The Choices Charters Hate

One of the evergreen arguments in favor of modern charters is that they will be laboratories of innovation. Freed from the constraints of the public school system, charters will whip up brand new educational approaches, pedagogical discoveries that somehow nobody has ever whipped up before. Once they have freed the edu-genii, they will then unleash these cool new ideas on the whole education world, and all schools will work better because the charters were allowed to figure out brilliant new techniques that the public schools could not.

That's how it's sold. But that's not how it works.

First, charters have displayed no special ability to think of brand new educational ideas that nobody has ever thought of before. Longer day, longer year, only teach the kids that are easy to teach-- none of these are new ideas. Pay teachers less and give them no say in how the school is run-- also not new ideas, but also not particularly good ones, either.

But even if charters are whipping up new edu-concepts, that doesn't mean they want to share. The modern charter is born of corporate culture, and one basic principle of corporate culture is that Ford does not send its best ideas over to Chrysler management.

No, in the corporate world many contracts come with strict non-competition clauses. So it should be no surprise to find the same thing going on in the charter world. In fact, it should be no surprise to discover that charters want to straightjacket their teachers as much as possible.

Meet Mike Kowalski.

Mike Kowalski was a teacher for the Mystic Valley Regional Charter School. Like most charters, MVRCS has no union and hires teachers for just a year at a time ("at will" meaning "at the will of the bosses"). They also offer lousy wages, and their teachers have no real power or say in the school. So how do they keep teachers from jumping ship at the first available opportunity to get a real job?

Easy. They require teachers make a contractual commitment in April for the following fall. And if the teachers take another job, the school sues them for breach of contract.

Kowalski signed his contract in April, was offered a job weeks later. His replacement was quickly hired and Kowalski actually trained him.

And the school still demanded that Kowalski pay them over $6,000.

Kowalski ended up talking to a Massachusetts Teachers Association lawyer, who found even more astonishing contents in the MVRCS-- a non-competition clause that forbid Mystic Valley teachers from working for any of the sending districts. In other words, this laboratory of innovation was specifically forbidding its employees from sharing anything they discovered or developed. The Massachusetts notion that charters are meant to "stimulate the development of innovative programs within schools" is not only being ignored, but is being expressly thwarted, specifically forbidden.

The non-compete clause makes perfect sense if you think that a charter school is a private business run on proprietary secrets. This is one more reason that these modern charters are in no way, shape or form public schools.

This also highlights the hypocrisy behind the charter choice arguments. Choice is great-- when it's the choice they like. The free market is great-- as long as it's serving them. But when it comes to staff, charters like Mystic Valley have taken steps to avoid any kind of market forces to come into play. Rather than compete for teachers by offering attractive employment terms, Mystic Valley tries to make sure that their teachers have no choice at all, to force them to stay by coercion and extortion.

In the corporate charter world, teachers should be easily-replaced widgets who get no choice in their working conditions, no choice in whether to stay or go, no choice in who they can talk to professionally.

Duncan Scolds Education Schools

When former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan isn't busy joining another board of some education-flavored enterprise (his latest is Revolution Foods, an over-hyped cafeteria supply company), he still finds time to offer uninformed opinions about education itself.

Pay me to have an opinion about school lunch? Retirement is awesome.

Take for instance his open letter today at Brookings, in which Duncan castigates the nation's collegiate teacher preparation programs.

He opens with his trademark blame-disguised-as-praise:

Schools of education are providing one of the most important services in America today, training our future teachers who will prepare our children to succeed in work and in life. No other responsibility is more directly linked to our future.

Really? Economic policy, business growth, policies addressing poverty, maintenance of infrastructure, global diplomacy-- nothing at all more directly influences the future of our nation than how well colleges prepare future teachers?  Okay then. Let's address the Most Critical Issue Facing Our Nation with a look at the hard facts.

Nah. On second thought, says Arne, let's just pull out a report from the National Council on Teacher Quality, a group devoted to proving that college ed programs stink, and proving it by using the laziest research methods ever. In fact, Duncan goes back to a NCTQ report from November of 2014, the delightful "Easy A" report. I've already discussed this as the most rigor-free half-baked research to ever be taken seriously. Research so lazy that it "evaluated" non-existent programs. Research so lazy that it literally consisted of reading commencement programs and course catalogs.

Duncan also cites the Deans for Impact, a group that includes Mayme Hostetter, a "dean" of the Relay Graduate [sic] School [sic] of Education [sic], the group created by charter operators as a way to grow their own "teachers" without having to actually do any of the real work. Relay was just rejected by the state of Pennsylvania, based on their lack of pretty much all characteristic features of an actual graduate school of education like qualified education professors and (no kidding) a library of actual education resources.

Duncan also shares the shocking news that he has talked to many teachers who did not feel ready to teach on Day One. Here's a quick pro tip-- if you feel absolutely ready to teach on Day One-- any Day One, including Day One of your thirtieth year-- you do not understand the situation and you are probably not safe to let loose in a classroom.

Nevertheless, I will give Duncan some slack here. I have been pretty critical of some teacher prep programs myself, and it is true that there is room for improvement. That's the education biz-- there is always room for improvement. But first you have to understand what needs to improve and how teaching actually works, and after all these years, there's little evidence that Duncan gets it.

As usual with a Duncan missive on education, there is grinding cognitive dissonance folded in with the soaring rhetoric. Duncan wants education programs to know that there is no room for lowering expectations, that lowering expectations does a disservice to teaching candidates, students, and presumably, given his opening, the fate of civilization as we know it.

He wants to see teachers held to high standards, "like engineering, business and medical students," which I suppose is his special way of saying that teachers are super-important, but they all suck.

We've heard versions of this from Duncan before, and as always I am waiting for the part of the message that would logically follow.

I am waiting for the part where Duncan condemns Teach for America for its super-short teacher training program. I am waiting for the part where Duncan condemns states that now allow anybody with any sort of degree to work in a classroom. I am waiting for the part where he condemns states and school districts try to fight the teacher shortage by lowering the job requirements to "stays upright, mostly."

I am waiting, of course, in vain. Citizen Duncan, like Secretary Duncan, reserves his scolding for the traditional public school system and the people who spend their lives working there. The shadow education system, the parallel system set up in the land of free market forces and private profit-- that system remains above reproach, immune to criticism, the recipients of no public letters except those filled with praise.

Jeb! Still Doesn't Understand

Jeb Bush sat down with Matt Barnum for an interview that ran at Campbell Brown's pro-reform website, the 74, And in the course of the interview. Bush showed that he doesn't understand education any better than he ever did. (He also discussed the Presidential election, though he didn't explain how his oppo guys did such a lousy job fending off Donald "Dumpster Fire" Trump.)

So what are the things that Jeb! still doesn't understand?

Jeb doesn't understand the true value of the Big Standardized Test (or lack thereof).



Bush still has an almost-childlike belief in the uber-importance of BS Testing. Early in the interview, he actually said this:

Rising student achievement is the only thing that matters; everything else is an input.

And later:

The delivery system is not relevant. That’s an input. The outcomes are what matters.

So not only do we not need public schools, but we don't need any type of school at all. Bush touts the awesomeness of "virtual" schools, but come on-- "student achievement" as always just means "BS Test scores," so if the results of a badly-written narrow test of just reading and math are all that matters, then we might as well hook students up to some test prep software and just let them plug away until they output a sufficiently high test score.

The students and their humanity don't matter. Other subject areas don't matter. The schools and the communities they serve don't matter. Just get those test score up. That's all that matters.

Jeb doesn't understand the value of schools to a community. 

Jeb wants to see any schools that "don't work" just shut down. Charter, public, cyber-- any schools that "don't work" should just be put out of business right away. Of course, what on earth "don't work" actually means is a mystery (I suppose it means "get low test scores") but the notion that you can just close down a school and not deliver a serious blow to the students, families and communities involved is just--well, it's the kind of thing that would make sense to a prep school bro.

Jeb doesn't understand the calls for charter accountability.

Jeb thinks that the folks criticizing charter and cyber schools, both for-profit and non-profit, are just a bunch of hypocrites, and that public schools should face accountability, too.

This is an odd sort of complaint, since the most common complaint about charter accountability is that they don't face the same level of accountability as public schools. They don't answer to elected boards, they don't have to follow the same rules for employment or even student treatment, and they have vigorously resisted any real transparency in how they spend taxpayer money.

I do not know of a single charter critic who has called for any rules for charters that public schools do not already follow.

Jeb doesn't know that cyber charters are a failed experiment.

Barnum: Now that many studies show that cyber charters are widely sucking hugely--

Bush: Not all of them. There might be one non-sucky one. So shut up. Just check the test scores.

Jeb doesn't know where Common Core came from. Still.

Bush still wants to argue that Common Core wasn't a federal program. Their involvement was indirect, Jab says. Like indirectly financing the creation and indirectly financing the tests that would give the Core teeth and indirectly blackmailing states into adopting them by leveraging the threat of NCLB penalties. Kind of like Trump pushed Bush out of the Presidential race by indirectly taking all the votes.

Jeb doesn't know how life in cities on this planet goes.

This is Jeb describing how he thinks, if we could start from scratch, we'd fix a whole lot of issues like segregation:

Here’s the accountability that we’re going to have. We’re going to make sure that we have rising student achievement, and when it doesn’t happen, we call it out. Moms and dads will know how schools are working, that they have a menu from which they can choose private option, public option, a hybrid, a competency-based model, a magnet school, schools that focus on a thematic kind of learning — whatever it is, if you’d have a menu, and you choose, I don’t think you’d have the same segregation. I’m almost positive.

Where to begin? I'm not sure this matches the vision of anybody on any side of the school debates. Nor does it seem that Bush understands any of the forces that create segregation, nor how market-based reform has itself emerged as a huge driver of segregation, nor how free-market ed reform no more promotes a discussion of the true merits of schools any more than the free market promotes a discussion of the relative nutritional and dietary benefits of McDonald's versus Burger King.

He's actually pretty sure that reforms in Florida have fixed things, which leads me to believe that Bush hasn't actually visited Florida in a while. Googling turns up multiple examples of studies over the past few years showing how segregation-- and re-segregation-- is alive and thriving in Florida (here's one, and here's another one).

Jeb doesn't know what political correctness is

I just don’t think we have the luxury of being politically correct right now. There’s a thousand kinds of alternatives that ought to exist, but the monopoly and the politics and the bureaucracy stifle the kind of innovation that occurs each and every day in every aspect of our life that is unregulated

I don't even know how to parse this, how political correctness (generally defined as "I don't feel like I'm allowed to express my racist thoughts, wah") is an impediment to the spread of free market education, unless Bush is referring to ideas like "Disenfranchising black and brown people so that some folks can make a buck by pretending to educate them" which is, I guess, an example of political correctness?

Jeb doesn't know what he said a few paragraphs ago

Remember a few paragraphs ago when Bush said that a free market education system would naturally de-segregate everyone? He's had a new thought-- desegregation helped raise black student achievement because they were then "accessing information that they never had before"so if we just hook every student up to their own Personalized Education computer, they'll all get great test scores and we will have achieved the results of de-segregation without actually having to de-segregate anything. So, problem solved! What, did you think there were benefits to de-segregation other than higher test scores? I'm sure they weren't important.

Jeb doesn't know how money functions in the education world

Barnum brings up the recent study published in Education Next that suggests that if you give schools more money, test scores go up. Bush is pretty sure that can't be right.

I don’t know what the research was that you just said, but if you’re spending $25,000 a student in Newark and you’re getting worse results for like-kind students than you do spending $8,000 in an urban core Florida public school, I can’t imagine that the research wouldn’t suggest that by itself that money is the answer. 

Because Newark and Florida are pretty much exactly the same. I get the impression reading Bush that his vision of America is a place that is as homogeneous as a slab of tofu, with some sprinkles of food coloring, but no actual differences of substance that mean anything. I will also note that he gets all the way through this interview without ever mentioning poverty or any sorts of cultural differences that might effect how education works. No, it's just a delivery system for getting high test scores out of students.

Barnum asks a pretty cool follow-up; if New Jersey funding goes down as it would under Christie's hare-brained proposal, does Bush think test scores will go down? Bush dodges the question. Well, no, actually he swats it down like an errant squash ball.

I don’t think it’s relevant in the overall objective. If you created an open system that I envision, you would have rising student achievement at far less because the scalability of success would become natural.

Which leads me to...

Jeb doesn't know we've tried all his pet ideas and they have failed

Bush remains convinced that all his good stuff has been thwarted by... well, you know who.

A successful school that is spending $8,000 a student, in the system we have today, all across this country, with 13,000-plus government-run, unionized, politicized monopolies, doesn’t take kindly to that success; it doesn’t say, Let me try to steal the ideas that created that success. In fact, those successful schools many times are marginalized. 

That's it. All the successful market-based schools getting great test scores for mere peanuts-- they've been marginalized and are hiding in some dark corner, huddled up with the Loch Ness Monster and a brace of Yeti, bemoaning their socially outcast state. Or maybe in that other corner with failed Presidential candidates listening to Mom tell them, "That's all right. They just don't like you because you are so smart and awesome and better than they are."

Jeb doesn't know that his old state is busy abusing nine-year-olds

Bush makes the point that money needs to be spent on reform programs, not schools. What works? "Funding your programs first rather than funding the beast," because public schools are just slavering evil union-soaked monopolies that live to suck the blood of small children, I guess. But then he offers an extraordinary example:


If you want to eliminate social promotion in third grade, you gotta have interventions, so that in second and first and kindergarten and pre-K and in third grade, so that there’s a strategy to make sure that kids aren’t held back. 

Um. That's not quite what they're trying these days in the Sunshine State, where a bunch of third graders had to go to court to be promoted to fourth grade because even though their grades are solid, they didn't take the state's beloved test. So apparently you also need to feed the lawyers, because another tool of fighting social or even academic promotion is the courts.

Jeb just doesn't know so many things

Bush is pretty sure that merit rewards for schools that get high scores out of students is just awesome, and he proudly references the $150 school recognition bonuses to teachers, which of course explains why so many teachers in Florida are driving brand new Lexuses (Lexi?). And here's another thing he apparently actually said

If you want to pay good teachers, great teachers, more, it’s going to work better than not paying them.

Well, I can't argue with that. This is undoubtedly the sort of educational insight that Harvard hired Bush to impart. 

Bush also seems certain that research would show that spending money over the last fifty years has gotten us a worse result. Because in Bush's tofu America, nothing else of significance has changed over the last fifty years. Oh, and the research that exists says he's wrong, too.

Are we sure George is the "dumb" one?

It's kind of amazing that Jeb! has made education his policy specialty for years, because he shows an oversimplified nuance-free evidence-deficient view of education that usually is best mastered by dilettantes who diligently avoid any sort of educated input. It has to be hard to be involved in a an area for so long and yet absorb so little real understanding. It's almost as if he entered the education world already committed to free-market business-friendly money-making policies and made sure to ignore any information that would get in the way of his already-chosen policies.

Bush believes devoutly in the BS Test and in the power of the marketplace. Reality and the world of facts have nothing else to offer him; he'll continue to sit comfortably in the warm embrace of his tofu throne.

No Digital Leadership for the Future (and No Research Base, Either)

"Future-Ready Schools" is emerging as the umbrella buzzword for the cluster of edu-biz opportunities emerging around the world of personalized learning, competency-based education, and the computer-driven school. There's a lot to learn about this area, and none of it is encouraging for fans of public education or the general idea of having children taught by human beings.

You can read a lot about Future Ready Schools here at a website that exists at a staggering nexus of private and government organizations, and we'll dip back into this slimy ocean many times in the weeks ahead. But today we're narrowing the focus.

On the Future Ready Framework page, we find the claim that the framework is research based. The phrase links to a report from the feds that makes two things clear:

1) The future for personalized learning is disturbing.

2) Anything can be "research-based" if you define "research" broadly enough.

We have seen #2 in action before-- the government definition of evidence-based as found in the Every Student Succeeds Act is less stringent than the standard used by the Weekly World News.

So what is research-based, exactly?

But the Characteristics of Future Ready Leadership paper from the US Department of Education's Office of Educational Technology says it provides a rubric! So you know this is hard data in action here. Research based! Really!! And here are the things that count as evidence according to the department:

Experimental research-- this is the empirical research that uses "an experimental or quasi-experimental approach" to test a theory of action of "explore connections" between inputs and outcomes. So there's no need to distinguish between correlation and causation, and no mention of review or replication of this experimental research.

Descriptive research-- for this one, all you need do is observe, give a survey, or conduct an interview with someone about a program. Fact checkers are unnecessary.

Grey literature-- now we just throw caution to the wind. Any white paper or report from a "reputable source" is fair game. It need not be connected to reality in any measurable way.

Professional standards-- standards put together by any leading organization in the field.

Expert opinion-- "conclusions or conjectures" from any expert in the field.

So if you imagined that "research-based" meant "based in research, like the kind conducted by trained scientists under controlled conditions with solid experimental designs and peer review," you were kidding yourself. A think tank paper based on unicorn breath and fairy tears, a glowing description of a program created under the control of that programs PR department, or just a wild-ass guess from someone who's managed to gain a rep as an "expert" -- that's all perfectly good for building a research base (suddenly the career of Raj Chetty makes more sense).

Does the USED meet this high standard?

The paper we're looking at has a nine-page bibliography. And it makes full use of the very broad definition of "research" delineated above, and embrace so wide that anything that came back on a google search for "education stuff" would count as research.

Here's "The digital learning imperative" from the Alliance for Excellent Education, a full-out reformy group led by former governor Bob Wise. This papers is a good example of the "report as advocate's PR argument" school of reporting. Not really research at all, but a finely woven tale that spins out "Let me tell you why I think you should agree with my policy ideas, based on the thoughts in my head and not really anything else."

Here's a piece on digital backpacks written in 2007, whene all discussion of digital backpacks was purely theoretical and speculative. Or a page on blended professional development that is mostly a presentation of the reasoning arguing in favor of it, with an overview of how it worked in one place (though not a consideration of how well it worked). And another speculative piece about the imagined future of elearning, again from 2007.

And that's just in the As. Cruising through the list of sources we find a piece by iNACOL, the group invested in promoting on-line edubusiness. An article advocating for flipped learning from the Flipped Learning Network. A straight-up advertisement from Digital Promise for their micro-credentials program.

Are there some legit sources as well. Sure. But by this definition of "research," a study about the effects of smoking could go ahead and cite promotional materials from R J Reynolds about the benefits of smoking.

So what are we pushing here?

So all of this sort-of-faux-research is being harnessed in the service of what, exactly? And can we see that leadership rubric now?

Well, second question first-- no, we cannot. Despite promises to the contrary, there is no rubric. There are charts which list "dimensions" for each of the four leadership qualities along with initials indicating which "type" of "research" is being referenced along with an "exemplary" column which-- seriously, we're going to label a column with an adjective. I guess this is supposed to represent the very best version of the dimension, skipping other columns like "good enough," and "not so great," thereby creating the impression that this is a rubric of some sort. It's not. It's a bad, lazy chart being used to dress up non-research.

So let's look at each of the four qualities needed for Futury Leadership.

Collaborative Leadership

Here's the definition of collaborative leadership that we are offered:

Commitment to demonstrating strong leadership aptitude, developing the vision, securing the ongoing funding, building the district-wide leadership team, and garnering the broad-based support needed to ensure a successful digital learning transition for students and teachers.

Do government copywriters go to a special school in which the meanings of words are sucked out of their heads? What part of that definition looks remotely like collaboration? This is sales and marketing-- grow your vision, sell your vision, get backers for your vision, convince underlings to buy into your vision. There's no collaboration here. None.

As we break it down into dimensions, some collaborative moments emerge in which district leaders are supposed to do things like seek "input in decision making" and convene "a team of diverse stakeholders." And then there's the "Culture of Trust and Innovation" in which everyone is supposed to be linked all the time, but somehow also feel free to take risks and operate independently. Big brother is watching, so just follow your muse bravely while you follow the strategic plan for implementing the vision. Gollow the exact same plan in our own way. Let's all be independent together.

Personalized Student Learning 

This is central to the Future Ready School, and the hub around which everything else turns, and this shows a complete lack of awareness of any of the weaknesses and problems of the approach. (You can read some of my research-based writing on the subject here).

The rigorous and relevant learning outcomes should be "defined in terms of competencies," which means they will be neither rigorous nor relevant, but limited to the sorts of hoops best suited to cyber-jumping. The "integrated assessments" should be set up to collect data on an ongoing basis-- all computerized testing, all the time. Students are on a pathway that is part student-chosen, part teacher-chosen, and part software-chosen. There will be all sorts of "high-quality content and tools aligned with outcomes." Meaning that everything is ultimately driven by what the computer is capable of assessing on a large scale across all students.

Oh, and teachers get new roles as "educational designers, coaches and facilitators, guiding students through their personalized learning experiences. Which is not so much "new" roles as just "frewer" roles.

Robust Infrastructure

Equitable access to next-generation bandwidth, wireless, hardware, and devices, managed by support personnel for reliable use-- both inside and outside of school.

Of all the pipe dreams of the CBE/Personalized Learning "revolution," this is the most pipely dreamiest.

While some supporters of CBE get excited about this part because they can just imagine all the money to be made here, but it's not very clear where all that money is going to come from. But this quality calls for specific high speed internet connections and a piece of equipment in every pot, with nifty software to boot. I cannot even begin to imagine the price to actually do this-- and to do it in such a speedy manner that schools have "next-generation" equipment all the time (aka all new hard- and soft-ware every six months).

Personalized Professional Learning

Yeah, let's just plug all teachers in to computers to earn their micro-credentials by passing ridiculous assessments on line. That's dopey enough, but the dimension that renders all the rest of this into sheer nonsense is the one that declares that the only professional development that matters is the one that raises student scores.

There are other dimensions to suggest that we can do this on the cheap by having teachers train and coach each other, and that would actually be a fine thing if we were thinking about actually improving teaching and not just raising test scores. But since teachers' jobs will now be just to coach students through their computerized programs, I guess better teaching is beside the point anyway.

But just like the students, teachers will be plugged in all day, every day, and the professional development will just sort of seep into our pores.

This is dreadful stuff

The future-ready classroom is a deeply unappealing place to actual teachers. Lord knows there's lots of technology that could be-- and is-- useful, but the future-ready classroom is neither student centered nor teacher centered, but software centered and data driven, which means everything will be designed around the needs of the software designers and hardware vendors. Students and teachers will just have to adapt, and education itself will be twisted into a mass of unenlightened hoop-jumpery. Feel free to quote my argument here as research-based.

ICYMI: October Already

Just some of the choice reading from the week. Don't forget to pass it on. And don't forget to look at some of the writing linked in the right-hand column of this blog. 

Denied

I wrote about this piece this week, but the Texas systematic denial of special ed services deserves a look.

New Empirical Evidence That Students in Persistent Economic Disadvantage More Likely To Bias Value-Added Estimates

Okay, it may seem like a scary title. but Audrey Amrein-Beardsley is looking at yet another study showing that test results and the VAM scores based on them tell us more about student socio-economic background than anything else.

Big Class Sizes Violate Constitution, Voters' Will

At the Orlando Sentinel, Scott Maxwell points out how large class sizes in Florida are thwarting the law.

SATs Are Worthless

Manuel Alfaro, the former SAT exec turned whistleblower is back with a specific example of exactly why the new SAT is a mess.


Where Is Common Core Headed ? (To Oblivion, Probably)

From NYU, an interesting (if not always exactly accurate) look at the current state of the Core.

Charter School Stomps Unions

This Slate investigative report looks at the Wal-martian lengths that charter schools will go to to keep unions out.

Democracy and national Education Standards

Nick Tampio offers a thoughtful, scholarly look at the conflict between the push for national standards and that whole democracy thing.

NY Times and Solutions Journalism

Bill Gates figured out years ago that it's no good paying for policies to be pursued if you don't also pay for some good newspaper coverage of them. Leonie Haimson looks at one example of how that plays out in New York

How Much Democracy Is Too Much?

The march of market-based education reform has come in lockstep with an assault on democracy. From Philly to Detroit to Chicago, the repeated policy message has been that Some Folks really shouldn't have democracy, that Some Folks need to have things decided for them. Of course, Some Folks invariably turn out to be non-wealthy, non-white folks. If you are poor and black, democracy is apparently a luxury that you do not need.

Reformsters have made the case for this silencing of black and brown voices in a variety of ways.

Democracy, they may argue, is not really democracy because school board elections are dominated by teachers unions. Here's Terry Moe, at the time a Stanford professor and fellow at Stanford's conservative Hoover Institute, "explaining" the issue way back in 2006:

School-board elections are supposed to be the democratic means by which ordinary citizens govern their own schools. The board is supposed to represent “the people.” But in many districts it really doesn’t. For with unions so powerful, employee interests are given far more weight in personnel and policy decisions than warranted, and school boards are partially captured by their own employees. Democracy threatens to be little more than a charade, serving less as a mechanism of popular control than as a means by which employees promote their own special interests.

This refrain has been echoed down through reformster annals-- school boards are the puppets of the teachers' unions, notorious for placing their adult issues ahead of student needs.

Reformsters also push the idea that mayoral control, where a locally-elected school board is swept aside so that a dashing chief executive can take control, is just more efficient and really helps Get Things Done. Here's the Center for American Progress making their case:

There is evidence that districts operating under mayoral control may spend their money differently, more strategically, and with a greater focus on the classroom than districts governed by elected boards.

CAP, like all mayoral control fans, has to acknowledge that in some places it has crashed and burned spectacularly, but they still argue that "in the right cases, however, mayoral control can be a catalyst for reform."

Reed Hastings famously argued that school boards are too unstable to run a school district, that all that constant electing means that they change direction and alter policies based on what the electorate demands. Charters are better because their boards don't answer to the voters.

And so the fundamental problem with school districts is not their fault, the fundamental problem is that they don’t get to control their boards and the importance of the charter school movement is to evolve America from a system where governance is constantly changing and you can’t do long term planning to a system of large non-profits…

Hastings acknowledged that reformsters couldn't just go out and argue for the end of elected school boards, but the stable governance and steady improvement of charters would eventually allow them to glom up 90% of all students, effectively replacing public schools subject to elected governance.

And for some reformsters even that is not enough. The concept of the Achievement School District is to create a state-level school district run by a state-level czar-- well, not so much "run by" as "brokered out to private education businesses."

And in Michigan, the pattern has become to put state-hired emergency managers in charge of everything from school systems to cities to basic utilities (with the power to decide what constitutes an "emergency" resting with the state). It hasn't gone well for cities like Flint or school systems like Detroit, but Michigan government still hasn't called for an end to emergency managers.

Now, I could take a side trip pointing out how all of these arguments are specious, based on failed premises and providing failure as results. But that's not where we're headed today. Instead, I want to ask a far more disturbing question.

Exactly how much democracy is too much.

Currently, the answer is mostly that school board election level local democracy is too much democracy for Some People, and that all by itself establishes a hugely disturbing principle, the principle that here in the United States of America, authorities can somehow decide that some of y'all aren't entitled to democracy any more, that you lost your right to vote, that you need to have things decided by your Betters. That principle plus racism equals hugely wrong policy.

But let's also note that every single argument leveled against locally elected school boards-- that elections are dominated by Certain Interests, that such elected groups can be unstable and inefficient-- can be leveled against every single elected office in this country.

So how much democracy is too much?

If the voters' judgment results in a school board whose power must be superseded by other officials, why not do the same for state legislatures, which are subject to all the same problems. Why not do the same to state legislatures, to Congress, to every elected office in the country? Is there anything to point to that says clearly that getting rid of democracy for running school systems is on the other side of a clear line that should not be crossed? Can you explain clearly why a locally elected school board should be done away with, but a locally elected legislature should not?

In terms of policy arguments, the answer is no. And in fact the rise of policy ideas like Michigan's emergency managers is a sign that in some places, that non-existent line has already been crossed.

It is ironic and scary to find us walking down this road these days because the idea that we just need a Big Strong Superman who can get in there and Get Things Done without being hampered by rules and the vagueries of democracy-- well, we're now facing an entire Presidential campaign based on that exact theory, and some of the same people who are horrified at the notion of elected Donald Trump as Beloved Leader also love the idea of having Rahm Emmanuel run Chicago schools instead of locally elected school boards.

I'm not a big fan of slippery slope arguments, but this is not so much a slippery slope argument as it is fruit of the same tree. Either you believe that our American notion of democracy is a valuable bedrock principle of our nation and is to be cherished and preserved even when it is messy and annoying, or you believe that some people are better than others, and the people who are better should be given relatively unfettered freedom to do what they know is right without the interference or distraction of messy democracy giving voice to people who should just sit quietly while their Betters run things.

Yes, we have always struggled with some version of this, as might be expected in a country founded by men who articulated great ideas that they couldn't quite live up to themselves. Nevertheless, this country's stated bedrock principles do not include a dedication to just a little democracy. It has been a long and hard struggle to extend the principles of democracy to all of our citizens. Is there really a compelling argument to move backwards? I don't think so.

When a Charter Closes (and Choice Is Not Choice)

The free market acolytes, lovers of the modern charter school, have a pretty neat and clean vision of the future. Well-informed parents choose from within a wide array of charter schools, and at appropriate moments, the market sloughs off those schools that either do a lousy job or are just not providing something that a large slice of the market wants.The whole process should be as tidy and bloodless as shopping at Wal-Mart.

But a piece from KPCC (Southern California Public Radio) last month shows how messy the actual function of the charter school market is.

Kyle Stokes reports on the story of a West Los Angeles charter that shut down three weeks into the school year. Thirteen months after opening, the fragile City Charter Schools high school hit a financial bump that ended them.

The article points at several issues that led to the school's demise.

One was that it simply didn't dent the market. Even though it was intended to receive students from the chain's elementary and middle schools, that didn't happen. And the insight offered about that under-enrollment highlights one of the paradoxes of "choice."

"Some kids just want the bigger school," Braimah said. "They want the football field, the marching band and all of those trappings; lots and lots of elective choices."

Yes-- if you want your child to have choices, one of the best ways to get those choices is by enrolling at a full-sized public school, where students can have their choice of many different programs under one roof. Want to start out as a band geek who also plays a sport, but then later decide to switch to art and science without completely changing schools? A full-sized public high school can do that. City Charter's high school, with less than half of its hoped-for 540 student enrollment, could not.

City Charter also highlights the problems of the infamous waiting list. City Charter had hopes for higher numbers this fall, noting that there are 41,000 students on waiting lists. But there aren't. There are 41,000 seats that are wait-listed, and when one student is on six wait lists, that means that five schools are not going to be enrolling that student.

City Charter also suffered from lacking a distinct marketing pitch, a clear brand identity.

"Our story’s a little harder to tell," said [executive director Valerie] Braimah. "It's like, 'We love kids!' Well, everybody says they love kids."

The school's still-up website underlines the rather undistinct mission of the school:

Our school provides an educational experience on par with the best schools in the country while emphasizing a mixed-socioeconomic, mixed-ethnicity student body that is truly reflective of Los Angeles. Our supportive community of learners propels students to express concerns and ask for help, develop character and lead.

They had hoped that this fall would see an increase in enrollment, but instead, they were losing steam and students. City Charter didn't have a real sales angle, a clear picture of what they were offering that was different from the public system. Which raises the question of why they ever needed to exist in the first place. What exactly was the point of opening the school if it was indistinguishable from public offerings? And isn't there something wrong with a system that requires a school to have a clear marketing brand to succeed?

The last thing to note about City Charter high school is that it could have limped along much longer than it did, except that an electrical fire led to the discovery that the building had "deep-seated" problems with wiring and air conditioning, and it was going to take a battle with the landlord to get them fixed. Which serves as yet one more example of what happens when the school system becomes infected with groups for whom business missions, not educational ones, are the driving force.

The students who found themselves cut loose managed, mostly, to find a new school to take them in, and I suppose they were at least a little fortunate in that they were cast adrift close to the beginning of the school year and not in January. But in the meantime a whole bunch of taxpayer money and resources have been wasted on a school that not much of anybody wanted and which didn't provide anything special other than a chance for charter operators to expand their brand vertically.

This is not the neat, efficient system that charter fans promised-- just a wasteful mess that has destabilized the education of a hundred-or-so families. What exactly is the point of the charter revolution, again?