Leave Those Kids Alone

Pre-K is the growth sector of the privatized school industry. There's no existing institutional structure to sweep aside, and there's near-universal agreement that a good Pre-K foundation is important for all future success, coupled with research indicating that many of our children are already behind on the first day of kindergarten.

Unfortunately, "good Pre-K foundation" is a phrase that has been interpreted in some not-very-helpful ways by not-very-clever people with a not-very-deep understanding of what is developmentally appropriate for a four-year-old. Google "kindergarten is the new first grade" and you get over 5,000 results. Because some folks are just certain that what three- and four-year-olds need is academic preparation, direct instruction, and, of course, tests that let us measure the outcomes.

The research on the effectiveness is a huge muddy mess (made more muddy by the continued absence of a reliable and meaningful measure of school effectiveness in general). Some of the research has been rather alarmingly headline-generating, like the Stanford study that suggests that delayed kindergarten enrollment reduces the possibility of developing ADHD.

Now the folks at Defending the Early Years have published a short piece by Lilian Katz that provides a useful framework for explaining and understanding why some approaches to early childhood education are not useful.

Lilian Katz is professor emerita of early childhood education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as well as principal investigator for the Illinois Early Learning Project. Her study of and advocacy for early childhood education is extensive and spirited.

"Lively Minds: Distinctions between academic versus intellectual goals for young children" is a four page report with one page of cover and another one of endnotes-- so we can cut to the chase pretty quickly and easy. I've read it, but you should probably go ahead and read it, too.

First, Katz establishes what the goal for early childhood ed must be beyond a mix of free play and formal instruction:

In the early years, another major component of education (indeed for all age groups) must be to provide a wide range of experiences, opportunities, resources and contexts that will provoke, stimulate, and support children's innate intellectual disposition.

And then, as the title suggests. Katz distinguishes between academic and intellectual goals.

Academic goals are centered on "mastery of small discrete elements" usually connected to reading; these skills are subject to worksheets, drill, and other exercises aimed at literacy goals. "The items learned and practiced have correct answers, rely heavily on memorization, the application of formulae versus understanding, and consist largely of giving the teacher the correct answers that the children know she wants." So all the sit in your desk, do the tasks assigned, perform behaviors that please the teacher.

Intellectual goals "are those that address the life of the mind in its fullest sense (e.g. reasoning, predicting, analyzing, questioning, etc.) including a range of aesthetic and moral sensibilities."  This is about children making sense out of the world and pursuing their own curiosity.  Asking questions. Figuring it out. Analyzing and understanding ideas. This is about learning how to be fully human, how to be in the world.

Katz is not arguing that academics have no place in the early ed classroom. But she quickly and succinctly puts them in their proper place.

An appropriate curriculum in the early years is one that includes the encouragement and motivation of the children to seek mastery of basic academic skills, e.g. beginning writing skills, in the service of their intellectual pursuits.

I've talked about this for years-- one of the major problems of the modern reformy era is that it turns schools upside down. Students are made to serve the school instead of the other way around. Students must master skills and properly perform on tests because the school needs them to produce the "outcomes" that will allow the school to survive. Katz reminds us that it's supposed to be the other way around-- that the school serves the student by providing them with skills that the student can use to become her best, truest self and to carve out a place in the world. The purpose of teaching students this stuff is not so the student can perform for the school's benefit, but so that the skill and knowledge can benefit the student by helping the student create a life.

Katz follows up with a couple of other important points.

First, while it may be true thatstudents from poor backgrounds may lack early exposure to certain academic skills, it does not follow that "they lack the basic intellectual dispositions such as to make sense of experience, to analyze, hypothesize, predict." Even if they haven't been read to at home, Katz says, it is still reasonable and helpful to assume "that they too usually have lively minds."

Second-- well, second is a really a two-fer. Intellectual disposition can be damaged by "excessive and premature formal instruction," but it's not going to be strengthened by mindless or banal activities (she cites a year-long sharing time built around teddy bears). Do meaningful stuff. Or as we like to say in my family, children may be young, but they aren't dopes. They're just tiny human with fewer skills and less live experience.

Katz next looks at short- and long-term effects of early academic instruction. She notes that while there is research to support the notion that early brain stimulation is good for early brain development, there is no real reason to believe that academic instruction qualifies as brain stimulation. The differences that show up in research about the long-term effects of early education seem to Katz to be linked to what kind of instruction we're talking about.

Short term "benefits" can be shown from formal instruction aka basic test prep; more test prep = better test results-- oops, I mean, of course, "increased student achievement." So short term this sort of crap-- oops, I mean, this instructional model-- looks like it's working, but in the long term, not so much. In other words, the damage isn't evident till later.

Also-- and this was a surprise-- it appears that early formal instruction is in the long run more damaging to boys than to girls. This could be neurological (girls brains grow faster) or social (girls are more often taught to be compliant and passive). We don't really know yet.

Katz' recommendation is brief and clear:

Early childhood curriculum and teaching methods are likely to be best when they address children's lively minds so that they are quite frequently fully intellectually engaged.

Katz makes a lot of sense, and while she's a specialist in her particular field, I can't help noticing that much of what she says here about four-year-olds also applies to the sixteen-year-olds that enter my classroom every day. 

Can Evidence Improve America's Schools?

That's the question asked by Mike Petrilli (Fordham Institute) asks over at the Fordham blog.

The piece harkens back to Chester Finn's 1986 book titled, unironically, What Works. And the piece also ties into Petrilli's ongoing series about how to drive change in education. After noting that nothing from Finn's work has ever really gotten traction, Petrilli bemoans our benighted edu-state.

Education remains a field in which habit, intuition, and incumbency continue to play at least as large a role as research and data analysis.

Petrilli has, as is his wont, stacked the deck from the first framing of the issue. He could as easily have written that education is a field in which experienced and trained professionals continue to rely on their own judgment rather than the kibbitzing of non-professionals outside the field. But absent the framing, I'll allow him this-- not a lot of outside research makes much of an impression on how schools function.

So the first question is why not? And Petrilli has a list of answers from Vivian Tseng (W.T.Grant Foundation), Tom Kane (Harvard Center for Reformy Education Policy Research) and Michael Barber (Overlord of Pearson's World-Conquering Data-Hungry Corporate Monstrosity).  The list is interesting, albeit not exactly on point.

Limited supply. Maybe there's more research than there used to be, but there are still many educational questions for which there are no research-based answers.

Too much junk. "Education is awash in a deluge of reports, journal articles, emails, tweets, and news stories" that all make claims to research-based pronouncements. And yet, much of it is junk.These two supply issues already raise some points for debate. Petrilli says that v"rigorous studies have made a big impact on teacher evaluation (for better or worse)" and I'd be inclined to argue just how rigorous the studies were that gave us VAM. There's also a certain irony in this observation coming from a guy at Harvard Ed Policy, arguably an advocacy group masquerading as a think tank masquerading as a university department. That kind of multi-mask mummery has given us an unending supply of marketing baloney masquerading as research.

Add to this the growing recognition of a problem in the sciences in general and education research in particular-- the paucity of research replication. Beloved long-held research findings are dropping like flies, to the point that some science is being called broken.  Bottom line-- there may be even more junk than we realize.

Poor Dissemination. School administrators don't check the What Works Clearing House very often. Research outlets do a bad job of pushing out their works of blinding genius.

Ideology. Damn ed college professors. "They’re fundamentally opposed to the reform agenda, measuring schools via student outcomes, and hard-nosed quantitative analyses." Petrelli's tongue is in his cheek here, but the list does touch on something important-- part of the reformy stance has been not so much "here's a technique for better education" as it has been "your entire map of the world is wrong." Most of us remain unconvinced.

Habits and Practices in schools and districts. So maybe we're just not open to new research. Maybe we're tired of the "reform of the month." Maybe (and this is me talking now) reformsters sound like that guy in the old joke-- "Are you going to believe me, or your own eyes?"

Because what's going on daily in schools is not just habits and practices. It's research and data collection. I start a new lesson. I scan the faces of my students, looking for signs of reactions, in particular reactions that signal understanding or confusion, engagement or cutting out. I ask some questions. I gauge the answers. I hand out a practice sheet. I watch  them work at it. We correct it, and I collect to check for particular patterns of understanding or confusion. That's ten minutes of my class, and I've already collected a ton of data and tested a mountain of techniques. I do that all day, every day. When some guy shows up to say, "I've never done your job, and I've never watched you do your job, and I don't know your kids, or your school or your community or you, but I would like to tell you how you should totally change what you do based on one flawed piece of research with ten bits of data, and by the way, I'm hoping to make a ton of money by selling this to you--" Well, that's just not a pitch I'm buying. I'm an education researcher every day of my professional life.


So the list of reasons is a little incomplete. What does Petrilli propose as possible solutions?

Book it. Basically, publish your research in book form so that people who read books will find it. "Develop evidence-based book that might have an impact." And I was almost nodding along with this one, but then he tossed out Doug Lemov's odious Teach Like a Champion as an example, which is kind of like using Art of the Deal as an example of a way to teach economics.

Get together. Again, he's onto something in noting that most teachers get techniques and ideas from people that they personally know and trust. But from there he jumps to the notion that folks with ed ideas to plug should "do a better job partnering" with groups that already exist, and that's not false, but the problem there is also not knew-- it is hard to "partner" with people when your idea of "partner" is "I'll talk and you'll listen. I'll sell and you'll buy. You'll scratch my back, and I'll help you scratch my back." He also likes the ideas of maybe forming new networks which-- come on. Reformsters have been trying to form new grass roots networks from the top down for the past several decades, from the Center for Education Reform to StudentsFirst. Surely we already have enough astroturf.

Go small. Again, not an entirely bad idea. Petrelli suggests that instead of broad global big scale studies, why not small-scale studies that give us information about very specific, very focused situations. Which-- let's be honest-- is what many education researchers have been producing without admitting it. After all, how much education research is there that applies only to small groups of sophomore from one specific university. A great deal of research does only apply to small, narrow situations-- researchers just haven't been willing to admit that they haven't found the solution for everyone everywhere.

Look, as I said above, evidence improves America's school every single day. Every half-decent classroom runs on evidence that the teacher-researcher gathers and processes constantly, often with several replications of the study in a single day. We try new things and we immediately find out how well they work. We share what our research has uncovered (at least, we do in schools where our job security and don't depend on "beating" our colleagues) and we pick up ideas from our larger web of connections (our Personal Learning Networks, as the current jargon puts it).

The problem with much of what Petrilli and Finn before him call "evidence-based" is that the evidence sucks. We are stuck right now in a period when a bunch of influential people actually imagine that the scores from a narrow, badly-constructed test taken by disinterested students is somehow evidence of anything at all. I can't say this enough times. The scores from the Big Standardized Tests are not evidence of a single damned thing.

Meanwhile, the evidence I collect in my classroom is immediate, actionable, and directly impacts instruction and my students' achievement. The kind of research and evidence and growth and development that teachers do every day is the lifeblood of pretty much every school where the process hasn't been choked to death by some lousy administrator or a dopey CMO that that already thinks it knows everything and need not listen to teachers. The real question Petrilli is asking is, "Can we tap into that, inject our own stuff into the bloodstream, and somehow get the process to move in the direction we want it to?" But if we're going to inject it into the heart and soul of the school, it had better be something other than lumpy, clotted junk.

Virtually Teaching

"Teacher Shortage Crisis Forces Districts To Innovate"

I get emails, often from folks who are thrusting their PR releases blindly into the blogosphere. Somebody or something told them I'm an education blogger, and so they add me to a mailing list, and mostly I don't pay attention. But the subject line that appears above caught my attention, and so I read my email from Shelly Smith, PR Manager for Proximity Learning, Inc., and consequently got to learn about one more way people are trying to make a buck or ten in the edu-biz.

By virtually teaching.

Proximity Learning might be one of the more ironic names out there, because what they actually deal in is what we used to call distance learning. I'll tell you more about how they work in a moment, but first, let me introduce you to the guys who came up with this outfit.

Andrew Polito is co-founder, COO and Vice President of the company. He has an edu-pedigree as the son of famed Tuscon edu-gadfly Sam Polito. He has a background running IT for a district, teaching ESL oversees, and generally getting involved in China Stuff. His undergrad work was in liberal arts and East Asian Studies.

Polito's co-founder is PLI CEO is Evan Erdberg. Erdberg is listed as a co-founder, but his LinkedIn account shows him as CEO since 2014, though the company says it was founded in 2008. Anyway, before PLI, , Erdberg worked in sales for Teachscape, a company specializing in "human resource management" that I once described as a place where the manufactured crisis in education meets the opportunity to make money from it. He also spent six years with Knowledge Delivery Systems, where one of his accomplishments was developing "a strategy to enter three new market verticals with our existing products that increased revenue by 25% and expenses by only 5%." Prior to that-- marketing, marketing and more marketing. His education-- a BA in Marketing and Management (Franklin and Marshall) and an MBA in Organizational Leadership (University of Edinburgh).

In the whole management team, there are two managers (Human Resources and Teacher Effectiveness) with actual teaching in their background. The three lead teachers include one elementary teacher and two whose background is in teaching Chinese.

That fits the PLI origin story, which says that PLI was founded (as TCG Global) in 2008 to meet the new crisis in world language instruction. Since then, they have expanded their offerings. But their basic format remains the same-- using the internet for virtual teaching.

See, everyone used to be short Chinese teachers and American Sign Language teachers, but nowadays, everyone is short all kinds of teachers, and the folks at PLI smell opportunity. Via e-mail, here's how Erdberg explained it to me:

Each student has access to a computing device such as a Chromebook, Laptop, Ipad, Tablet, etc. When they come into class they log in to our online software and they actually see our teacher.  Our teacher will then also see them through the webcams on there computing device.  Our teacher will then lead class in the same way a teacher physically there would.  In every classroom there in a sub/facilitator/parent etc. that assists with classroom management.  Our teacher also adopts the schools curriculum, using there books and lesson plans, there grading policy, and we set up the classes to the bell schedule of each school we work in.  Students can raise there hand during class to ask questions, be called up to the "whiteboard" by the teacher to show work, etc.  All assignments are done online in our Learning Management system along with grading etc.  We are effectively able to find and hire fantastic teachers and deliver them to students that would otherwise have a substitute or an unqualified teacher. 

And here's what that looks like in action...




Erdberg was happy to answer other questions as well. School districts hire PLI on a per-class basis, with an allowance of up to thirty seats per class. And when I asked him about costs to the district, he told me

The cost to hire one of our teachers is about 25% lower than hiring a full time teacher since they are not paying healthcare, pension costs, taxes, union negotiated wages, 401k, etc. They only pay a set fee to us.

I wondered exactly who PLI would hire to teach-- after all, working teachers are, well, working when these courses need to be presented. Erdberg says they hire a large number of teachers on maternity leave as well as recent retirees-- folks who want to stay in the game, but prefer working part-time and/or from home.

I imagine the technical issues are legion. I wonder how extensive a lab there would be in the PLI teacher's kitchen, and the production values and camera work have to be an issue as well. In the example video above I was dying to have control over camera position, because the chosen angle made it challenging to see what the teacher was trying to show. And PLI teachers are supposed to adopt the hiring school's curriculum, but if the school doesn't have someone teaching that course (hence the need to hire PLI) I have to wonder just how useful the curriculum is.

I can see the value of PLI's original mission, perhaps because I work in precisely the kind of school district that could never offer something like courses in Chinese unless it was through this kind of distance learning arrangement.

But I am reminded of the mission creep of Teach for America, an enterprise that started out with the noble mission of filling empty teaching positions but eventually, flush with Big Money and Important Friends, became a way to replace and supplant actual existing teachers.

PLI is currently in California, Virginia, Kentucky, New Jersey and Texas (they are based in Austin); here's the list that Smith sent me of participating districts (here's a newspaper story about the Greenville, MS district)

• Richmond City Public Schools, (Capital of VA)
• Kansas City Public Schools (Largest City in MO)
• Columbus City Public Schools (Largest City in OH)
• Cincinnati Public Schools (3rd Largest City in OH)
• San Antonio ISD ( 2nd largest city in TX) 
• Garland ISD (12th Largest City in TX)
• Stockton USD (13th Largest city in CA)
• Greenville Public Schools (Located in the deep south of MS)
• Bibb County School District (The 4th Largest district in GA) 
• Clovis Municipal Schools (10th Largest district in NM)
• Quakertown Community School District, PA
•  Ecorse Public Schools, MI
• St. Helena Parish Schools, LA
• Mainland Regional School District, NJ

Are these districts that have all been forced to "innovate" in the face of a teacher shortage, or are we working on innovative ways to avoid actually hiring full-time, benefit-receiving, pension-funding teachers? Does this help solve the "teacher shortage," or does it make it less necessary to even think about it? The usual reformy players are not in evidence with PLI (it may involve too many actual trained teachers for their tastes), but I'm always a little leery of any chance for folks to say, "Hey, look! We don't actually have to hire real teachers any more!" Of course, distance learning has been around for a while, offering some real benefits but failing to gain traction. And I have my doubts about the technology's ability to interest or engage digital natives. But this is a thing that is now out there in the world. Watch for a virtual teacher coming to the classroom next door. A little less human, but at least more cheap.

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.