High School, a public school in Camden*, NJ. Felton aspires to be an "educational leader," which makes his recent piece in the Huffington Post all the more extraordinary.

In "What It's Like Being a Male Teacher," Felton mushes together a couple of separate issues, some of which deserve discussion and some of which make me want to sat, "Oh, Honey."

As a man in that job, I’ve been talked down to, talked over, patronized, condescended, corrected, and otherwise ignored most often by female teachers - I’ve been womansplained.

Oh, Honey. As I'm sure many people have told you at this point, womansplaining is not really a thing. It's just not.

Now, there are any number of things that could actually be going on here, and without sitting in CHS, I'm in no position to know what they could be. But here are some possibilities.

1) This is what it can feel like when you are trying to mansplain to others who fail to be properly impressed by your mansplanation. An alternate possibility is that you are not mansplaining, but given your stage in the career, you could be newby-teacher-who-thinks-he-knows-the-secret-of-everything-in-education-splaining (you are clearly too young to be old-fart-splaining).

2) It's more personal than gender-based. Your co-workers just think you're an ass.

3) You are fine, but your co-workers are jerks and the atmosphere of your school is a bit toxic.

And I’m not alone. Many of my male colleagues have reported a similar phenomenon. They’ll be in a meeting with other teachers, sharing an idea, when a female teacher will interrupt them and dismiss what they’re saying with a curt explanation. The mostly-female group will then move on, having forgotten the male teacher’s words.

I am in my thirty-eighth year of teaching and I have literally never seen this ever. Well, I've seen something like it, only with all the genders in this example reversed. But the longer I work, the larger percentage of my co-workers are women. They've always treated me just fine. Okay, there is one person here who has to work on the whole interrupting things and-- oh, wait. That's me. I get excited about whatever thought pops into my head.

But I've never seen a "curt interruption" that wasn't personal. I am reluctant to tell you this, but I think you are getting on some of your co-workers' nerves.

Felton points out that teaching has become a largely female profession, which is a true thing. But he wants you to know that this gender pressure he's feeling is not a "societal thing."

As a husband, my wife and I work hard at sustaining an equitable partnership. With our young daughter, we’re raising her in the absence of Disney princesses because there are lots ofreal female role models for her to emulate, thankyouverymuch. And for me, personally, many of my greatest heroes are actually heroines.

This is just short of "some of my best friends are women." And English teacher to English teacher, I'm going to suggest you be more careful with your introductory modifiers.

Felton's theory is that the larger number of female teachers has created a power imbalance that leads to more splaining and general oppression of Boy Teachers. And he has some thoughts about how to fix the imbalance.

He recognizes that getting more Boy Teachers is an uphill battle, and notes the attitude that women are more nurturing and so better fit the profession, and I will totally chime in on his example of how men pushing a stroller are treated. I can't begin to tell you how tired I got, back in the day, of explaining that no, I was not "babysitting" my children.

He points out that general reformy mess that is adding to the overall teacher shortage is not helping with the Boy Teacher shortage, and he notes that making the field more attractive in general would give employers the opportunity to more actively select Boy Teachers.

And, of course, it’s not just about womansplaining. It’s about the kids. Because students need to see a wide diversity of faces at the front of classrooms. They need different perspectives and backgrounds and role models that show them the full breadth of human life. And that’s something to strive for, too.

This might have been a good place to bring up the matter of racial diversity, too. I have to think that a teacher in Camden* might have noticed that we have a problem there as well.

There are certainly gender-related issues in the teaching biz, not the least of which is that the profession is disrespected by lots of powerful folks who think of it as women's work (and don't think much of women, to boot). And we certainly need more men in classrooms. But mansplaining about womansplaining is definitely not the way to make things better. 

*Collingswood is in Camden County, NJ, not Camden city.

Education vs. Poverty

Ben Spielberg, at 34justice, has put together a short stark piece that juxtaposes five simple pieces of data. There is nothing new here, but putting these five points side by side is compelling.

1) There are achievement gaps already present by the time children enter kindergarten, and they are related to family income.

2) School quality is a minor factor in explaining the testing (aka "achievement") gap.

3) Economic success in this country is less common for low-income students who are successful in school than for high-income students who are unsuccessful in school.

4) The test scores of students in the United States relative to the test scores of students around the world aren’t all that different than what students’ self-reports of their socioeconomic status would predict.

5) The distribution of educational attainment in the United States has improved significantly over the past twenty-five years without significantly improving students’ eventual economic outcomes.

None of these are news, though #5 in particular is often overlooked. We've been improving achievement among students for decades; according to the theory of action among some reformsters, we should be seeing an increase in student success as they go out into the world. According to the theory, if Chris got better test scores than Chris's parents did, then Chris ought to have a better job and higher income. That hasn't been happening, just as students who spent their whole academic careers soaked in Common Core have not suddenly been tearing up college campuses.

Speilberg's conclusion is pretty simple, and not a huge stretch given the evidence he's laid out-- if we want to boost opportunities for poor students, education is an important thing, but it is not the most important thing.

Yet here is Arne Duncan, former head of the US Department of Education Reform, taking to the pages of the Atlantic to wax poetic on how awesome charters are, and how they are changing the world by raising the achievement levels of non-wealthy, non-white students.

Yet I absolutely reject the idea that poverty is destiny in the classroom and the self-defeating belief that schools don't matter much in the face of poverty. Despite challenges at home, despite neighborhood violence, and despite poverty, I know that every child can learn and thrive. 

Ignoring for the moment that nobody is saying that "poverty is destiny in the classroom," Duncan is somehow confusing getting poor children to score higher in a narrow standardized test and getting poor children access to better, more prosperous and successful lives.

Duncan says that he is focused on the idea "that high-performing charter schools have convincingly demonstrated that low-income children can and do achieve at high levels—and can do so at scale." There's plenty of evidence that neither of those things are true, but even if they were true, so what? The continued assumption that a high score on the PARCC is somehow a gateway to a brighter tomorrow is bizarre and dangerous-- bizarre because it has no foundation in reality and dangerous because it give policy makers like Duncan an excuse to walk away from the children of poverty.

Duncan says he's a "huge fan" of out-of-school anti-poverty programs, but he cites some medical assistance programs and moves on to this:

High-performing charters are one more proof positive that, as President Obama says, “the best anti-poverty program around is a world-class education.”

The data says that Arne Duncan and Barack Obama are just plain wrong. 

Charter Fans Put Bounty on John Oliver's Head

How much did John Oliver's piece on charter schools upset charter cheerleaders?

About $100,000.

Yesterday the Center for Education Reform, Jeanne Allen's pro-charter advocacy group, announced the "Hey John Oliver, Back Off My Charter School" video contest, in which your charter school can win $100,000 for creating a video that will show John Oliver "why making fun of charter schools is no laughing matter..."

The press release from CER, as always, quoting Allen:

$100K if your school can be funnier than this professional comedian

"The program was meant to be funny and provocative entertainment," said CER Founder and Chief Executive Officer Jeanne Allen, "but Oliver went way out of bounds and far beyond simple entertainment when he used examples of a few poorly run schools to paint all charters, and the whole concept of charter schools, as failures."

Or as the contest website puts it

Here is a brief summary of Mr. Oliver’s presentation: “Some charter schools have been mismanaged. Ergo, ipso facto, presto change-o, all charter schools are bad, bad, bad.” 

That's a sloppy misreading of Oliver's piece, which actually bent over backwards to include the opposing views of charters. What Oliver pointed out is that the charter school business is an unregulated playground for folks who are far more interested in making money than educating students. But to refute that would be hard; better to fashion a John Oliver-shaped straw man that can be easily defeated. "He said that all charter schools are bad. Here's one that isn't. Boom!"

There are some rules for this. Here's the basic idea of what your charter school is supposed to create:

Let viewers know why students chose your school over all the others. Help them understand the opportunities charters offer (and which wouldn’t exist without charters).

I, too, would be interested to see what opportunities charters offer that wouldn't exist without charters. Perhaps some videos will highlight charter-only perks like "getting away from Those Children" or "enjoying a constantly churning staff of underpaid unretained teachers" or "the delightful mystery of what exactly is being done with our tax dollars" or "the warm glow of knowing that we've helped some investors make a buck or ten" or even "the suspense of never knowing when my school might suddenly close." Please, somebody, make that video.

The video must be "home made" on a phone or tablet-- slick production values are not allowed because that would just point to the idea that charters are high-profit businesses rather than schools. It can't look like it cost $100,000 to make, because that would draw attention to the fact that charter folks have that kind of money to drop on PR stunts.

Kind of like just pulling $100K out of pocket for a PR generating contest shows that the charter industry and its BFFs can play fast and loose with big chunks of money (most of which comes from the taxpayers). 

The "Our School Is Great" video is a common genre. Public schools all across the country make them-- for free-- all the time. But it's completely in keeping with the charter school industry that, having failed to raise a groundswell of grass roots anger over the Oliver piece (which is now over a week old and yet the righteous indignation over it seems largely confined to people who make their living shilling for charters), the charter cheerleading squad must now pay somebody to stand up for them and help them fight back against this PR disaster. 

English Teacher Side Hustle

Forbes may be the magazine of the business world, but they aren't above the occasional listcicle. Today my feed coughed up the insta-classic "15 Easy Side Hustles You Can Start This Weekend."

Ryan Robinson is the writer, and his intro slide sets it all up:

Not ready to leave your job, but also not ready to start up? Here are some ideas that can help you earn some extra money on the side.

Number one? Remote English Teacher-- you can make upwards of $25 an hour by skyping in to tutor folks in places like Hong Kong.

Number eight. Standardized test tutoring-- folks will pay big money for that.

Number nine. Teaching online courses, particularly if you have marketing or design skills.

What sort of other great hustles are listed with these items? Well, you could become an instagram marketeer, or brew your own beer, or be an online dating consultant, or even start podcasting. These are the sorts of things that rank with the education-related side hustles.

Oh, and number fifteen-- write college essays for students and their families.

Please note-- nobody suggests just pulling some legal advising out of your butt or doing medical care as a side hustle.

Add this to your list of the ten thousand little ways that our culture reminds us that teaching is not a valued profession, but some kind of hustle that anyone can do to scam a little cash now and then.

Mr. Gates Chats with Mr. Bowling

A week back, Bill Gates took to his blog to report on a sit-down with Nate Bowling. He calls it "A Powerful Conversation about Schools, Poverty and Race," and that may be overstating the case a bit, but it's worth a quick look.

Nate Bowling has won an assortment of teaching awards, most recently Washington State Teacher of the Year. He blogs at A Teacher's Evolving Mind, and his self-intro there captures his point of view pretty succinctly:

Effective teachers of color face a dilemma: we know--more than anyone, the urgent need for change--we get that the status-quo screws our kids. But at the same time we also see a reform movement that "has all the answers" and doesn't want or value our experiences and insights from working with marginalized communities.

If we want to be heard, on our terms, then when must create our own spaces.

I proudly ride with #Educolor

Bowling is on my short list of writers in the edu-sphere with whom I do not always agree, but who I believe are following a path for understanding without any pre-determined conclusion in mind. You can read about my last encounter with his ideas back here.

At the beginning of 2016, Bowling wrote a widely-circulated piece entitled "The Conversation I'm Tired of Not Having" in which he comes down hard on the idea of setting aside questions of education policy until we can honestly grapple with the issues of race and poverty, charging that the powers that be and the folks in the 'burbs are actually pretty happy with The Way Things Are.

Polite society has walled itself off and policymakers are largely indifferent. Better funding for schools is and will remain elusive, because middle class and wealthy people have been conditioned over the last 35 years to think of themselves as taxpayers, rather than citizens. They consistently oppose higher taxes--especially tax expenditures for programs for “the other.”

And he announced that he was done arguing about issues like charter schools and common core. In fact, he would take only one clear focus, in bold letters:

If you ain't talking about the teacher in the classroom, I ain't listening.

Now I would say that on the one hand, issues like charter schools and common core are important precisely because of their effects on the teacher in the classroom, and that many reformy issues are problematic precisely because they change which teachers get to the classroom, which teachers stay in the classroom, and what those teachers are empowered to do in the classroom.

On the other hand, if we kept talking about those issues in terms of the teacher in the classroom and not policy wonkitudary, it would be a more useful conversation.

Bill Gates also read that piece, and he brought it up in his conversation with Bowling, particularly spinning off of this paragraph from Bowling's essay.

Through white flight and suburbanization, wealthy and middle class families have completely insulated themselves from educational inequality. They send their kids to homogeneous schools and they do what it takes, politically at the local level, to ensure they’re well-funded, well-staffed, with opportunities for enrichment and exploration. Poor families lack competent and engaged administration (see Chicago, Detroit, etc), the levy money (locally, see Highline), capital budgets (see rural Central, WA), and the political capital wealthier families enjoy.

Ask yourself, would suburban schools ever be allowed to decay like what we saw in Detroit? Nope. What's happening in Detroit could never happen in Auburn Hills; what’s happening in Chicago could never happen in Evanston; what’s happening in South Seattle could never happen in Issaquah or Bellevue. Middle class America would never allow the conditions that have become normalized in poor and brown America to stand for their kids. 

Gates hears part of that, and allows that he gets the point. Sort of.

I certainly agree that those of us who live in the suburbs by and large don’t see what’s going on in inner-city schools. It’s like two different worlds. This is one reason why Melinda and I get out and visit different schools around the country as part of our foundation’s education work, which is all about supporting the New Majority.

First of all, Gates does not live in the suburbs. I don't know if he's being self-deprecating, or he's just that out of touch. But this is not suburban living.

The Gates suburban home

Second, Bowling's insight should ring a bell. Back in May of 2015, Gates was sitting about five feet away from Warren Buffet on a CNBC panel chat when Buffet said this:

If the only choice we had was public schools, we'd have better public schools.

In other words, if the wealthy and super-wealthy had skin in the game, public schools would get the support they need. As long as a handful view public education as a work of charitable outreach to help the children of Those People (and the rest stolidly oppose spending their tax dollars on Those People), we'll keep getting what we've got. An occasional drive-by is not quite the same.

In fact, the charter concept that Gates so loves is the exact opposite of what's being called for. First, it "helps" only a small percentage of students at all. Second, with its rhetoric about how the money belongs to the child who should be able to take it wherever, it moves completely away from the notion that we are collectively responsible for making a great education for all children. The charter sale pitch is that rich families get to say, "I've got mine, Jack," and abandon everyone else-- why shouldn't less wealthy students get to say, "I've got mine, Jack," too?

Imagine if Gates had thrown his money and weight behind, say, a call for Washington State to institute a modest income tax with the funds to go to public schools. Imagine a Gates-backed PR campaign as thorough and expensive as his campaigns to sell charter schools, but instead one to sell the idea that the public has a responsibility for ALL public schools-- not just the one in their neighborhood.

Gates refers to improved integration and more equitable funding as "important goals," which is kind of like saying that keeping babies well-fed is a "pretty good thing." And he really just bruishes by these on his way to talking about the importance of teachers. And now he just let's Bowling talk.

Bowling's plea for teacher focus is on point.

“Schools are the building blocks of our democracy,” he [Bowling] told me [Gates]. “If we’re going to create a better society, it has to happen through schools. And if we’re going to build a better society through our schools, it has to happen through better teaching.”

Gates reports that Bowling called for teacher autonomy, incentives to keep good teachers in the classroom, and recognition that the demands of teaching in high-poverty schools are different. That all gets compressed into one paragraph. Gates takes two paragraphs to report Bowling's call for better professional development, based on the belief that all teachers can become better.

All in all, it's an odd conversation to read about and watch (there's a short video clip, too). I am not sure how much of Bowling's message Gates really hears. Oddly enough, though he says that Bowling's "difficult subjects' are ones that "we need to be discussing," we don't really hear him respond to any of what Bowling has to say. The only time we hear Gates' voice is when he notes how he's affected by Bowling's self-designation as a "nerd farmer."

So I'm glad that Bowling's mouth and Gates' ears were in the same room. I'm not sure how much of an impression Bowling made; while it's nice that Gates let a nerd farmer in to see him, maybe what we need is a nerd whisperer.

MI: Boatloads of Money

“People should get a fair return on their investment,” said former state schools Superintendent Tom Watkins, a longtime charter advocate who has argued for higher standards for all schools. “But it has to come after the bottom line of meeting the educational needs of the children. And in a number of cases, people are making a boatload of money, and the kids aren’t getting educated.”

That's from a stunning profile of the charter industry in Michigan that ran last week in the Detroit Free Press. In that must-read piece, Jennifer Dixon gives detailed and sprawling picture of just how bad things are in Michigan.

These days it seems as if there's a wide consensus that for-profit charters are a bad idea (even as folks pretend not to notice that not-for-profits can be just as bad). But in Michigan, for profit charters are still the law of the land, favored and widespread, making Michigan Exhibit A in the story of Why For Profit Charters Have No Business existing.

In Michigan, the authorizers of charters are primarily universities, and I suppose some folks would think that putting institutions of higher learning in charge of the gateways and oversight of charter schools would help keep things honest. But that's not how it's working out.

Consider for instance the case of University YES Academy. Allie Gross at the Detroit Metro Times (the newspaper with the most ill-considered website heading ever-- really, folks? "NEWSHITS"??) has been covering this story and you can catch the full details here and here. The management company running the school was such a mess that the teachers voted to form a union, so the operator of the school dissolved the management company, negating all previous contracts-- and then the same person created a new management company with a new name. The NLRB got involved, and the management company folded their hand and sold the school to another management company, which appears to have bought the school only so that they could close it at the last minute before the beginning of the school year and force the students to go to the company's other school-- thirteen miles away.

This is just one example of charter awesomeness in Michigan-- and some of the players here are supposed to be among the top exemplars.

Yes, that's Bay Mills CC right up there

At the point that the NLRB got involved, the school's authorizer sent a letter saying the school might lose its authorization. But if the authorizer doesn't seem quite up on what the Detroit-based charter is up to, that might be because that authorizer is almost 350 miles away from the school.

That authorizer is Bay Mills Community College, a two-year tribal college with about 430 part-time and full-time students. It offers Associate Degrees in Education and Early Childhood Education; it offers seven education courses, two of which are on-line courses, and one of which is a study skills course for first year college students. But BMCC is the authorizer for a whopping forty-one charter schools in Michigan, a large number of which are in the Detroit area and none of which are near the college because, well, nothing is near the college. However, charter money at this point must be a hefty chuck of BMCC income. Given the size of BMCC's student body and the size of its charter portfolio, I'm wondering if BMCC is an actual college that does some authorizer work on the side, of a charter authorizer that teaches some classes on the side.

That's just one example that happened to come across my desk this week. The Free Press piece has many more, illustrating the degree to which Michigan taxpayers have been fleeced. One billion-with-a-B dollars of taxpayer money has poured into charter coffers-- per year!-- with little or nothing to show for it. Just the subheadings alone in the article tell the story--

Often no consequences for poor performance
State law sets no qualifications for charter applicants
No guidelines for when a charter should be revoked
Taxpayer money can be hidden from public view
Mixed results academically, less spending in the classroom
Loopholes in Michigan law allow insider deals and nepotism
Authorizers, management companies work closely-- too closely?

Alongside many, many tales of charter shenanigans in the story are some hard words from charter supporters.

“The theory of charters was if you remove elected school boards, a centralized bureaucracy and powerful unions, that you would get better student achievement. The evidence so far, in Michigan and around the country, is ... some charters work and some don’t,” said Lou Glazer, president of Michigan Future Inc., a think tank that financially supports nine schools in Detroit, including eight charter schools

“On average, if there are gains, they’re marginal at best.”

Or this from a representative from the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, who, after saying that authorizers should never approve schools with boards chosen by the management company, has this to say about the old "So what if they hoover up taxpayer money, as long as they do a good job" argument.

Richmond, whose organization is pro charter, said even if a charter school does deliver academic excellence, that’s no excuse if taxpayers are gouged.

“I can’t think of any other area of public or private enterprise that would agree to be ripped off by someone as long as they were providing a nice product.”

There's no question that Detroit, where democracy has been suspended for the non-wealthy and non-white citizens, gets the worst of it. But Michigan seems to be in the grip of some sort of Anything For A Buck disease that threatens both education and other public services. The purpose of charter schools in Michigan is to give investors a good return on their money; educating students is a minor consideration, far behind making boatloads of money in importance. Here's hoping that more people start asking the big question-- what good is it to have a boatload of money if your ship is sinking?