IIt's a short list this week, but still worth reading.
The Annual Autopsy
You know I love a good analogy. Here's one more way to look at the uselessness of "data."
Education's Failure To Retain Great Teachers
Another look at the sad state of teacher retention in the ed biz.
Seven Things I learned from Attending a Charter School Board Meeting
Nancy Flanagan went to a charter board meeting and had an eye-opening experience.
Campaign Paraphernalia for Great Schools Massachusetts
$9,000,000 ought to buy you a great deal of cool stuff. Here are some suggestions for the out-of-state privatizers who are trying to finance the anti-charter-cap campaign in Massachusetts.
Order in the Court
Also in Massachusetts, the attempt to beat the charter cap by filing a civil rights lawsuit failed. Jennifer Berkshire tells that story.
Sunday, October 9, 2016
Saturday, October 8, 2016
PA: Charter Laws "Absolute Worst"
States have taken a variety of approaches to the business of replacing public schools with publicly funded private charters. In states like Florida and North Carolina, the focus has been on tearing down the public system to make room for the charters. But in Pennsylvania, the emphasis has been on making charters so easily lucrative that edu-preneurs find getting rich easier than printing money.
PA Auditor General Eugene DePasquale has made charter law one of his regular talking points, and charter operators have provided him with ample fodder.
For instance, back in August Nicholas Trombetta finally pled guilty to a tax conspiracy charge that he had fought for three years, a charge that he had defrauded taxpayers to the tune of $8 million. These were federal charges brought by a US Attorney in federal court; in other words, the state of Pennsylvania was continuing to let this guy do business as usual.
After the guilty plea, DePasquale took a look at Trombetta's business dealings. Trombetta is the founder-operator of PA Cyber Charter School (until 2012, just before the fertilizer met the fan) and also the founder of Lincoln Performing Arts Center School and some other charter-related businesses. DePasquale found a number of issues, including hiring family members for big-money jobs, and funneling giant gouts of money to a no-oversight management company. All shady and costing the taxpayers millions of dollars, but also, as DePasquale notes, perfectly legal under Pennsylvania charter law. Trombetta was brought to justice in a federal court; the state of Pennsylvania was never going to so much as bother him because, by PA charter law, he was perfectly within his rights to hire a computer company that was co-owned by a trustee (board member).
Or take the Chester Community Charter School, where federal auditors found that, among other things, the owner had written an $11 million check to himself. CCCS uses one of teh oldest dodges in the charter rule book-- the school is listed as a non-profit, but it hires the for-profit corporation CSMI to run all operations. That company is run by Vahan Gureghian, one of the most rapacious edu-preneurs in the state, who has made tens of millions in the charter biz, but apparently has friends in Harrisburg who manage to get him perks, like the time his school was charged with cheating and was then allowed to investigate itself.
This was the same federal report we mentioned earlier this week, in which the auditors noted that the US Department of Education is failing to have any sorts of checks or safeguards against fraud or waste in the charter sector. CCCS made the list as an exemplar of just how open to fraud and waste the system is. So, yay, Pennsylvania.
DePasquale responded to the auditor's report by noting, again, that PA charter law stinks, and that there is little oversight required or even allowed by the laws.
“I have been your Auditor General for a little over three years and in that time we’ve found over $300 million dollars in money that’s basically been wasted in Harrisburg or related state government interests,” said DePasquale, a first-term Democrat. “Absolutely unbelievable. Some of the biggest waste we’ve found has been on the charter school side of it.”
The ability of any Democratic official to get changes made in the GOP-run legislature is-- well, it would be a break from a fairly well-established tradition. But at least DePasquale is busy telling anyone who will listen that Pennsylvania is not protecting the interests of its taxpayers when it comes to tax dollars spent on charter schools. Let's hope somebody will listen.
PA Auditor General Eugene DePasquale has made charter law one of his regular talking points, and charter operators have provided him with ample fodder.For instance, back in August Nicholas Trombetta finally pled guilty to a tax conspiracy charge that he had fought for three years, a charge that he had defrauded taxpayers to the tune of $8 million. These were federal charges brought by a US Attorney in federal court; in other words, the state of Pennsylvania was continuing to let this guy do business as usual.
After the guilty plea, DePasquale took a look at Trombetta's business dealings. Trombetta is the founder-operator of PA Cyber Charter School (until 2012, just before the fertilizer met the fan) and also the founder of Lincoln Performing Arts Center School and some other charter-related businesses. DePasquale found a number of issues, including hiring family members for big-money jobs, and funneling giant gouts of money to a no-oversight management company. All shady and costing the taxpayers millions of dollars, but also, as DePasquale notes, perfectly legal under Pennsylvania charter law. Trombetta was brought to justice in a federal court; the state of Pennsylvania was never going to so much as bother him because, by PA charter law, he was perfectly within his rights to hire a computer company that was co-owned by a trustee (board member).
Or take the Chester Community Charter School, where federal auditors found that, among other things, the owner had written an $11 million check to himself. CCCS uses one of teh oldest dodges in the charter rule book-- the school is listed as a non-profit, but it hires the for-profit corporation CSMI to run all operations. That company is run by Vahan Gureghian, one of the most rapacious edu-preneurs in the state, who has made tens of millions in the charter biz, but apparently has friends in Harrisburg who manage to get him perks, like the time his school was charged with cheating and was then allowed to investigate itself.
This was the same federal report we mentioned earlier this week, in which the auditors noted that the US Department of Education is failing to have any sorts of checks or safeguards against fraud or waste in the charter sector. CCCS made the list as an exemplar of just how open to fraud and waste the system is. So, yay, Pennsylvania.
DePasquale responded to the auditor's report by noting, again, that PA charter law stinks, and that there is little oversight required or even allowed by the laws.
“I have been your Auditor General for a little over three years and in that time we’ve found over $300 million dollars in money that’s basically been wasted in Harrisburg or related state government interests,” said DePasquale, a first-term Democrat. “Absolutely unbelievable. Some of the biggest waste we’ve found has been on the charter school side of it.”
The ability of any Democratic official to get changes made in the GOP-run legislature is-- well, it would be a break from a fairly well-established tradition. But at least DePasquale is busy telling anyone who will listen that Pennsylvania is not protecting the interests of its taxpayers when it comes to tax dollars spent on charter schools. Let's hope somebody will listen.
Friday, October 7, 2016
College Digitized and Privatized
Slice the "a" from 'audacity" and you have Udacity, the leading purveyor of for-profit, on-line college. Udacity is the dean of digitizing, the maharajah of MOOCkery. In them, we can see everything in the digitally privatized future face of higher ed that some folks love and other folks find appalling.
Born in 1967, Sebastian Thrun came from Germany and found a place as a Stanford professor and Google VP. He was the founder of Google X, the big geeky exploratory part of Google, and he has had a hand in everything from hoverboards to self-driving cars.
Thrun is also one of the co-parents of Udacity, an on-line digitized set of courses that can earn you, among other things, nanodegrees, which appear to be the same basic idea as micro-credentials, but which sound slightly more academically legit. Udacity started out as a few computer courses offered for free by Stanford, and its nanodegree offerings still seem primarily tech oriented, with everything from software debugging to interactive rendering to software development to web design to inscrutable-to-laypeople programs like full stack web developer. Plus a couple of Google-specific programs. And currently their most hugely popular offering is one "taught" by Thrun himself-- Self-Driving Car Engineer. SDCE has pulled huge numbers of interestedcustomers students for the course that will cost $2,400 for three twelve-week terms.
The usefulness, effectiveness, and educational validity of Massively Open On-line Courses has been debated from Day One. Late in 2012 a short cyber-debate erupted between Clay Shirky and Aaron Bady. Shirky is a tech writer thinky guy, while Bady is a blogging Cinderella story who rose to prominence because he had some good thoughts, written well, about wikileaks. Their conversation begins here, with Shirky claiming that MOOCs are like recorded music. Bady replied here in Inside Higher Education.
Some of his criticism will seem familiar:
Udacity’s primary obligation is to its investors. That reality will always push it to squeeze as much profit out of its activities as it can. This may make Udacity better at educating, but it also may not; the job of a for-profit entity is not to educate, but to profit, and it will.
But this next point is new and interesting, and well worth resurrecting from almost four years ago:
The key difference between academics and venture capitalists, in fact, is not closed versus open but evidence versus speculation. The thing about academics is that they require evidence of success before declaring victory, while venture capitalists can afford to gamble on the odds. While Shirky can see the future revolutionizing in front of us, he is thinking like a venture capitalist when he does, betting on optimism because he can afford to lose. He doesn’t know that he’s right; he just knows that he might not be wrong.
Bady also clearly sees how these on-line institutions like Udacity as pale imitations of real education-- and are meant to be.
The giveaway is when Shirky uses the phrase "non-elite institutions": for Shirky, there are elite institutions for elite students and there are non-elites for everyone else. The elite institutions will remain the same. No one will ever choose Udacity over Harvard or U.Va., and while elite institutions like MIT, Stanford, Princeton, and my own University of California are leaping into the online education world head first, anyone who thinks these online brands will ever compete with "the real thing" will be exactly the kind of sucker who would fork over full price for a watered-down product.
And he lands on this important question:
Why have we stopped aspiring to provide the real thing for everyone? That’s the interesting question, I think, but if we begin from the distinction between "elite" and "non-elite" institutions, it becomes easy to take for granted that "non-elite students" receiving cheap education is something other than giving up. It is important to note that when online education boosters talk about "access," they explicitly do not mean access to "education of the best sort"; they mean that because an institution like Udacity provides teaching for free, you can’t complain about its mediocrity. It’s not an elite institution, and it’s not for elite students. It just needs to be cheap.
Maruia Bustillos, following up on this conversation in The Awl, asked a more pointed version of the same question.
Okay, fine, but let’s get this straight: public money has been mercilessly hacked from California’s education budget for decades, so now we are to give public money, taxpayer money, to private, for-profit companies to take up the slack? Because that is exactly what is happening. Wouldn’t it make more sense to just fund education to the levels we had back when it was working?
Bustillos followed up with Bady, who offered this elaboration on the point:
If you start by not letting education be anything more than what it’s possible to deliver via YouTube — and MOOCs are a little more complicated than that, but essentially all the arguments for the cheapness of MOOCs are based on that model, that it’s something you can digitize and then distribute very cheaply — then if that’s all you want, if you’re satisfied with that, then yeah, MOOCs are great, because they’re cheap. But you’ve already given up on almost everything that the entire academic enterprise has been creating for centuries. So it’s that framing of the conversation, much more than Shirky’s particular argument, that drives me up the wall.
Emphasis mine. Digitizing education requires that we reduce education to something that will fit in those digits. And aiming it at "non-elites" or "lessers" or "those people" is a cheat because it sets the bar at "well, anything that's better than nothing is an improvement of what Those People were going to get."
In other words, we look at some poor folks who get barely one meal a day and say, "Well, let's get them all a single piece of cold, day-old pizza. Granted, it's a sad shadow of actual decent healthful food, but it's better than nothing." Why are we doing that instead of asking why we can't arrange for those folks to eat as well as we do? Why do we not examine the damning charge implicit in our assumption-- that we are not willing to make sure Those People get something as good as what we've got, that we know in our hearts that we will never willingly pay the cost of getting Those People what the more fortunate among us can take for granted.
Programs like Udacity are cold, dry pizza instead of full, rich healthful education. But they let us off the hook for the problems of Those People.
Born in 1967, Sebastian Thrun came from Germany and found a place as a Stanford professor and Google VP. He was the founder of Google X, the big geeky exploratory part of Google, and he has had a hand in everything from hoverboards to self-driving cars.
Thrun is also one of the co-parents of Udacity, an on-line digitized set of courses that can earn you, among other things, nanodegrees, which appear to be the same basic idea as micro-credentials, but which sound slightly more academically legit. Udacity started out as a few computer courses offered for free by Stanford, and its nanodegree offerings still seem primarily tech oriented, with everything from software debugging to interactive rendering to software development to web design to inscrutable-to-laypeople programs like full stack web developer. Plus a couple of Google-specific programs. And currently their most hugely popular offering is one "taught" by Thrun himself-- Self-Driving Car Engineer. SDCE has pulled huge numbers of interested
The usefulness, effectiveness, and educational validity of Massively Open On-line Courses has been debated from Day One. Late in 2012 a short cyber-debate erupted between Clay Shirky and Aaron Bady. Shirky is a tech writer thinky guy, while Bady is a blogging Cinderella story who rose to prominence because he had some good thoughts, written well, about wikileaks. Their conversation begins here, with Shirky claiming that MOOCs are like recorded music. Bady replied here in Inside Higher Education.
Some of his criticism will seem familiar:
Udacity’s primary obligation is to its investors. That reality will always push it to squeeze as much profit out of its activities as it can. This may make Udacity better at educating, but it also may not; the job of a for-profit entity is not to educate, but to profit, and it will.
But this next point is new and interesting, and well worth resurrecting from almost four years ago:
The key difference between academics and venture capitalists, in fact, is not closed versus open but evidence versus speculation. The thing about academics is that they require evidence of success before declaring victory, while venture capitalists can afford to gamble on the odds. While Shirky can see the future revolutionizing in front of us, he is thinking like a venture capitalist when he does, betting on optimism because he can afford to lose. He doesn’t know that he’s right; he just knows that he might not be wrong.
Bady also clearly sees how these on-line institutions like Udacity as pale imitations of real education-- and are meant to be.
The giveaway is when Shirky uses the phrase "non-elite institutions": for Shirky, there are elite institutions for elite students and there are non-elites for everyone else. The elite institutions will remain the same. No one will ever choose Udacity over Harvard or U.Va., and while elite institutions like MIT, Stanford, Princeton, and my own University of California are leaping into the online education world head first, anyone who thinks these online brands will ever compete with "the real thing" will be exactly the kind of sucker who would fork over full price for a watered-down product.
And he lands on this important question:
Why have we stopped aspiring to provide the real thing for everyone? That’s the interesting question, I think, but if we begin from the distinction between "elite" and "non-elite" institutions, it becomes easy to take for granted that "non-elite students" receiving cheap education is something other than giving up. It is important to note that when online education boosters talk about "access," they explicitly do not mean access to "education of the best sort"; they mean that because an institution like Udacity provides teaching for free, you can’t complain about its mediocrity. It’s not an elite institution, and it’s not for elite students. It just needs to be cheap.
Maruia Bustillos, following up on this conversation in The Awl, asked a more pointed version of the same question.
Okay, fine, but let’s get this straight: public money has been mercilessly hacked from California’s education budget for decades, so now we are to give public money, taxpayer money, to private, for-profit companies to take up the slack? Because that is exactly what is happening. Wouldn’t it make more sense to just fund education to the levels we had back when it was working?
Bustillos followed up with Bady, who offered this elaboration on the point:
If you start by not letting education be anything more than what it’s possible to deliver via YouTube — and MOOCs are a little more complicated than that, but essentially all the arguments for the cheapness of MOOCs are based on that model, that it’s something you can digitize and then distribute very cheaply — then if that’s all you want, if you’re satisfied with that, then yeah, MOOCs are great, because they’re cheap. But you’ve already given up on almost everything that the entire academic enterprise has been creating for centuries. So it’s that framing of the conversation, much more than Shirky’s particular argument, that drives me up the wall.
Emphasis mine. Digitizing education requires that we reduce education to something that will fit in those digits. And aiming it at "non-elites" or "lessers" or "those people" is a cheat because it sets the bar at "well, anything that's better than nothing is an improvement of what Those People were going to get."
In other words, we look at some poor folks who get barely one meal a day and say, "Well, let's get them all a single piece of cold, day-old pizza. Granted, it's a sad shadow of actual decent healthful food, but it's better than nothing." Why are we doing that instead of asking why we can't arrange for those folks to eat as well as we do? Why do we not examine the damning charge implicit in our assumption-- that we are not willing to make sure Those People get something as good as what we've got, that we know in our hearts that we will never willingly pay the cost of getting Those People what the more fortunate among us can take for granted.
Programs like Udacity are cold, dry pizza instead of full, rich healthful education. But they let us off the hook for the problems of Those People.
Bill Gates Wants Your Tax Dollars
On his blog yesterday, Bill Gates made his pitch to get more our of our tax dollars.
Gates notes that the Presidential campaign hasn't touched much on innovations (which I guess is true if you don't count innovative ways to repackage reality). Invoking the 1961 moon-shot declaration of John F. Kennedy, Gates wants to make a case for four areas in which the government can spur innovation. With money.
He tries to frame this as a centrist idea by creating an imaginary extreme on one end of the debate:
I’ve heard some people argue that life-changing innovations come exclusively from the private sector. But innovation starts with government support for the research labs and universities working on new insights that entrepreneurs can turn into companies that change the world. The public sector’s investments unlock the private sector’s ingenuity.
If he means, as his essay suggests, that some people argue that the private sector does these things while refusing any dirty government money, well, I haven't heard anybody argue that. Have you heard, for instance, of any charter schools that have insisted on finding their own funding and have refused any solitary cent of government support? No, me neither.
Gates is arguing for the same old, same old-- private corporations getting their hands on that sweet, sweet pile of tax dollars to fund their enterprise. Gates is arguing that we need to elect leaders who see that the government can make progress on the issues that face us by unlocking innovation with a big fat key made out of money. He cites the space race as one of the great public-private partnerships, but what he doesn't discuss is the manner of the partnership and the rules by which it operated. It's almost as if he thinks that just throwing money at private companies will automatically fix the problems of our world.
Well, four problems of our world.
Provide cheap, clean energy to everyone (without harming the environment).
It's a noble thought, but-- well, is the suggestion here that somehow the big energy companies don't have any money for R&D? Because I'm thinking that the big energy companies are actually wealthier than many nations.
Develop a vaccine for HIV and cure neurodegenerative diseases
And
Protect the world from future health epidemics
Again, I applaud these goals. But medicine is a great example of how public-private partnerships have come off the rails, as witnessed by medicines like the epi-pen, developed with the support of public tax dollars, and yet manipulated by private interests for maximum private profit. The world of medicine already has a very productive public-private partnership-- the private corporations reap profits and the government keeps rules in place that protect those profits, even when the profits are indefensible and involve drugs that the public already paid to develop.
Give every student and teacher new tools so all students get a world-class education
Well, you knew this was here. Gates calls for "personalized education" with every child hooked up to a computer that will dispense and education. Oh, and teachers can just upload videos of themselves, because technology is never boring and students love to watch videos of teachers. Anyway, the private sector has started work on these things, but it would be great if the feds would kick in some R&D costs, because companies like Microsoft don't really have money for R&D either. Of course, what Gates really skips over here is that he's asking the government to fund a policy change, not a technological one. Gates is asking for funding to change the very nature of what school is and what it's supposed to do (train, in Gates world, rather than educate). Gates isn't just asking for federal help for private companies to create new tech; he's asking for federal cooperation as private companies set new national policy.
What is notably lacking?
You know what would help the government provide funding for all this private innovation? Tax dollars to hand out. You know who's gotten really good at not giving the government tax dollars? Private corporations.
For instance, Microsoft reportedly keeps almost 100 billion dollars in off-shore accounts, allowing it to avoid paying several billion dollars in taxes. They certainly aren't the only company doing this, so we can only imagine the amount of funding the government could provide if it had billions and billions more tax dollars with which to do such funding.
A good step toward that public-private partnership that Gates envisions would be for the private folks to do their part by helping fund the government so that it could unlock innovation with piles of money. Or they could acknowledge that they have held a bunch of money out of government reach and that money constitutes a federal tax rebate.
Mind you, I think public-private partnerships, properly maintained and managed, can be a great thing. But the whole business could start with an honest conversation. And if private companies want to be partners, they could start by acting like partners.
Gates notes that the Presidential campaign hasn't touched much on innovations (which I guess is true if you don't count innovative ways to repackage reality). Invoking the 1961 moon-shot declaration of John F. Kennedy, Gates wants to make a case for four areas in which the government can spur innovation. With money.
He tries to frame this as a centrist idea by creating an imaginary extreme on one end of the debate:
I’ve heard some people argue that life-changing innovations come exclusively from the private sector. But innovation starts with government support for the research labs and universities working on new insights that entrepreneurs can turn into companies that change the world. The public sector’s investments unlock the private sector’s ingenuity.
If he means, as his essay suggests, that some people argue that the private sector does these things while refusing any dirty government money, well, I haven't heard anybody argue that. Have you heard, for instance, of any charter schools that have insisted on finding their own funding and have refused any solitary cent of government support? No, me neither.
Gates is arguing for the same old, same old-- private corporations getting their hands on that sweet, sweet pile of tax dollars to fund their enterprise. Gates is arguing that we need to elect leaders who see that the government can make progress on the issues that face us by unlocking innovation with a big fat key made out of money. He cites the space race as one of the great public-private partnerships, but what he doesn't discuss is the manner of the partnership and the rules by which it operated. It's almost as if he thinks that just throwing money at private companies will automatically fix the problems of our world.
Well, four problems of our world.
Provide cheap, clean energy to everyone (without harming the environment).
It's a noble thought, but-- well, is the suggestion here that somehow the big energy companies don't have any money for R&D? Because I'm thinking that the big energy companies are actually wealthier than many nations.
Develop a vaccine for HIV and cure neurodegenerative diseases
And
Protect the world from future health epidemics
Again, I applaud these goals. But medicine is a great example of how public-private partnerships have come off the rails, as witnessed by medicines like the epi-pen, developed with the support of public tax dollars, and yet manipulated by private interests for maximum private profit. The world of medicine already has a very productive public-private partnership-- the private corporations reap profits and the government keeps rules in place that protect those profits, even when the profits are indefensible and involve drugs that the public already paid to develop.
Give every student and teacher new tools so all students get a world-class education
Well, you knew this was here. Gates calls for "personalized education" with every child hooked up to a computer that will dispense and education. Oh, and teachers can just upload videos of themselves, because technology is never boring and students love to watch videos of teachers. Anyway, the private sector has started work on these things, but it would be great if the feds would kick in some R&D costs, because companies like Microsoft don't really have money for R&D either. Of course, what Gates really skips over here is that he's asking the government to fund a policy change, not a technological one. Gates is asking for funding to change the very nature of what school is and what it's supposed to do (train, in Gates world, rather than educate). Gates isn't just asking for federal help for private companies to create new tech; he's asking for federal cooperation as private companies set new national policy.
What is notably lacking?
You know what would help the government provide funding for all this private innovation? Tax dollars to hand out. You know who's gotten really good at not giving the government tax dollars? Private corporations.
For instance, Microsoft reportedly keeps almost 100 billion dollars in off-shore accounts, allowing it to avoid paying several billion dollars in taxes. They certainly aren't the only company doing this, so we can only imagine the amount of funding the government could provide if it had billions and billions more tax dollars with which to do such funding.
A good step toward that public-private partnership that Gates envisions would be for the private folks to do their part by helping fund the government so that it could unlock innovation with piles of money. Or they could acknowledge that they have held a bunch of money out of government reach and that money constitutes a federal tax rebate.
Mind you, I think public-private partnerships, properly maintained and managed, can be a great thing. But the whole business could start with an honest conversation. And if private companies want to be partners, they could start by acting like partners.
Thursday, October 6, 2016
USED's Troubled Charter Love
"Honey, you have got to break up."
When a trusted member of your own family sits you down to tell you that you are in a bad relationship, it's only prudent to pay a little attention. And that is where John King's US Department of Education finds itself right now.
"Dude," says the USED's own office of the inspector general. "You have got to get this whole charter school thing under control. It is soaking you for money and you don't even know what the heck is going on."
The audit by USED's inspector general was meant to assess " the current and emerging risk that charter school relationships with charter management organizations (CMOs) and education management organizations pose to the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education (OESE), the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS), and the Office of Innovation and Improvement (OII) program objectives and evaluate the effectiveness of OESE, OSERS, and OII internal controls to mitigate the risk." The audit set out to look for internal controls-- any sorts of checks and balances and brakes on the USED-charter relationship. The findings were not good:
We determined that charter school relationships with CMOs posed a significant risk to Department program objectives.
You can read the whole sad jargon-soaked report if you like. The bottom line is that the audit found three major issues:
1) Insufficient controls between charters and charter management organizations, including (but not limited to) "conflict of interest, relate-party transactions and insufficient segregation of duties." The lack of controls constitutes a risk for fraud, waste and abuse, a risk of losing accountability for federal funds, and a risk that the charter schools are ignoring and violating federal rules, requirements and programs.
2) Insufficient controls within the department, meaning that USED has no useful knowledge or oversight of what charters are up to
3) Insufficient monitoring procedures to allow the department to even know if something hinky is going on.
In even fewer words, the USED does not have rules in place to discourage, spot or stop charter fraud, waste or abuse.
That is some hard tough love from a office within the education department.
Like many folks in a bad relationships, John King shows some awareness that maybe, somehow, something is wrong. Just this week John King suggested that Michigan wasn't exactly doing a bang-up job with its approach to closing schools and opening charters.
“I worry a lot about the charter sector in Michigan, which has very uneven performance,” King said. “There are a lot of schools that are doing poorly and charter authorizers do not seem to be taking the necessary actions to either improve performance or close those underperforming charters.”
Of course, the fact that King is traveling to Detroit in hopes of asking questions and finding out what's going on might actually help make the inspector general's point-- that the department has no controls in place for keeping tabs on how federal money is being spent and whether or not charters are actually doing anything useful. Though I suppose in the case of Detroit the recently-filed federal civil rights lawsuit about the horrifyingly bad state of affairs in Detroit might have clued him in. Or he could just read the Detroit Free Press for accounts of charter shenanigans.
And yet, like many folks in bad relationships, John King just can't quit charters. Also in recent news, we have the USED handing over $245 million to charter operators.
The lucky winners include Louisiana, where millions upon millions of tax dollars have vanished into the New Orleans charter swamp with no clear accounting for where they went. California is up for a $50 million grant, even though a 2015 study showed one in five charters closing, and a recent ACLU study shows many charters illegally restricting admissions. I suppose it's good that they did not--again-- shovel out some federal money to Ohio charters in the face of reports of widespread fraud and misbehavior. But at the same time, the new stack of money contains a proposed almost-seven million dollars to expand charters in Washington State-- where the charter school law has been declared unconstitutional. What exactly will the seven mill be spent on? Lobbying Olympia for a more charter-friendly-- and legal-- law?
So to recap-- the US Department of Education's own inspector general is telling them that they are in a bad, unsafe, unprotected relationship with the charter sector, that they have insufficient measures to watch for how tax dollars are spent, and they're going to hand over another quarter of a billion dollars anyway.
This, mind you, is the same federal department that has been intent on micro-managing every public school system in the country, and whose favorite funding approach has been to make states and districts fight for money by competing to show excellence and accountability in every program. And yet somehow, this same department ends up in some version of this conversation:
"You cannot hand over your paycheck to Chris McCharter again. You just can't."
"But Chris is so cute, and I'm soooo in love."
"Chris could be spending your money on hookers and drugs. It's happened before and you don't even know."
"I don't care what you say. I'm in lurv!"
It's a sad story, and it makes me long for a different story, a story from an alternate universe where the USED wakes up, stops enabling the Bad Charter Sector that it will never really reform, and falls in love with Public Education instead. Now that would be a story.
When a trusted member of your own family sits you down to tell you that you are in a bad relationship, it's only prudent to pay a little attention. And that is where John King's US Department of Education finds itself right now.
"Dude," says the USED's own office of the inspector general. "You have got to get this whole charter school thing under control. It is soaking you for money and you don't even know what the heck is going on."
The audit by USED's inspector general was meant to assess " the current and emerging risk that charter school relationships with charter management organizations (CMOs) and education management organizations pose to the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education (OESE), the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS), and the Office of Innovation and Improvement (OII) program objectives and evaluate the effectiveness of OESE, OSERS, and OII internal controls to mitigate the risk." The audit set out to look for internal controls-- any sorts of checks and balances and brakes on the USED-charter relationship. The findings were not good:
We determined that charter school relationships with CMOs posed a significant risk to Department program objectives.
You can read the whole sad jargon-soaked report if you like. The bottom line is that the audit found three major issues:
1) Insufficient controls between charters and charter management organizations, including (but not limited to) "conflict of interest, relate-party transactions and insufficient segregation of duties." The lack of controls constitutes a risk for fraud, waste and abuse, a risk of losing accountability for federal funds, and a risk that the charter schools are ignoring and violating federal rules, requirements and programs.
2) Insufficient controls within the department, meaning that USED has no useful knowledge or oversight of what charters are up to
3) Insufficient monitoring procedures to allow the department to even know if something hinky is going on.
In even fewer words, the USED does not have rules in place to discourage, spot or stop charter fraud, waste or abuse.
That is some hard tough love from a office within the education department.
Like many folks in a bad relationships, John King shows some awareness that maybe, somehow, something is wrong. Just this week John King suggested that Michigan wasn't exactly doing a bang-up job with its approach to closing schools and opening charters.
“I worry a lot about the charter sector in Michigan, which has very uneven performance,” King said. “There are a lot of schools that are doing poorly and charter authorizers do not seem to be taking the necessary actions to either improve performance or close those underperforming charters.”
Of course, the fact that King is traveling to Detroit in hopes of asking questions and finding out what's going on might actually help make the inspector general's point-- that the department has no controls in place for keeping tabs on how federal money is being spent and whether or not charters are actually doing anything useful. Though I suppose in the case of Detroit the recently-filed federal civil rights lawsuit about the horrifyingly bad state of affairs in Detroit might have clued him in. Or he could just read the Detroit Free Press for accounts of charter shenanigans.
And yet, like many folks in bad relationships, John King just can't quit charters. Also in recent news, we have the USED handing over $245 million to charter operators.
The lucky winners include Louisiana, where millions upon millions of tax dollars have vanished into the New Orleans charter swamp with no clear accounting for where they went. California is up for a $50 million grant, even though a 2015 study showed one in five charters closing, and a recent ACLU study shows many charters illegally restricting admissions. I suppose it's good that they did not--again-- shovel out some federal money to Ohio charters in the face of reports of widespread fraud and misbehavior. But at the same time, the new stack of money contains a proposed almost-seven million dollars to expand charters in Washington State-- where the charter school law has been declared unconstitutional. What exactly will the seven mill be spent on? Lobbying Olympia for a more charter-friendly-- and legal-- law?
So to recap-- the US Department of Education's own inspector general is telling them that they are in a bad, unsafe, unprotected relationship with the charter sector, that they have insufficient measures to watch for how tax dollars are spent, and they're going to hand over another quarter of a billion dollars anyway.
This, mind you, is the same federal department that has been intent on micro-managing every public school system in the country, and whose favorite funding approach has been to make states and districts fight for money by competing to show excellence and accountability in every program. And yet somehow, this same department ends up in some version of this conversation:
"You cannot hand over your paycheck to Chris McCharter again. You just can't."
"But Chris is so cute, and I'm soooo in love."
"Chris could be spending your money on hookers and drugs. It's happened before and you don't even know."
"I don't care what you say. I'm in lurv!"
It's a sad story, and it makes me long for a different story, a story from an alternate universe where the USED wakes up, stops enabling the Bad Charter Sector that it will never really reform, and falls in love with Public Education instead. Now that would be a story.
Wednesday, October 5, 2016
The Facts Problem
We've had much discussion about living in a post-fact society, but I'm not sure we really appreciate just how much trouble the whole business of "facts" is in.
I don't mean the obvious public signs, like a national Vice-Presidential candidate who simply lies his way through a nationally broadcast debate. I'm not talking about how many of us keep our head buried in the internet bucket, listening to nothing but the echoes of our own voices.
I think our problem is deeper than that.
We've seen, for instance, something now called the replication crisis, the growing discovery that many landmark (and not-so-landmark) studies are simply one-offs, research completed exactly one time and attempts to replicate the results have either not been made, or have been made and turned out to be unsuccessful. Keep digging and you find that many "facts" about what constitutes "normal" for human beings are just plain non-factual.
The institutions that are traditionally the center of fact-discovery, or the kind of research that lets us Know New Things are in trouble, beset by everything from financial to ideological problems. Billionaires like the Koch brothers now hire professors to present the preferred set of "facts" to students. With tenure a thing of the past, professors and scholars will feel more pressure to avoid coming up with "facts" that might make anyone uncomfortable. And the pressure on colleges and universities is to replace coursework with micro-credentials, with simple competency-based tasks which can by their very nature only be defined in terms of what we already "know." You can't create a competency-based performance task built around the creation or discovery of new knowledge. You can only recycle.
At the same time, we are trying to build facts about things we cannot know. We cannot know what is going on in another person's head, in their thoughts, their feelings-- but education reformsters want to quantify that and attach a number to it so that we can kick it around as if it is a fact. Every day brings one more article that tries to bandy about facts about something for which no facts can be generated. Here's just one example from Education Next-- an article trying to consider the facts of what disciplinary techniques produce good results, as if there's a way to know the connection between how an eight-year-old is scolded for punching a classmate and whether or not that child thirty years later will be a good, decent, responsible adult. In education we want to know so many things that cannot be known, and so we insist on making up "facts" as proxies, numbers that we can claim correspond to actual facts. We talk about "student achievement" as if the numbers attached to the idea are facts, when they are just test scores from a single badly-written, narrowly-focused standardized test (perhaps fed through an unproven and unreliable equation).
Meanwhile, our own government has defined down what constitutes a fact. The definition of "evidence" used by the feds and enshrined, among other places, in the Every Student Succeeds Act includes demonstrating a rationale-- in other words, any half-baked argument I've ever made on this blog can be counted as "evidence." The last federal policy paper I looked at said that "research-based" includes any "conclusions or conjectures" from experts in the field, so I guess "facts" stop just short of wild-assed guesses, but not by much. And really-- if conjectures and rationales qualify as research and evidence, then how hard is it to be an "expert" in a field, particularly a field like education where we swim in an ocean of facts that are not actually facts.
Look, education has always been short on facts. Experimenting on children is Bad, so we've mostly held back on that. And studies conducted on a group of sophomores at one particular university aren't exactly broadly helpful.
But we live increasingly in a fact-starved world, a world in which facts are not only beaten and thrown down the stairs until they look like a ball of silly putty run through a blender, but we aren't even all that interested in looking for facts in the first place. And because we are a People of Irony, the fewer facts we use, the more we insist we are data-driven and evidence-based.
Hey, I'm a good old-fashioned "truth is more important than facts" any day. But it's really hard to get to the truth when your facts are not facts, and we are increasingly paying a price as a society for swimming in a giant vat of bovine fecal matter and pretending we're beating Ryan Loche (who may be an ass, but he's a fast ass) in an Olympic pool.
The scariest thing is not that we are ignorant of what the facts are. The scariest thing is that many of us don't even know what a fact is.
I don't mean the obvious public signs, like a national Vice-Presidential candidate who simply lies his way through a nationally broadcast debate. I'm not talking about how many of us keep our head buried in the internet bucket, listening to nothing but the echoes of our own voices.
I think our problem is deeper than that.
We've seen, for instance, something now called the replication crisis, the growing discovery that many landmark (and not-so-landmark) studies are simply one-offs, research completed exactly one time and attempts to replicate the results have either not been made, or have been made and turned out to be unsuccessful. Keep digging and you find that many "facts" about what constitutes "normal" for human beings are just plain non-factual.
The institutions that are traditionally the center of fact-discovery, or the kind of research that lets us Know New Things are in trouble, beset by everything from financial to ideological problems. Billionaires like the Koch brothers now hire professors to present the preferred set of "facts" to students. With tenure a thing of the past, professors and scholars will feel more pressure to avoid coming up with "facts" that might make anyone uncomfortable. And the pressure on colleges and universities is to replace coursework with micro-credentials, with simple competency-based tasks which can by their very nature only be defined in terms of what we already "know." You can't create a competency-based performance task built around the creation or discovery of new knowledge. You can only recycle.
At the same time, we are trying to build facts about things we cannot know. We cannot know what is going on in another person's head, in their thoughts, their feelings-- but education reformsters want to quantify that and attach a number to it so that we can kick it around as if it is a fact. Every day brings one more article that tries to bandy about facts about something for which no facts can be generated. Here's just one example from Education Next-- an article trying to consider the facts of what disciplinary techniques produce good results, as if there's a way to know the connection between how an eight-year-old is scolded for punching a classmate and whether or not that child thirty years later will be a good, decent, responsible adult. In education we want to know so many things that cannot be known, and so we insist on making up "facts" as proxies, numbers that we can claim correspond to actual facts. We talk about "student achievement" as if the numbers attached to the idea are facts, when they are just test scores from a single badly-written, narrowly-focused standardized test (perhaps fed through an unproven and unreliable equation).
Meanwhile, our own government has defined down what constitutes a fact. The definition of "evidence" used by the feds and enshrined, among other places, in the Every Student Succeeds Act includes demonstrating a rationale-- in other words, any half-baked argument I've ever made on this blog can be counted as "evidence." The last federal policy paper I looked at said that "research-based" includes any "conclusions or conjectures" from experts in the field, so I guess "facts" stop just short of wild-assed guesses, but not by much. And really-- if conjectures and rationales qualify as research and evidence, then how hard is it to be an "expert" in a field, particularly a field like education where we swim in an ocean of facts that are not actually facts.
Look, education has always been short on facts. Experimenting on children is Bad, so we've mostly held back on that. And studies conducted on a group of sophomores at one particular university aren't exactly broadly helpful.
But we live increasingly in a fact-starved world, a world in which facts are not only beaten and thrown down the stairs until they look like a ball of silly putty run through a blender, but we aren't even all that interested in looking for facts in the first place. And because we are a People of Irony, the fewer facts we use, the more we insist we are data-driven and evidence-based.
Hey, I'm a good old-fashioned "truth is more important than facts" any day. But it's really hard to get to the truth when your facts are not facts, and we are increasingly paying a price as a society for swimming in a giant vat of bovine fecal matter and pretending we're beating Ryan Loche (who may be an ass, but he's a fast ass) in an Olympic pool.
The scariest thing is not that we are ignorant of what the facts are. The scariest thing is that many of us don't even know what a fact is.
NEA's Concern Trolling
The NEA is concerned about bullying.
Specifically, they are concerned about the Trump Effect, which is one more name for one of the plumes of toxic smoke curling up from the dumpster fire that is Herr Donald's Presidential campaign.
There is reason for concern. Herr Donald's campaign has freed many folks from the restraint of what we could call "political correctness" or "general decent treatment of other human beings," and nothing bad ever gets loose in the general population that does not also breathe its toxic breath into the atmosphere of schools.
Anecdotes abound. The high school students who cheered "Build a wall" at their mainly-hispanic opponents. The endless supply of stories about children who are worried that the next President might deport them. There's absolutely no question that Trump's campaign has loosed some slouching beast into the political sphere, and that in turn has dropped a big bucket of ugly into schools across the country.
It's a topic worth discussing. Just not like this.
Instead of addressing the issue of bullying and the effects of our bad political discourse on the tiny humans of our nation, NEA has grabbed this issue and ground it up as campaign fodder.
A buttload of money will be spent to make ad buys in many, but not all, states, with a focus on swing states and states considered critical for the Presidential election. And they will, apparently, focus strictly on Herr Donald, concern trolling about how he poses a threat to our nation's youths by amplifying racism and intolerance and just general bullying.
These are the times when I kind of hate my union. This is transparently political, and really dangerously close to using children (and bullied children, at that) as props for political advantage.
Is bullying a tremendous issue that should be addressed regularly and forcefully? Absolutely. Is Donald Trump a terrible excuse for a Presidential candidate? Without a doubt.
But this PR push is not what happens when a bunch of people sit in a room and say, "Bullying is a tremendous issue for our students. What message could we put out that would help push back against it?" No, this is the kind of push that happens when union leadership says, "What's a message we can put out there for the Clinton campaign that looks somewhat connected to our mission as teachers?"
Yes, I'm probably still a bit cranky about the general shafting that Bernie Sanders got from the Clinton camp. And, yes, I've about had it with my union selecting and promoting candidates who promptly stab us in the back. But I would also like to not have to try to make excuses for my union when civilians see actions that are clearly based on political calculus and not on educational concerns. This is why union activity can be dismissed as simply political leveraging. This is also why the same young teachers who see Clinton as more of the same-old, same-old are inclined to reach the same conclusion about the NEA.
I know that politics matter, and that politics and politicians set any of the rules that govern how my life in the classroom goes. I don't think I'm all that naive. In fact, I suspect I'm less naive than those who think that this campaign will be seen as anything but what it is. I suspect I'm also less naive than the people who think this campaign will give people a lower opinion of Herr Donald, or a higher opinion of teachers and their unions.
Specifically, they are concerned about the Trump Effect, which is one more name for one of the plumes of toxic smoke curling up from the dumpster fire that is Herr Donald's Presidential campaign.
There is reason for concern. Herr Donald's campaign has freed many folks from the restraint of what we could call "political correctness" or "general decent treatment of other human beings," and nothing bad ever gets loose in the general population that does not also breathe its toxic breath into the atmosphere of schools.
Anecdotes abound. The high school students who cheered "Build a wall" at their mainly-hispanic opponents. The endless supply of stories about children who are worried that the next President might deport them. There's absolutely no question that Trump's campaign has loosed some slouching beast into the political sphere, and that in turn has dropped a big bucket of ugly into schools across the country.
It's a topic worth discussing. Just not like this.
Instead of addressing the issue of bullying and the effects of our bad political discourse on the tiny humans of our nation, NEA has grabbed this issue and ground it up as campaign fodder.
A buttload of money will be spent to make ad buys in many, but not all, states, with a focus on swing states and states considered critical for the Presidential election. And they will, apparently, focus strictly on Herr Donald, concern trolling about how he poses a threat to our nation's youths by amplifying racism and intolerance and just general bullying.
These are the times when I kind of hate my union. This is transparently political, and really dangerously close to using children (and bullied children, at that) as props for political advantage.
Is bullying a tremendous issue that should be addressed regularly and forcefully? Absolutely. Is Donald Trump a terrible excuse for a Presidential candidate? Without a doubt.
But this PR push is not what happens when a bunch of people sit in a room and say, "Bullying is a tremendous issue for our students. What message could we put out that would help push back against it?" No, this is the kind of push that happens when union leadership says, "What's a message we can put out there for the Clinton campaign that looks somewhat connected to our mission as teachers?"
Yes, I'm probably still a bit cranky about the general shafting that Bernie Sanders got from the Clinton camp. And, yes, I've about had it with my union selecting and promoting candidates who promptly stab us in the back. But I would also like to not have to try to make excuses for my union when civilians see actions that are clearly based on political calculus and not on educational concerns. This is why union activity can be dismissed as simply political leveraging. This is also why the same young teachers who see Clinton as more of the same-old, same-old are inclined to reach the same conclusion about the NEA.
I know that politics matter, and that politics and politicians set any of the rules that govern how my life in the classroom goes. I don't think I'm all that naive. In fact, I suspect I'm less naive than those who think that this campaign will be seen as anything but what it is. I suspect I'm also less naive than the people who think this campaign will give people a lower opinion of Herr Donald, or a higher opinion of teachers and their unions.
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