Mother Jones: Black Teachers Matter

I usually save my reading recommendations for Sunday, but if you read one article this week, it must be "Black Teachers Matter" by Kristina Rizga at Mother Jones.

Rizga addresses the all-important question of why we're missing so many black teachers in this country (and she does it far more thoughtfully than the folks at Brookings) by focusing on one school in the Philadelphia district. It is a sad and frustrating tale, and it shows how black teachers have become the canaries in the educational coal mine. The lack of black teachers is a problem in and of itself, a problem that needs to be addressed-- but it is also a symptom of the larger disease of education reform.

Rizga has done her homework. Some of the data points are familiar, like the huge drop in black teachers in some urban settings-- 18.5% in Philly, 40% in Chicago, and a whopping 62% in New Orleans.

And some of the details were new to me-- the Boston Consulting Group estimates that every child who attends a charter school adds $7,000 to district expenses.

This is the story of how Broad Academy graduates like Hite of Philly are trained to "right-size" districts, how reformers have prioritized charters over integration, how the destruction of schools has become part of the destruction of the inner city.

Most of all it's a clear, direct look at how cutting schools out of a community slices right through the heart of those community's ties. Why are we losing and missing so many black teachers? Because like most schools in the country, inner city schools, non-wealthy schools, non-white schools get many of their teachers from the pipeline that runs right from the heart of their own community, and when you cut the school's ties to the community, you sever that pipeline. And if that doesn't do enough damage, you then replace that community based school with a school that is either colonial in nature, with outsiders coming to impose their view on the community school (because, you know, Those People aren't really fit to educate their own children), or you scare the school that hasn't yet been shut down, scare it into submitting to the imposed agenda just to stay alive.

Chris Emdin, an associate professor of education at Columbia University and the author of For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood...and the Rest of Y'all Too, told me that many black educators leave because they are forced to become the kind of teachers they resented when they went to urban schools. "They want to teach in urban spaces because they want to undo that damage that they've experienced," Emdin, a former teacher, told me. "They say, 'I hated school. I want to teach math, English, science in an engaging way.' And the minute you try to be more creative, the principal says, 'Nope. You gotta do more test prep. You gotta follow the curriculum.' At every turn they are being told that they can't do what they know in their spirit and heart and soul is the right thing to do. It's causing teachers to leave, students to fail, and it's making these schools factories of dysfunction."

Another piece of research I wasn't familiar with-- a Center for American Progress study that shows that urban schools spend far more time on test prep, because they have so much more riding on the results.

This is an important story, fully researched and well-told, that simultaneously gives a clear and nuanced picture of one particular school, but also pulls back focus to show the larger pattern of what is happening to our schools and our communities. You will see the link to this story in many of your social media spaces, and you should follow the link when you have a few minutes to read the whole piece. This is required reading for anyone remotely connected to education.

Read this article.

Chester Finn, the Death of Democracy, and Opposites Day

So today, conservatives hate tradition, and democracy is increased by taking away the vote.

Behind the paywall at Wall Street Journal, Chester Finn (honcho emeritus of the Thomas Fordham Institute), Bruno V. Manno (Walton Foundation), and Brandon Wright (Fordham) are happy to announce the death of one more piece of democracy in this country.

The trio reports that charter schools are spearheading a "quiet revolution" in local control. Because, like Reed Hastings (Netflix), they are happy to see the local elected school board die.

Oh, the elected school board was fine back in the day. "This setup functioned well for an agrarian and small-town society in which people spent their entire lives in one place, towns paid for their own schools, and those schools met most of the workforce needs of the local community." But this set-up does not work for a "country of mobile and cosmopolitan citizens." Not with money coming from the state and feds, and not when "discontent with educational outcomes is rampant." What does that mean? Where is the evidence? What do you mean?! Didn't you hear him? The discontent is rampant! Rampant, I tell you!

Also, they want you to know that some school districts are really, really big. So big that elected boards are no longer "public spirited civic leaders" but are now a "gaggle of aspiring politicians and teacher-union surrogates." Because gaggles of aspiring politicians are far worse than gaggles of aspiring financial masters of the universe. Hedge fund managers are known for their altruism (remember how altruistic Wall Street was back in 2008). Not that these guys are going to mention that the folks behind the great charter revolution are mostly hedge funders and money changers.

So, on opposites day, conservatives like Finn, Manno and Wright are opposed to one of the oldest democratic traditions in this country. But wait-- the bulletins from Bizzaro World are still coming in.

Yet far from undermining local democratic control, these new schools are reinventing it...

Well, yes. Kind of like Jim Crow laws tried to reinvent freedom for black folks.

Because these boards function more like nonprofit organizations than political bodies or public agencies, their members need not stand for election. Being generally union-free, they don’t have the headaches of collective bargaining.

"Function like nonprofit organizations" is weasel wording of the highest order. I live in the shadow of UPMC, a nonprofit healthcare giant that turns huge profits and employs some of the highest paid executives and board members around. We need to get past the notion that nonprofits can't be as  money-grubbing and rapacious as for-profit companies, because they absolutely can.

And with freedom to engage and deploy principals and teachers, and to adjust budget, curriculum and instruction to do their students the most good, charter schools are attracting to their boards selfless citizens and community leaders who see a plausible chance to promote change.

Which is a pretty way to say that the unelected operators of the school district can do whatever the hell they want to whomever the hell they want to do it to, and not have to answer to anyone. That's the dream here-- no answering to unions or taxpayers or damned government busybodies-- just the sweet freedom to rule over your domain as an all-powerful CEO.

The boys also talk about "confederations" of similar schools, by which they mean big business charter chains. And they take a moment to whinge about how charters get fewer government monies and so must depend on the kindness of philanthropists and "entrepreneurial energy" aka investors.

Established education interest groups—always more attentive to adult jobs than to kids’ learning—fight them relentlessly, as do a few civil-rights groups aligned with the unions. Some charter leaders and board members have been guilty of self-dealing and corrupt behavior.

Yes, those damned unions, trying to take away power from the rightful Masters of the Universe. And here comes another favorite charter cheerleader refrain-- These are a new species of public school, "open to all comers, paid for by taxpayers, and licensed by the state." Well, two out of three ain't bad.

What accountability do charters face? If they fail to meet standards of academic performance or fiscal soundness, charters are "supposed to be closed or restarted with fresh leadership." And that's absolutely it, because this section started with the phrase "But that's where democracy comes in," but now a paragraph later, democracy is a no-show. Voters don't get a say. Taxpayers don't get a say. Charters resist transparency vigorously. And if you are a parent who's unhappy with some aspect of the school, you can vote with your feet-- that's it. Any other kind of vote is off the table.

We've seen it over and over. Check out just this single report from NBC News, profiling how the closing, turning over, or general charterizing of schools is invariably accompanied by a loss of voting rights and voice for non-wealthy, non-white communities.

Of course, privatizing means the death of democracy for the sorts of people who don't read the Wall Street Journal. But the old kind of local control (sometimes known as democracy) is obsolete. What the world really needs is for elected officials to be replaced by boards composed of our Betters, the rich and powerful folks who need to run things without interruption from the Lessers who keep yelping and squawking and demanding some kind of voice or vote. Democracy, as these guys define it, is enhanced by giving fewer people less say. Because on opposites day, the fewer votes you get, the more democracy you have. As long as only the Right People, the Betters, have most of the money, most of the power, and most of the votes, well, then, democracy is thriving. At least on opposites day.

Brown Goes To Boston

Campbell Brown has decided to add her two cents to the sprawling debate about raising the charter cap in Massachusetts (and really, why not, because lord knows everyone else has added their two cents, or two million dollars).

Brown's argument is the same basic one repeated by other charter school proponents:

1) We should do it for the poor children.
2) Unions suck
3) Boston charters have had amazingly awesome results

Or as Brown puts it, "Wow. For Madeloni, her union, and their supporters, Boston charters are an extraordinary menace. Not because they are failing poor children of color, but because they are serving them so well. "

Each of these points is problematic. Let's go one at a time.

Do it for the poor children.  

Or more accurately, "do it for some poor children, but only if they speak English and are well-behaved."  Massachusetts has, to its credit, one of the best charter reimbursement formulae in the country, which means that sending Chris to a charter school doesn't mean that the ten students who stay in public school don't get totally shafted. Chris's former school still gets almost all of the per-pupil money that left with Chris-- or at least they would if Chapter 46 were fully funded, which it hasn't been for a few years now. But the proposed charter expansion is going to increase education costs for Massachusetts by many, many dollars; those dollars will either come from tax increases (unlikely) or other public education spending (more likely) or just not anywhere at all (also more likely) meaning that the charter tradition of robbing ten poor public school students to pay a charter to educate one poor student remains alive.

If charters want to do it for all the poor children, I'm listening. When you want to build a lifeboat for ten students by cannibalizing the ship that's carrying a thousand, your claim to a moral high ground is in trouble. Also, I am still waiting for charter fans to explain to taxpayers that taxes should go up so that  some few select students can be sent to private school at public expense.

Unions suck.

Brown likes the assertion that urban public schools are entirely run by the teachers' union, and that unions only oppose charters because they are trying to preserve their big seat at the public teat.

This argument gets a little fuzzy in Massachusetts because on the one hand, Mass has some of the most successful schools in the nation, but on the other hand, their schools are supposedly crippled by the evil union. The nature of the problem seems flexible, depending on the argument being made.

Of course, charter fans could disarm their evil union opponents easily-- by unionizing their charter schools. If the unions were charter stakeholders,  charter fans would find themselves with powerful allies for fights like this one. Could it be that charter operators find beating and blocking the uunions more important than opening more charters?

The awesomeness of Boston charters

The charter lobby has leaned hard on the notion that Boston charters are exceptionally awesomely awesome. Actually, that's generally all they say, as getting into any sort of evidence of that awesomeness is a little like presenting the evidence of the Loch Ness Monster's existence.

That could be because even the state auditor is unable to get enough legit data from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. But when the Boston Foundation did a study to show how awesome their results were, the study instead showed that charters didn't do any better than the public schools at getting students all the way to graduation. Other attempts to crunch charter numbers show that Boston charters are particularly rough on boys; their college graduation numbers for young black men are tiny and unimpressive no matter what you compare them to.

And it's a little surprising that charters don't beat the public system on these numbers, because they do not appear to be matching the demographics of surrounding communities (in particular, avoiding the non-English speaking students). Perhaps it's because the highly restrictive and controlling environment favored by so many schools teaches compliant behavior that is actually bad preparation for college and the world. 

The charter menace. 

So the charters or Massachusetts don't seem to be serving anyone-- not extra-burdened taxpayers, not students, not communities. Well, they serve their investors, the kind of well-heeled rich individuals that can hang with folks like Campbell Brown. The charter sales pitch is founded on baloney and smoke. But Brown is correct-- by trying to destabilize and replace one of the most successful school systems in the country, charter fans have turned the Massachusetts cap battle into a large and important test of the charter biz. Let's hope the right side comes out on top. 

FL: Still Stupidly Punishing Children

Sigh.

So you will probably recall that some of Florida's educational leaders have lost their damned minds, having decided that the full force of districts and state powers must be brought to bear in order to beat a bunch of nine-year-old children into compliance. In some school districts, administrators had concluded that third grade children who opted out of the Big Standardized Test could not be promoted, not based on their report cards, and not based on alternative assessments like portfolios.

The case ended up in court when parents sought relief from their children's non-promotion. The details that emerged there were not pretty. Orange County allowed students to advance based on their portfolios-- just not this one particular child. Many districts played Gotcha by not informing children they had failed third grade until the very end of the school year, with no prior notice of deficiency and no attempt to put a remediation plan in place. And it also became clear that when the state wasn't hedging and hemming and hawing, it was just plain giving districts advice contrary to the actual laws of Florida. All of this, mind you, while other counties in Florida had no trouble reading, understanding, and following the law. Meanwhile, to add broader insults to the whole business, the state introduced the contention that report cards are meaningless.

You might think that the finding by Judge Karen Gievers would put the writing on the wall large enough for even the dimmest superintendent or state bureaucrat to read. But a couple of weeks ago, I wrote this:

Of course, we're not done with this yet. The state will appeal, because God forbid they let this little nine-year-old scofflaws slip through their fingers. But if they have a leg to stand on, I can't see where it is. Not that they won't try. This is Pam Stewart and the Florida Department of Education-- if they can pursue a ten year old boy on his death bed, the optics of yanking a bunch of fourth graders out of class to throw them back in a third grade classroom won't deter them. But on a planet with even a remote simulation of justice, the state will continue to lose this fight.

Sad to say, since the judge issued her public spanking, Florida officials have lived up to my low opinion of them.

School districts had defended themselves throughout the run-up to the case by declaring that their hands were tied, they were just following the law, and gosh they couldn't do anything about it because that darn state, donchaknow. And then, when the judge spoke, effectively untying their hands, not only did the state DOE appeal (no surprise there) but Orange, Seminole, Broward, and Hernando Counties also appealed the ruling. Parent activist Jinia Parker responded in an open letter

I will not accept “our hands are tied” ever again. Throughout history, “I was following orders” has been the excuse of cowards and those who lack honor.

I’m not asking for anything extraordinary. I am asking that school boards in Florida do the right thing.

In Hernando County, three of the children involved in the case waited for the ruling before reporting to their magnet school. Once it was established that they would enter fourth grade, they reported to school, where the principal met them to tell them that they no longer had seats at that school. Again, a punitive and just plain mean choice by the district, delivered in the nastiest way possible-- "No," some administrator must have said, "No letter. No phone call. Let the little sonsabitches show up all excited about starting the new year and then stick it to them. That'll teach 'em to mess with us."

As a Tampa Bay Times editorial put it, "Reason flew the coop in Hernando County, to be replaced by cruelty."

And clearly something has taken the place of reason for some Florida school leaders, who are bound and determined that nine-year-olds will be beaten into submission.

This is the kind of spectacle you get when you insist on enforcing a stupid law, and the law that says students must pass the Big Standardized Test in order to move on to fourth grade is a deeply stupid law, without a shred of science to back it up. But this is the hill on which the state has decided to fight the opt out battle, hoping that a battery of nuisance motions and legions of taxpayer-financed lawyers will somehow beat these children and their families down so that finally the Supreme Test Gods can receive their proper homage.

It's stupid not only because it's wrong (though lord knows that's reason enough) but because it's stupid politics and stupid optics. Lots and lots of people are busy demonstrating on the public stage that they are spectacularly unfit for their jobs. Let's hope that before this is all done, many of them are looking for work. In the meantime, I hope they find more and more unruly parents bothering their offices.

And if you want to help, follow this link to contribute to the legal fund. Because while the state and school districts can just keep wasting mountains of taxpayer money on this fiasco, the parents enjoy no such luxury.

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.