Why Charters Love "Public School"

The question is up for pseudo-debate once again because of the National Labor Relations Board decided in two separate cases that charter schools are private corporations.

The decision is new, but the fact that charters are private businesses is not. While charter fans are trying to act shocked and surprised., I'm just going to go ahead and link, for the six-zillionth time, to that special occasion when Eva Moskowitz successfully took New York State to court claiming that they had no right to audit her private corporation. Charter operators have always claimed to be private corporations when it suits them.

Neal McClusky of the right-tilted Cato Institute expresses concern that this is part of union efforts to unionize charter schools. That's understandably a concern, since many charter operators depend on at-will employees that can be hired, fired, and paid as the operator wishes. McClusky's argument is that charters are public because some public entity has to give them the right to exist. I'm actually wondering if McClusky was badly quoted in the piece, because that seems like a sloppy argument for him-- "given the right to exist by a public entity" includes every business that had to meet zoning requirements and every Wal-Mart that got its lot by having local government use eminent domain.

McClusky's concern about the machinations of the teacher union may be misplaced. Some folks in the teaching biz are a bit leery of unionizing charter schools because that makes the union a stakeholder in that charter. Charter fans may well want to welcome an opportunity to co-opt the unions, even if it means they will have to offer their employees decent pay and working conditions.

Why are charter schools so attached to the word "public," anyway? Charter backers are insistent about "public," attaching it to the word "charter" every chance they get.

It makes sense as a political maneuver. Think back to how many folks are vocally opposed to Bernie Sanders' idea of "free" college for students, which the opposition views as students getting to go to college at taxpayer expense. It's another evil "entitlement." But what are charter school systems except an entitlement for K-12 students to attend a private school at taxpayer expense? So let's not say "private school."

But Emma Brown's Washington Post coverage of the decision includes a quote that probably best captures the charter industry's love of "public"-- it is a critical piece of marketing.

But Ziebarth [Todd Ziebarth, senior vice president at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools],said he still believes that charter schools are public schools. And it’s a term that matters, he said: Americans have high regard for the importance of public education, and private schools carry connotations of exclusivity that don’t apply to charters.

"Public School" carries with it all sorts of connections. Public schools accept all students. Public schools have to listen to members of the public, like students and parents and community members. Public schools don't suddenly close up shop. Public schools aren't exclusive. Public schools have to follow certain rules about how they treat students. Public schools have to follow certain rules about how they treat and hire teachers. Public schools are run by elected members of your community who have to make all their decisions in public. Public schools have to tell you how they spend their money-- they're directly accountable to the community.

When people hear "public schools," they make a whole bunch of associations and assumptions that charter schools proceed to take advantage of.

It is, in essence, the greatest branding coup ever. It's like a new hamburger chain getting government permission to call themselves McDonalds. It's like a new automobile manufacturer getting government approval to slap the Ford nameplate on its cars. The new business gets all the benefits of being associated with the old brand, yet when it encounters anyone who doesn't love the old brand, they can just say, "Well, we're actually different and better."

So the NLRB decision is mostly bad for charters not because of its implications for unionization or lawsuits, but because it hurts their branding. It hurts the marketing. It's bad for business. But good for public schools.

Brookings Fails at Teacher Diversity Research

This is just exceptional.

In mid-August, Brookings released a report looking at the huge inequity in the teacher force, specifically the question of how to get more teachers of color in the classroom. Their conclusion, loosely paraphrased, is that the problem just can't be solved. Which seems, I don't know-- counterintuitive? improbable? wrong?

There are some red flags in this report. Right up front we note that two of the authors of this report are Hannah Putnam and Kate Walsh, "director of research" and "president" respectively of the National Council on Teacher Quality. In all the world of reformy groupd, none deserve to be taken seriously less than NCTQ, a group that has evaluated teacher education programs by looking at commencement programs, judges a teacher evaluation system based on whether or not it fails enough teachers, and whips up the US News college awesomeness list by flipping through college course catalogs. You can find critiques of its methodology here and here and here, though nothing quite beats the experience of sitting across a table from a college professor angry for being downgraded by NCTQ based on a program that her college doesn't even offer. NCTQ consistently produces the least-rigorous, least-credible research in the education world, and their technique seems to be to reverse engineer it, starting with the desired headline. NCTQ's presence here is a clear signal that this report is not to be taken seriously.

It would be nice to drive this car around today

Nevertheless, I'm going to read this you don't have to.

The paper opens with an overview and history of teacher diversity (and the lack thereof). This is basically a compendium of other folks' work and some data, and to their credit, the authors at least include some of the arguments about why increasing diversity in the teacher force to reflect the diversity in the student population is a Good Thing.

So why don't we have more non-white teachers? The authors come up with several places where the pipeline has sprung a leak.

1) A smaller percentage of Black and Hispanic students finish college, though the proportion who enter college match the proportion of the general population.

2) Non-white students are less interested in teaching than white students.

3) Non-white teachers are hired at a lower rate than white teachers.

4) Non-white teachers leave the profession at a higher rate than white teachers.

So basically we're losing teachers of color at every single point of the pipeline. We could quibble a bit at this point-- some sources disagree with #3, for instance. And the authors' consideration of #4 fails to note that one factor in retention of non-white teachers is mass firings of black teachers (e.g. New Orleans and Chicago) and the reformy closings of predominantly black and brown schools.

But as it turns out, we don't have to get into anything all that granular, because now we've established the background and analyzed the problem, so we're ready to do the heavy research needed to consider possible solutions. And the paper considers each possible pipeline hole in turn and asks "what would happen if we fixed that." Mind you, it doesn't ask "how would we fix that" or "what are the different ways we could try to fix that and how relatively effective would each of those techniques be." And each of the four considerations is accompanied by a graph. I'm going to paste just one of those graphs here; let's see if you can spot the flaw in their research method--

Source: Estimates based on the authors' calculations.

Seriously. That's the basis of this whole paper. "We spitballed some back-of-the-envelope numbers and this is the best we think we can do." But the good news is that they do figure that if we plug all four holes at once "setting aside the practical considerations about resource allocations and limitations" there would be parity between black teachers and black students in 2044. Hispanic parity would not come until... well, some time after 2060, because at 2060 they ran out of space on the back of the envelope.

Now the paper moves into the Just Thinking Out Loud portion, where the authors deal a bit more in specifics. How exactly do we get this train a-rollin' down the tracks?

In our view, the fundamental bottleneck here is not so much the failure of efforts by districts’ human resources offices to hire and retain trained minority teachers (in truth, changing hiring practices can barely nudge the needle on teacher diversity); rather, the problem comes both from the low rate of college completion by black and Hispanic students and then the inability to persuade them to consider a career in the teaching profession. 

So this is not so much an actual "research" paper as just an "in our view" paper. Good to know, on page 15/24. But the good news is that we know all about making teaching more attractive, and about getting students to finish college. So, you know, just do that stuff.

However, they caution us, don't get so excited about quantity that we overlook quality. Did I mention that earlier they said alternative initiatives like TFA were swell, but not big enough to really help?

At any rate, this will be a long term solution. Does the research general idea-thinking suggest any short-term solutions? Well, schools could "leverage" other staff positions to get some non-white folks in there with the students. Schools could put policies in place to "mitigate" the effects of white racial attitudes on students of color. That would have been an interesting paper, but here it's just a paragraph. Third, teachers can be educated about the effects of the diversity gap. So, more professional development? That should totally help.

And it's all over but the references pages.

This is a serious issue that deserves serious consideration and should be addressed by serious solutions. I do not know what this report is, but it's definitely not serious, which is unfortunate. 

Honestly, some days I think I should just incorporate myself as the Curmudgucation All-Beef Baloney Sandwich Institute, get myself a fancier header and start fishing for grants to fund whatever writer-babblings I wanted to pull out of my butt so that I could essentially do what I always do, but get paid in money and fame (you know-- on top of the fame I'm already earning). Instead of lowly blog posts I could issue "reports." I could put graphs with them, and I estimate that by 2027 (probably around the second Tuesday in May) I could retire with enough money to buy a really nice car. Maybe then I could become an economist.

ICYMI: Fall kick-off edition (9/4)

As always, if you see something that really speaks to you, share it.

Michigan Spends $1 Billion on Charter Schools But Fails To Hold Any Accountable

Well, that headline for this Detroit Free press pretty well covers it.

Schools Open, Schools Close-- Charter Schools and the Ties That Bind

From Harvard, a thoughtful consideration of the real costs of school closures

Rubric for the Rubric Concerning Students' Core Competency in Reading Things in Books and Writing About Them

McSweeney's comes through with some edujargon fun

Education Matters but Direct Anti-Poverty and Inequality Reduction Efforts Matter More

Ben Spielberg puts together some basic facts about the effects of poverty

Screens in Schools are a $60 Billion Hoax

Time magazine pulls no punches in calling the push for education computer tech a huge scam

Between the World and John Deasy

Joshua Leibner lays out the sordid, failing-ever-upward career of Deasy and his ilk

Public Schools Aren't Businesses

Or, "If businesses had to run like public schools..."

Field Tripping

First hand account of touring a charter school with clueless economists.

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.]