PA: Professor strike update

As is typical in the early stages of these things, the main news being reported from the third day of the Pennsylvania strike by college and university faculty is that this is the third day of the strike by college and university faculty. I have heard numerous reports of students joining faculty on the picket line and attempts by schools to keep students going to classes-- even if nobody is teaching them. Opponents of the faculty are trying to paint the strike as greedy teachers and evil unions, but the actual issue are far more fundamental than who gets paid what.

There is also the intriguing question of what, if anything, Governor Tom Wolf is up to. Prior to the strike he had some even-handed words of encouragement for both sides (Go fix this), but there's been nothing much form him since the strike broke.

However, regular reader Seth Kahn is a co-chair of the strike committee at West Chester University, and he had this to say in the comments section of my previous post about the strike:

As far as we're concerned, the most problematic proposals left on the table are these--

1. While they've withdrawn (under pressure from us, by the way) the crassest proposals about how to exploit adjunct faculty even worse, there's still one that would lower the pay scale for part-timers. The idea is to split even the ranks of the non-tenure-track faculty into full-time and part-time. No.

2. Their claims about the health care proposal (that we won't accept what everybody else has) is literal BS (not Big Standardized--the other kind). The state system *imposed the package* on their managers (who obviously don't collectively bargain because they're managers) and now are blaming us for not voluntarily accepting a package NOBODY HAS VOLUNTARILY ACCEPTED.

3. The salary proposal has been obvious since AFSCME settled a year or more ago (the system engages in pattern bargaining, so once AFSCME settles we always know what's coming). But now, the system is trying to pretend like what was always obvious is somehow super-ultra-generous, and that we're jerks for not giving them everything else they want in return.

There's no question whether Frank Brogan is trying to build a system or break a union. He doesn't give a flip about this system or the people in it. He wants a union-busting line on his resume.

There are numerous rumors out there that backchannel attempts to reach an agreement are going on, but on the record, few facts to report. Let's hope this gets settled soon.

My Visit To Preschool

I'm in Seattle for almost a week, visiting my daughter, her husband, their newborn son, and their almost two-year-old son. This provides all manner of entertainment (you'll notice blogging has run a little slow), but today it provided an opportunity for me to be a visiting grampa (actually, my grandparental name is "Gump") at my grandson's pre-school class.

Like many education observers, I have an increased interest in pre-K because policy-makers and the Big Money Crowd are interested in pre-K these days. And while there are many good things to be said about pre-school programs, they remind me of what my high school band director said about playing clarinet-- it's easy to do, but really hard to do well.

This guy

I have read a little bit about Seattle's co-operative pre-schools before (check out Teacher Tom's blog over in the bloglist to the right). There's a big, semi-painful network of co-ops, coordinated by levels of boards, run out of colleges and other civic groups. Co-ops are big in Seattle. It's a complex system that is still evolving (still reportedly working on consistency in teacher pay). But I'm still curious-- how exactly do you run a pre-school for children under two? And what would Department of Education officials require to prove that the program was high quality?

My grandson's pre-school is on the campus of North Seattle Community College, in a large rambling building that looks like it would have made a good set for a bad seventies sf movie, but is still clean and pretty and, on this particular morning, glistening with steadily falling Seattle dew. It's a co-op , and this particular class includes children between one and two years old.

The two-hour session starts with a half hour of open play in the outside playground area (this is Seattle so the play area is under an overhang so that it's still usable even if the dew is falling heavily).  Then there is circle time, in which the children and their parents (every child comes equipped with a parental unit) sit on the carpet in a circle-like format and Teacher Kari (who plays a mean autoharp) leads some songs. There's snack time, then play station time (not PlayStation time), then cleaning up time, then circle again, and then goodbyes.

You could call it loosely structured. The parents sang the songs and modeled the actions and at any given moment, some of the children were following along and some... not so much. But the whole atmosphere was relaxed and nobody pushed the children to stay "on task." The play stations were completely self-chosen, and parents monitored, but did not direct the activity. During the stations, parents also rotate in and out of parent education sessions.

Teacher Kari delivered pretty much everything in song. There was a greeting song and a picking up song and a goodbye song. The circle songs used lots of props, like blackbirds on a stick and scarves and a parachute.

Was there academic content? Well, some of the songs used some numbers and body parts (make the blackbirds dance on your shoulders). But any attempt to measure the "outcomes" would be a fool's errand; today one boy is having trouble separating from his mom and another just wants someone to read him a book. How do you propose to measure that?

Was there non-cognitive skill content? Did I mention the age? They show some social behaviors, but mostly managing to play in the same space as another tiny human is a win. They interact well with the other parents (my son-in-law is the most popular kid in class).

So was this more than just a loosely organized play date? Absolutely. Could any reasonable human actually assess any of this? And the very idea that you would try to would be a clear signal that your pre-school does not have its heart in the right place. And before you tell me that nobody in their right mind would try to do assessment of two-year-olds, I'll remind you that only a few years ago nobody would have seriously suggested testing five-year-olds.

So it's nice to know that somewhere in the world-- especially in the part of the world where my grandson lives-- people still know how to do pre-K right. I can only hope that as the US Department of Education inserts itself into the world of pre-K, they manage to visit that world.

John King's Civics Lesson

The e-mail from the charter-shilling group Center for Education Reform announced breathlessly that John King "joined the chorus of education leaders, elected officials and respected members of the African-American community in criticizing by the NAACP‘s decision to demand moratoriums on charter schools."

He didn't. He spoke in front of the National Press Club at a luncheon this week, said many things about civic education, and answered some questions, one of which may be my absolute favorite question asked of a federal official ever-- but we'll get to that along with some other things he did. But King did not go after the NAACP.

The full text is twenty pages long, and I've read it, but nobody really needs to. But I am going to compress severely.

Jeff Ballou gives King an introduction that mentions his " emphasis on making sure all students are receiving the same level of education, regardless of race or zip code," and notes that he is today returning to "his roots as a social studies teacher" and I am reminded that as abused as the mantle of "Teacher" has become, lots of people sure do want to claim it based on the thinnest of experience (like say, teaching for just a year or two in a selective private charter school.

As always, King opens by invoking tales of Mr. Osterweiler, the gifted teacher who changed King's life and who would never be allowed to do half of what King credits him with doing in  today's climate. It remains the central irony of King's career that it rests on such a powerful story of powerful teaching, and yet King cannot or will not see how the policies he pursues guarantee that the Osterweilers of the world will be stifled, straightjacketed, and pushed out of teaching.

But on to his point.

Civic education is a big deal. King leads with some history of civic issues like voting and an appeal to the importance of knowing that history, but says there are more important things like "being willing to think beyond our own needs and wants and to embrace our obligations to the greater good." Yeah, don't wait for me to say something snarky about that, because he's correct.

Next some scare stats about Kids These Days and how they don't know their Constitution or Joe Biden and Schoolhouse Rock explanations of how a bill becomes a law (and that's before we even get to stuff like "How a federal agency uses its enforcement powers to rewrite or circumvent laws it disagrees with."

So King wants teachers to cover civic duty-- and he wants teachers to do it in a non-partisan manner. And it tells us something about King that he says the civic engagement is not a GOP or Democratic Party issue, as if the two parties do not cover (and also fail to cover) a wide range of philosophies and ideologies that create a fairly wide and complex tapestry on which American citizenship plays out. It's the view of someone who is looking at the political gamesmanship of DC and not the actual ideas and understanding that drives the worldviews behind policy positions.

But Kin knows these conversations could be "uncomfortable," so he calls for "support and training" for teachers because heaven forbid we teachers try to talk about Hard Things.

Then we're on to specific examples, including some student service groups and the James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation, because there's nothing political about that. And he talks about the new Museum of African American History and Culture. And he works his way around to an absolutely strong and even moving argument in favor of civic knowledge and civic skill, that wraps up here:

 Whether it’s K-12 education or higher education, we have to see it as preparing students, yes for college and careers, and yes for civic participation, for citizenship, for caring about the common good and contributing to the common good. 

It's a nice speech, almost nice enough to sail past the fact that it is Duncan and King's Department of Education that has pushed college and career readiness (defined as "good score on a math and reading test) to the point of pushing out exactly the kind of civics education that he I arguing for. One of the amazing features of the USED is that they seem to be completely oblivious to the effect ts of their own policy decisions.

But now, for the Q & A session.

The event took questions from twitter. It's in the Q & A session that King generated some of the press that has come out of this event. Let's take a quick look. I'll paraphrase:

Ballou: You just said a lot of really pretty words. How do you actually do any of that stuff?

King: Short answer-- no idea. Long answer-- Some grant money that could be used for civics. Schools should decide to just do it, despite the fact that all of my department's policies are dedicated to pushing them in other directions. Third, "lift up" teachers by "empowering" them to lead. Somehow.

Ballou: Do you think Trump has made bullying worse among kids?

King: "I can't comment specifically on the 2016 election" because reasons? Because I want to be the only person in the country who hasn't? Because I want to keep employment options open? Seriously, I can't think of a single reason he couldn't. But he goes on to say that bullying is bad, and bullying of immigrant children is really bad. And as this point is developed he ties in the issue of police brutality and relations between citizens and law enforcement.

Ballou: Are we getting higher graduation rates by producing less capable graduates?

King: "Yeah, we worry a lot about that." Yup. When you use some simple data point as a measure of complex stuff, you get baloney data. People keep trying to tell me that, but I don't listen. Let me toss in the old argument about college remedial classes, because that's another simple measure of complicated stuff that could be affected by all sorts of other factors. Don't care. I'm going keep acting as if this is a simple issue and that everything bad is the local district's fault.

Ballou: You need money for a lot of this stuff, but at the same time, you keep pissing Congress off. Could that be a problem?

King: Let me rattle off the history of education law, pointing out that it has always been about civil rights. Therefor, I feel comfortable interpreting ESSA in terms of what history intended, and not what the Congress that passed it actually wrote.

Ballou: Should somebody do something about poverty?

King: School. Education. Pre-K. I will continue to ignore research that says family SES trumps education most days.

Ballou: Speaking of which, can you get Pre-K support from that Congress that you annoy.

King: I will crush them with the wait of my academic, theoretical economics argument. I learned in New York that you don't have to actually work with people to achieve policy goals. At least, I think that was the lesson.

Ballou: Prion education?

King: We're putting back education funding for incarcerated learners.

Ballou: What about Common Core, called a "punishment-driven shotgun approach" by some critics?

King: The usual baloney about standards adopted by states, gosh, feds got nuthin' to do with it; state developed, state chosen. Does anyone anywhere actually still believe this?

Ballou: The charter question. It's pretty meaty. How do you fix authorization so that you don't have suckfests like Michigan. How do you reconcile your own public school salvation story with the charter tendency to drain resources from public schools. Do you agree with the NAACP's criticism of charters, and if so, will you stop throwing federal money at new charters?

King: Charters are magical education factories and we should let them grow without limit. Bad authorizers are a problem, but they are the states' problems, not ours. We shouldn't have arbitrary caps because "we shouldn't limit kids' access to great opportunities." Which is pretty talk, but if a charter only gives access to 1% of the students in a city, while reducing the opportunities available to the 0ther 99% by reducing the resources available to them, charters aren't really helping, are they?

So King in spirit disagrees with the NAACP-- but he didn't come right out and say so, and never actually referred to their resolution in his answer.

Next up:Okay, this is an absolutely awesome question that came in via internet, as many teachers were apparently chiming in. Here's the actual transcript:

 One teacher says, “I worked 12 hours yesterday, I didn't have time for lunch. Did you have time for lunch? I make $47,000 a year. How much do you make,” which of course is public record. “I can't go to the bathroom when I need to. Can you go to the bathroom when you need to? And please don't talk about how great teachers are. We don't need empty rhetoric. We need resources, we need policies that actually help us teach, not help profiteers.”

King: Let me offer some empty rhetoric.

Ballou: Your IT got in big trouble. Have you sorted all that out?

King: Totally. Our IT is now awesome. It is the best IT in the world. Our IT is nothing but winners. We IT so well that everyone else is just losers.

Then King answers some questions about himself, gets a ceremonial mug and heads on his way.

PA: About the Professor Strike

As just about everyone has heard today, the professors at fourteen of Pennsylvania's state colleges and universities are on strike (due to a quirk in our system, Pitt, Penn State and Temple are in a different state university system). This is the first such strike in ever.

It is hard to know exactly what's going on in the first days of a strike. I was president of my own local union over a decade ago when we went on strike, and I still remember well how information management is a huge issue all by itself, struggling both with the issue of hundreds of people shooting off their mouths regardless of knowledge, and both sides trying hard to control the narrative.

Bottom line-- be a cautious information consumer these days.

But as some with friends, family and former students all over this dispute, I can note a couple of things.

The state's point man is Chancellor Frank Brogan. Brogan started out as an elementary classroom teacher in Florida and got out pretty quickly to enter administration. He eventually became Florida's youngest-ever Education Commissioner. He was going to run for that job again when he was tagged to be Jeb! Bush's Lt. Governor. He was Jeb's point man on education and was elected to second Lt. Gov. term, but left in 2003 to become president of Florida Atlantic University. Upon being appointed to second term at that job, he left that job to become chancellor of Florida's university system in 2009. In 2013, Pennsylvania hired him away, while PA was being run by a governor who wanted to roll the university system back. And he carried all that baggage into contract negotiations that have been dragging on since 2015.

The contract struggle has been a fine example of all the bad things happening in higher education. The state has proposed to hire more adjuncts, force them to teach more classes for the same money (or, more likely, take a pay cut for the same work), push more cyber classes, and just generally water down the whole product. The state has run some of that back at the last minute, which if nothing else has the PR effect of generating a lot of smoke about what is actually on the table.

But what I want to be sure to note is this-- the faculty members could have easily thrown the adjuncts and part-timers under the bus on this one. They could have said "I've got mine, Jack" and let the adjuncts and part-timers take it in the gut. They didn't do that.

Students, at least in my region, are doing some freaking out. The teacher pipeline is already in serious trouble and this strike, which makes the prospects for student teaching and other pre-service placements just kind of mysterious and uncertain.

Nobody ever wants to strike. But strikes are invariably the result of reaching that moment where you realize that you can either damage the institution some right now, or you can sit back, cover your own butt, and let the whole thing be slowly and more thoroughly wrecked over time. In our strike, I used to say that it was not a contest to be won by one side or the other, but a problem to be solved by both sides together. Hard to do if management doesn't want to fix anything. The most striking detail I've read today is the news that the state's team just quit last night around 8:00. When you reach this kind of impasse, you can either try to build something or break something. The next few days will tell whether Brogan and his team are trying to build a system or break a union.

Here's some additional reading if you want it, likely to change regularly over these days (though the state has been running behind)-

The union FAQ sheet

The state's FAQ sheet

PA: Court Decides in Favor of Privacy

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court this week issued a long-overdue ruling with far-reaching consequences for school privacy issues.

The case dates back to 2009, when some folks asserted that Right-To-Know laws meant they could demand home addresses and phone numbers for teachers. The state teachers union fought the issue, but the lower court ruled that teachers should have the right to argue why specific their own personal info should be denied. But that was it, and it wasn't much. PSEA appealed.

Now in a unanimous ruling, the state supremes have ruled that a school district is not a directory service. And they've said in language that has some other clear implications. Here's how Emily Leader described the ruling in an e-mail to Pennsylvania School Board Association members:

The Court held individuals have a constitutional right to privacy in their home addresses under Article 1, Section 1 of the Pennsylvania Constitution.  In general, individuals have a right to “informational privacy” which may not be violated unless this right is outweighed by a public interest favoring disclosure.”   The Court found that in this case there is no public interest in disclosing the school employees’ home addresses in response to this request which outweighs their interest in privacy in their home addresses.  It noted, “To the contrary, nothing in the RTKL suggests that it was ever intended to be used as a tool to procure personal information about private citizens or, in the worst sense, to be a generator of mailing lists. Public agencies are not clearinghouses of “bulk” personal information otherwise protected by constitutional privacy rights.

Does that seem a little broader than just employee's home addresses? It looks that way to PSBA, too. Here's their advice for how school districts should deal with the ruling:

If someone asks for individuals’ private information which is in the school district’s possession, you should deny the request unless the requester provides sufficient information to establish the public interest outweighs the privacy interest. Remember that things like salaries and other compensation are public.  However, home addresses are not.  We do not have an exhaustive list of what is covered and what is not covered by the right to informational privacy. For those non-lawyers receiving this, you will certainly need to get legal advice when you want to assess whether informational privacy rights are implicated by a request under the Right-to-Know Law.

Emphasis mine.

In the opinion, the court looks back at the history of privacy cases in PA and the history of ruling the right to privacy part of the basic rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The court also throws in a mild scolding for the Office of Open Records.

We must remind the OOR, however, that the unique procedural posture of this case, including its status as a party-defendant, is the result of its repeated failure to promulgate adequate regulations to address the almost complete lack of procedural due process for individuals whose personal information is subject to disclosure under the RTKL.

This is followed by some choice excerpts from the Judge's Spanking the OOR Greatest Hits, which translate roughly as, "If the OOR wasn't such a half-assed lazy crew that counted on everyone else to do the hard part of enforcing the law well, we wouldn't be here."

It should also be noted that the Right To Know Law in Pennsylvania is always being bullied and whittled away by the public entities (including school districts) that would rather the press and the public didn't know certain things, so any ruling that puts another leash on the law is not an unmitigated win. This ruling will provide the basis for a lot of necessary privacy protection, but sooner or later some dipstick is going to try hide some sort of misbehavior behind it as well.

As a postscript, we should also note that the ruling re-asserts the principle in PA that breaches of privacy are supposed to weigh public benefits against private costs, and that principle certainly takes a beating any time someone wants to argue that all sorts of student personal data and testing data and God-knows-what-else data should be hovered up and handed over to testing companies and whatever other entities they choose to share/sell it to.

Dear Hillary. Re: Education

We already know that there is no public education candidate running in this Presidential election. But we find ourselves in the unenviable position of having to choose between someone would subject public education  to bad, disruptive, destructive, dismantling policies and someone who would just drop a nuke on public education.

Not that anyone really wants to talk about public education, mind you. Man, remember the old days, when everyone thought that education was going to be a marquee topic in this election cycle? (So sorry, Jeb! Too bad, Campbell.)

So Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post sent out some questions about education. The Trump campaign didn't actually answer ("Go look at our website, you journalistic losers!"). But the Clinton campaign did, and their answers give us an idea of the sorts of things we will need to bombard them and their Secretary of Education about over the next four years (if Trump somehow wins, we will be hunkering down while he bombards us). Here's the short form of the Q & A, with my thoughts about what we need to say in our Dear Hillary letters.

WP: Property tax-based funding of school seems to be Not Very Fair. You want to fix that?

HRC: Before I pretend to answer that, let me toss on the "every child deserves a great education regardless of zip code" boilerplate. Some districts are super-poor because of super-bad funding. But we should fund smarter. Because "invest in our future." I want to fund some very specific things like pre-K and computers. Oh, and she'll look for ways to "encourage" states to fund better.

PAG: Buried in a bunch of generic happy-talk is the fund-smarter-not-harder point, whicvh translates to "no more funding for schools that isn't earmarked by the feds." AKA "we will tell you what you need." This invariably translates into more top-down policy where local control and voices are ignored. Not cool. And I really think we've had enough of the feds "encouraging" states to do what the feds think they should.

WP: Can schools fix poverty by themselves?

HRC:  "...what happens inside our classrooms can’t make up for the investments we’ve failed to make outside our classrooms." Policy is bad. I'll have some programs to work on it.\

PAG: At least on paper, that's a change of pace from fifteen years of "If we get every kid to pass the Big Standardized Test, poverty will just disappear.

WP: Should every student take the BS Test every year?

HRC: That's a controversial issue that I will now sidestep. Agree that too much time is being spent on testing, so I'll say "fewer, fairer tests" are the answer. Let's reduce "unnecessary and duplicative" tests, somehow.

PAG: Brrnnnnt. No. Wrong. It's a yes-or-no question, and the answer is "no.'

WP: Should parents be allowed to opt students out of state-mandated BS Tests?

HRC: "I think we can all agree that just adding more tests will not improve the quality of education our children receive. I also think tests can serve as a valuable tool to see how our children are learning." More with the fewer and fairer, with a side of conversation between parents and schools to do... something.

PAG: Brrrnnnnnnnnnnnt!! Wrong again. This is also a yes-or-no question, and an issue in which the feds have yet to own their role. This is a weasel answer, and the on ly reason  to weasel that simple question is that you know your real answer ("Test 'em al!!") is going to be unpopular.

WP: Four and five year olds are being asked to sit and do academic work. Should play and other child-appropriate activities be re-instated?

HRC: Well, let's just do both. Early literacy and early math are swell, but so is play.

PAG: BBRRRRNNNNTTTT!!! Wrong wrongity wrong. Organized academic work for four year olds is not only unnecessary and unhelpful, but some research suggests it's actually damaging. Also, there are not infinite hours in the day.

WP: Do you support universal pre-K?

HRC: Thank goodness-- an easy one. Way yes. Highquality pre-K for all the four year olds.

PAG: This would be a fine answer except for the previous answer which suggests that Clinton's definition of "high quality pre-school" is seriously defective.

WP: Should teachers be evaluated based on test scores?

HRC: Clinton actually avoids answering this question at all. There's some blather about how hard teachers work and the old "biggest in-school factor" point. Maybe ESSA will help us evaluate teachers real good.

PAG: Sigh. It's a yes-or-no question. Do you wonder why people hate politicians? This is why-- the refusal to answer simple questions simply. Also, the answer is "no."

WP: What's the best way to measure schools, and what do we do with the "failing" ones?

HRC: The measure of success is getting every child college and career ready, even though nobody knows what the hell that means or how to measure it. ESSA will fix it. And failing schools should get more resources.

PAG: One out of three is below basic. But I'll give her some credit for saying we should help failing schools instead of just closing them and turning them over to charter businesses.

WP: I'm going to toss Common Core at you. How do you want to manage this third rail.

HRC: Standards are super, and CCSS was messed up by the implementation. Also, the whole thing was state-led, so federal hands are clean. It's those wacky states.

PAG: I suppose that's pretty mild for someone who probably gets her education briefings from remnants of the Center for American Progress, a group whose love for Common Core is so relentless deranged that I have literally run out of ways to make fun of them.

WP: What's the federal role in education?

HRC: Mostly to make sure that school can be a way out for poor kids in urban and rural poverty spots.

PAG: So we're back to the notion of schools as mainly a social program and not so much an educational one.

WP: Charters are not currently required to be as transparent about finances and other stuff as public schools are. Should they be?

HRC: Almost manages a clear yes for this one, though she has to include a bit about how swell good charters can be, and she's always been a supporter, but boy-- loves that public school. Unprompted, she adds the bit about taking and serving all students that previously made her charterista friends nuts.

PAG: For once, I have no complaints.

WP: Should for-profit businesses be allowed to operate charters?

HRC: I can give an unequivocal no to this because I will continue to pretend not to understand that nominally non-profit charters can be just as lucrative as the profit ones. When we hand out federal largesse to charters in the form of mountains of public tax dollars, we totally rule out for-profits, so you know no businesses are getting rich from that money.

PAG: Nope. The many ways in which non-profit charters can be used to turn a nifty profit have been so widely documented that no sentient being can pretend not to know about them. I'm a little disappointed that the question didn't press the issue a little more directly.

WP: Should states limit the number of charter schools?

HRC: Clinton flat-out doesn't answer this, but instead says we should shut down bad schools and hold charters accountable. Not an answer.

PAG: There is nobody to keep happy with this answer except the millionaire backers of charter businesses. It is exactly the kind of answer that makes it hard to shake the feeling that HRC remains mainly loyal to her big-money Wall Street pals.

WP: Studies show that lots of black children, even pre-schoolers, are disproportionately suspended? Want to comment?

HRC: I have a detailed plan to end the school-to-prison pipeline. Boom.

PAG: In any other year, I would dismiss this as the kind of question that any dummy running for office could figure out and offer a correct answer to. This year we're all learning better.

WP: Vouchers? Should giving public dollars to private schools be a thing?

HRC: No. Private schools don't follow accountability rules when it comes to content, staffing or student treatment, and a voucher system drains precious resources from already-struggling public schools.

PAG: It's a good answer and a good repudiation of voucher systems, but can Clinton explain how it is not also a repudiation of a charter system? This is nuts. For three paragraphs she gives a beat-down of vouchers that could be used, word for word, to oppose charter schools. I start to wonder if Clinton actually understands any of what she's talking about, or whether she is just well-prepped with pre-loaded talking points.

WP: Should colleges and universities be able to factor in race and ethnicity in admissions?

HRC: "I do."

PAG: Look at that. She can give a straight answer to a yes-or-no question when she wants to.

WP: Help pay for college?

HRC: I have been a staunch supporter of free(ish) college ever since Bernie Sanders kicked my ass with the issue.

PAG: Let's take this as a sign of her flexibility and leave it at that.

WP: Should federal loans be for all study areas?

HRC: Sure, but I like the Obama administration's idea of reducing college "quality" to a few really simple metrics, including "how much money do your alumni make," so we'll do more of that.

PAG: The Obama plan leans heavily on the notion that the best college provides vocational training, and metrics that don't really measure what they pretend to measure. They encourage colleges to avoid accepting those damn poor kids who predictably don't go on to make the kind of numbers (or kind of money) that make colleges look good under this ham-brained system.

The questionaire winds up with some personal questions, from which we learn that Clinton had a favorite teacher, hated choir (she can't sing, which is somehow... unsurprising), learned resilience in college, and never cheated because her father would have been disappointed. I will let someone else unpack the world contained in that answer.

So what did we learn? HRC belongs to the Cult of the Test, doesn't display real understanding of charterdom, isn't up on the research about premature academics, and still doesn't understand the whole Common Core thing. There are Grand Canyon sized gaps in her understanding of the whole landscape of educational issues and the debates thereof. She talks kind of like a person whose education about education has come primarily from rich reformsters, and not so much like someone who has regular contact with regular teachers. She is totally welcome to come hang out with me for a day or two. Have your people call my... well, me. I have no idea if Clinton is educable, is willfully ignorant of the issues, or has a full understanding but just prefers the dark side. But I suggest the rest of us gear up for the work of trying to help her "evolve." Of course, if Trumpm wins, no evolving will be going on for a while. Good luck to all of us.

The NAACP: Ignorant Dupes?

They probably had their press releases ready. Despite the full-court lobbying, the charter fans had to have an idea which way the wind was blowing. And so when the NAACP announced the official, full-throated adoption of the call for a charter moratorium, charter fans were ready to explain why it should be ignored.

As always, nobody leapt in with less nuance or modulation than Jeanne Allen at the Center for Education Reform. In an email subject-lined "NAACP Caves To Union Pressure," Allen made it clear that the NAACP has been pressured, duped, and kept in the dark about The Truth.

This is yet another case of a group being intimidated by unions, and being misinformed about how opportunities for poor children, in particular, and minorities, are best served by the kinds of choices that charter schools offer.

This theme runs through most of the charter-flavored responses to the NAACP resolution. Take Jondre Pryor, a KIPP principal who once met an actual NAACP person thereby allowing him to see just how ignorant the NAACP is of What Is Really Going On.

I came to understand the NAACP’s position a little better when I attended a panel on education with several of my KIPP colleagues and when I talked one-on-one with several delegates. It became clear that misinformation was the basis for their opposition. They had heard stories about a few bad charter schools, and they were using that to judge all 6,800 schools in the movement. 

As Jim Horn has pointed out, one of the stories they might have heard was the story of Pryor's own school, where angry parents withdrew students over allegations of mistreatment and the Atlanta newspaper running a photo of KIPP students sitting on the floor, working toward the magic day when they would be judged compliant enough to "earn" a desk.

The NAACP resolution is actually pretty restrained. The NAACP hasn't rejected charters (they specifically state they aren't doing this because of charter opposition), or called for a roll back. They've called for four issues to be settled before the charter train gets rolling again:

1) Charters should be subject to the same transparency and accountability as public schools

2) Public funds should not be diverted to charters at the expense of public schools

3) Charter schools should stop suspending and ejecting students that a public school is obligated to serve

4) Cease to perpetuate de facto segregation of the highest performing children from those whose aspirations may be high but whose talents are not yet as obvious.

These are four odd things for charter fans to object to. For #1, calls to hold bad charters accountable are now a staple of charter fans (see for instance this call from charter supporters for cybers to get their act together). Keeping charters accountable and closing the bad ones is a basic part of the sale pitch. Numbers 2 and 3 are regularly denied. Just check out the #YesOn2 folks in Massachusetts claiming that more charters will mean more money for all schools. Every time a story breaks about charters pushing out students, the response is not justification, but denial. Faced with the Got To Go list, Eva Moskowitz mostly claimed that her charters do no such thing. As for Number 4, with the exception of that wacky Mike Petrilli, this is once again a thing that charter fans claim they don't do.

In short, it's not entirely clear why the charter PR muscle isn't behind a push to say, "We think the NAACP's concerns are legitimate, and that's why we already mostly don't do these things, except for a few bad actors that we want to see closed, too." Why, really, are they freaking out?

If I had to guess (and, of course, I do), I'd say the freak-outery is that this is a PR set-back. The charter movement depends a lot on the ability of the rich white guys pushing charters to be able to gesture at some Actual Black Persons who support charters and agree that charters are the best thing that white folks have ever done for them. This whole holleration is not about policy or politics, but instead centers on their bastard child, PR optics.

It may be simpler than that. Many of the charter backers are in it to make money. A moratorium on launching new charters would hurt their bottom line, and they are simply businessmen who have hit an obstacle to expanding their business revenue. It's PR perhaps with a side of money-grubbing.

But charter fans do have options here. They could, instead of arguing that the NAACP can be dismissed because they are now ignorant dupes, actually listen to what they're saying.

I say this as someone on the Support Public Ed side of the debate, where many of us really blew it in the early stages by suggesting that support for charters among parents of color was only happening because they had been misinformed and duped. But they weren't. They were responding to what looked like the best available solution to the problem of underfunded, under-resourced, just generally crappy poor schools.

The lesson for some of us? It's a mistake to dismiss someone's concerns just because you disagree with their method of addressing those concerns. If someone comes running out of a building wearing a tin hat and shouting, "I'm wearing this tine hat because the building is on fire," discussing the anti-fire efficacy of tin hats is useful, but denying the flames shooting out of windows is not.

So if charter fans were smart, they would look at things like the NAACP resolution and say, "Well, we clearly have some problems that need to be addressed, because these folks are certainly responding to something that they see going on." They could look at this as something more than a lost skirmish in a PR battle, but an opportunity to gather some actual information.

Or Allen and her posse can keep trying to write off the NAACP as a group of ignorant dupes, blame it all on the teachers' union, and keep wondering why, even though they've thrown away their tin hats, everything feels so very warm.