Some Gates Charter Personalized Love

Don Shalvey has been pushing charter schools for many, many years. He was serving a superintendent of the San Carlos School District when he launched the first charter school in California. That was 1992. In 1998 he joined with Reed "Elected Schools Boards Suck" Hastings (Netflix) to for Californians for Public School Excellence, an astroturf group created to push charter school legislation through California. Shalvey then immediately (with the help of some Hastings money) co-founded Aspire Public [sic] charter management, a chain that has spread across the country, where he was CEO for eleven years. Aspire has attracted attention at various times for ejecting difficult students, spending lots of money on marketing, and operating their own teacher training program based on some questionable practices.

But Shalvey has since moved on to a new job-- deputy director of K-12 education at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. So if you have any doubts about where the Gates stands on charters, here's some more evidence that the foundation is just chock full of charter adoration.

Shalvey took to the pages of the NonProfit Quarterly to talk about that very subject. "What Drives My Education Work at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation" illuminates some of the flaws in the Gates charter argument.

Once he's rehearsed his CV, Shalvey throws out the old, "Despite our arguments, we're all in it for the education of the kids and not because charters are a great way to invest money and make a bundle while getting the little people to shut up and just do what we know is good for them." Okay, I added on that last part. Next up-- Gaping Hole #1.

This is one idea that we all can agree on: A high-quality education is a bridge to opportunity in the United States.

Well, no. We can't agree on that. Particularly if we're going to allow our opinion to be shaped actual facts. I take no pleasure in poking holes in this, because I really want to believe in the power of education. I've devoted my entire adult life, my entire life's work, to promoting and providing the power of education to my students. But what we know is that the bridge to opportunity has a foundation of money and power and socio-economic status of families of origin. Mind you, I still absolutely believe in the importance of education and the possibilities for many, varied, awesome futures for all of my students. But to pretend that All You Need Is Education, particularly when you come from a low-SES family, is just mean, like telling a girl who wants to be Miss America that all she needs is just a nice hairdo. It's not the whole truth.

And here comes Gaping Hole #2.

And one of the best examples of this belief in action is at Summit Public Schools, a charter management organization with schools in California and Washington. Summit is one of the national leaders in personalized learning. 

Shalvey is about to launch into a sales pitch for Summit and Personalized [sic] Learning. But before we go there, let me point out that this does not provide a "best example" or even a "fair example" of how high-quality education is a bridge to success. A "best example" would involve two parts-- a part where we had proof of the quality of education provided, and then a part where we looked at data showing just how awesomely successful the students became in their lives. Spoiler alert: our discussion of Summit is not going to provide either of those things.

Shalvey is going instead to tout the awesomeness of computer-based learning, something that has been failing to get traction in the education world for decades now. Remember how Rocketship Academies were going to revolutionize education by hooking every student up to computerized instruction. And then they didn't?

Shalvey wants us to know about Summit's success rate. So do some other folks, like the student who complains that computerized "go at your own pace" learning with unseasoned teachers is not very educational. Or the researcher who determined that Summit's attrition rate is nothing to brag about. That includes their retention of teachers, and a look at the Glassdoor reviews hints why. Though many reviews are positive, there are also some like these:

The educational model is seriously flawed and failing students

The culture is unprofessional and emotionally unsafe

Summit (the organization) abuses teachers. As an at-will employee you have no rights.

The management style is top-down, with examples like a single evaluation rubric that allegedly all teachers must use for all students. And Summit is tied to the usual web of reformsters, plus ties to Dell Computers who could be expected to be big fans of a model that requires every student to work at a computer.

And what would a reformster program be without "research." Shalvey directs us to "research" showing that computer-based personalized learning is super-duper. And look! It's a report sponsored and published by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-- so researched sponsored by Gates to prove that the Gates-sponsored programs are doing great.

Shalvey's final plug is for the assimilation of public schools collaboration between charters and public schools, citing the Summit Basecamp program from this year, which brought together a bunch of public school teachers to test-market become familiar with Summit's in-house personalized learning platform (not the first one they've had, actually, but this one was developed with help from facebook!) back in their own classrooms with a hand from their own Summit sales rep instructional mentor, with progress for students measured by looking at MAP test results and oh good lord I can't even-- There are just days when trying to follow every thread of this big reformy mess is like trying untangle a Grand Canyon-sized spider web. But hey-- you know this kind of assimilation collaboration works real good because here's a study conducted on the very subject and can you guess who sponsored the study? Of course you can.

At any rate, it looks as if at the very least, Summit Charters will be a good launching pad for a bunch of competency-based education personalized learning software. Oh, the so many ways to make money while dismantling public education and electing yourself Overlord of US Education.

Is Poverty No Longer a Thing?

Mike Petrilli was over at Campbell Brown's place this week where A) he was oddly billed as a research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and a book author, but not as the head honcho of the Fordham Institute and B) suggesting that we might need to reconsider our stances on poverty, now that it's not so much of a thing.

I'm not an economist and I don't play one on tv (though economists pretend to be education experts all the time, so maybe I should just throw caution to the wind), so I'm leery of wrestling with Petrilli's contention that the poverty rate has dropped to 7.8%. But I can say this with confidence-- there's a huge amount of disagreement about what the poverty rate actually is.

The census folks said that in 2014, the poverty rate was 14.8%. But median income rate stayed flat. The poverty rate dropped from 19% in 1967 to around 15% today. Maybe those numbers are all really low because the poverty cut score is set too low, and the true number is much higher. Or maybe the true poverty rate is actually 4.5%. One sometimes suspects that economists do not know what the hell they are talking about.

Petrilli is leaning on a study by Scott Winship. Winship is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and at Brookings (maybe-- they really should annotate their website more carefully). So, not exactly a lefty here. Winship's idea is that when you count people's earnings, you should count all their government benefits as well, as in "Well, you're not really poor because you've got food stamps and tax credits and other non-cash benefits." He also thinks the Census Bureau's inflation calculator overstates things. Let's say that not everyone agrees with Winship's method of computing.

Petrilli is willing to note that Winship's method of figuring clearly implies that there would be waaaayyyyy more people in poverty if welfare-slashers in DC had their way. And he also acknowledges that just even if you're a bit over the poverty line, you're probably still having a Very Rough Time. Yet he also dismisses Free and Reduced Lunch numbers as a good measure of poverty.

But he's going to go on talking as if the 7.8% number is accurate so that we can consider the implications.

Part of his considering is baloney stapled to a straw man.

For the teachers unions and other traditional education groups, it raises hard questions about their familiar contention that America’s lackluster student achievement is due to poverty—that we must “fix poverty first” before our schools will improve.

The contention may be familiar, but only because reformsters keep repeating it and attributing it to their opponents. I don't know any serious voice on the non-reformy side of the debate who says, "We must fix poverty before students can learn." The fact that folks in the public education sphere see poverty as a factor does not mean that they see it as an excuse. If I have a student who wants to race, but she's in a wheelchair, I'm not contending that she must be cured and on her legs before she can race. But the preparations and  training for that student will be different from those of a wheelchair-unbound student. If I think the solution for the athlete in the wheelchair is simply push her through the same training program I'd use with a non-wheelchair athlete, I'm a dope. She needs preparation that fits her situation.

Petrilli knows all this, and acknowledges in the piece that "a strong link remains between students’ socioeconomic status and achievement." (As always, we don't really mean "achievement"-- we mean "score on a narrow standardized test.")

But, Petrilli says, if poverty is lessened, then it can't be causing our "educational underachievement"-- which means at this point he is discussing the correlation between two data points (student achievement failure, lessening of poverty) neither of which has actually been established as a true thing.

We are doing better by our poorest citizens, including our poorest children, than we were 20 years ago. And we should expect them to be doing better in school as a result.  

But we don't really know if we're doing better by our poorest citizens or not, and we have no real indication that they aren't doing better in school for any number of reasons, including but not limited to A) policy wonks don't have a decent measure of student achievement and B) we have no way to measure the differences between what schools asked of students twenty years ago and what they asked today. 

One implication that Petrilli doesn't address-- one reformster school (the one favored by the current administration) is that better education will cure poverty. So if poverty has been reduced, I suppose they could declare victory. Of course that would also mean they could stop pushing new reformy ideas. But the linchpin of their entire theory is still unproven-- that a child who gets a good score on the Big Standardized Test will end up with a better-paying job, as if employers are sitting out there thinking, "Well, I would pay more for this minimum wage job, but I'm waiting to hire someone who got a really high PARCC score."

The other factor that Petrilli is leaving out is the importance of support from government and policy makers. He notes that society is more stratified, with a greater gap between the wealthy and the not-wealthy; it's worth asking how much that stratification leads to the systemic under-support of schools in poor communities. We could also take a look at reports that show schools are handling 1 million more students with 200K fewer teachers under the headline that the recovery has not reached schools, raising the question: what happens if student poverty gets better, but school under-funding gets worse? He says that we should expect poor students to be doing better in school; I'd say we should expect federal, state and local government to do a better job of supporting those schools that the poor are students in.

Dyett Opening Again

You may recall that a year ago, activists launched a hunger strike to protest the closing of Dyett High School in the historic Bronzeville section of Chicago. Chicago Public Schools appeared bound and determined to carve the school up and turn it into one more private turnaround money salad (with gentrification dressing on top), even though community members had done everything just the way they were "supposed" to, from working the system and making community based proposals, to mounting a protest that was non-violent and non-confrontational. And yet, for a while, it looked as if CPS was only interested in working the optics rather than addressing the issues.

But now, a year later, Dyett is on the verge of opening again as a public high school.

The Walter H. Dyett High School for the Arts (with a website address of "newdyett") is ready to go, with millions of dollars of improvements and a fuller-than-expected roster of enrolled students (150 instead of 125). On Wednesday, Beulah McLoyd, Dyett’s new principal, and Janice Jackson, chief education officer at CPS, toured reporters through the new school.

The new school sounds impressive, with everything from a swimming pool to a black box theater, and the original protesters who were on hand are quoted as cautiously optimistic. But they were clearly moved by the resources and investment in a school that had previously been left to simply fall down around itself.

“When I went in there, I just started crying,” said Irene Robinson, a CPS grandmother who was hospitalized during the strike. “If I had to do it all over again, I’d do it in a heartbeat.”

The story is not over yet, and folks are still waiting to see how the handoff to an elected community board goes; that's supposed to happen in 2018.

Jeannette Taylor, another hunger striker, said she is holding off on enrolling her freshman daughter in Dyett until she sees how open administrators are and how inclusive the school is of parents and the community during its first year.

Here's hoping that CPS manages to follow through with its promises to the community. Kudos to the members who staged the hunger strike. Maybe next time CPS can do the right thing and listen to community members without anyone having to starve.

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.