As always, share the originals for anything here that you like. And in the meantime, let it snow.
TFA Wants My Money: Why I Said No
Perhaps Kevin Huffman shouldn't have sent his fund-raising letter to one of the TFA alumni who published a book about the abusive scamming of TFA
Pat and Fred Cody's American Story: Resistance and Resiliance
Anthony Cody tells the story of his parents, the fifties, and HUAC's abuses
ELOs- How Community Based Learning Advances the Cyber Education Agenda
One more thing to watch out for as we stay alert for further moves to replace schools with screens.
What Are You Doing To Teach Students To Spot Sketchy News Stories
One of the stories to come out of the election is the widespread dissemination of fake news. Bill Ferriter offers some concrete methods for teaching your students to be smarter than that.
Doing Well By Doing Good: For-Profit Schools
Larry Cuban takes a look at the not-very-successful history of for-profit education.
Trump's 20 Billion School Choice Plan-- Is It Doable?
Alyson Klein looks at Trump's education plan ("throw money at charters") and tries to see how or if it could be done.
A Beacon of Excellence
Charles Sahm of the Manhattan Institute, usually pushers of charters, writes a glowing review of a public school.
Evidence for the Disconnect Between Changing Test Scores and Changing Life Outcomes
Jay Greene is planted firmly in the reform camp, but that rarely keeps him from calling bullshit. Here he attacks one of the basic assumptions of reformsterdom-- the idea that raising a child's test scores improves that child's future.
Here Are Corporations and Right Wing Funders Backing Education Reform Movement
From back in April, a handy little resource from Media Matters, this is a fairly large list and set of charts showing some of the drivers on the right-tilted side of ed reform. We can quibble about what was or wasn't included (does DFER get to be counted as left-leaning just because they say so in the face of all evidence to the contrary). But it's still a handy guide to some of the players.
Sunday, November 20, 2016
Saturday, November 19, 2016
Make Ed Reporting Reporting Again
Alexander Russo has used the recent bout of reportorial navel gazing about the role of journalism (or the lack thereof) in the last election as an opportunity to ask if education reporting can also use a bit of a reboot. He has four specific recommendations which are worth considering, but I think he missed the hugest one of all.
Reporting with Greater Authority
Folks have noted that a little fact checking might have been useful during this dumpster fire of an election season, just as many folks have called out the media's repeated insistence on false equivalency, insisting that two viewpoints are equally valid, as if the Flat Earth Society is just another point of view.
Says Education Writers Association executive director Caroline Hendrie, “We need to report when people are saying things that are wrong. We do not want to pass them along.” And, well, yeah, that's true, it's a measure of how lost journalists have become that such a thing even needs to be said out loud. It is only half a step less obvious that, "We need to report using words in the native tongue of our readers."
Russo asked on twitter if anyone had seen or passed on stories that were not true. My first thought was, yeah, how about several years of stories insisting that Common Core was written by teachers, then developed and adopted freely by states with no federal involvement. And that's before we get to the kind of spin and selectivity routinely used for a new "study" on various testing results. So, yes, this attention to accuracy issue is definitely a thing.
Resisting the Illusion of Certainty in Numbers
I will give Russo a big Standing O for this one. The entire reformster movement has made a deliberate effort to try to assign numbers to all sorts of things so that we can call those numbers "data" and then mistake them for "facts." That in turn creates an illusion of certainty. Are you certain that this reading program helps students get better jobs? Why, yes, of course-- look at these numbers! Can you certify that you know exactly whether or not this eight-year-old is on track for college? Absolutely, because we have generated this number!
This is one of the reasons that so much of reformer policy makes me nuts. It comes down to this conversation:
Me: This whole policy rests on having knowledge of things that cannot be known.
Reformsters: Of course they can be known. We have numbers right here!
Getting Out Of The Urban/Charter Coverage Bubble:
I will give him the urban thing. As someone who works in a small town/rural setting, I can absolute certify that almost nobody is paying any real attention to what goes on here. And when you start talking about charters and choice in the states where there are fewer than a million people in the whole state-- well, get serious.
He also mentions getting out of the "everyone must go to college" bubble, which is an excellent idea.
But the notion that some people are stuck in the charter-choice bubble because that's comfortable? I don't think so. We're stuck discussing charters all the time for a couple of reasons. First, because charters are exerting never-ending pressure to sell their product and the policies that promote it. There's a bubble in part because charteristas are working day and night to inflate that bubble. Second, we can't desert the charter-choice story for the same reason that we can't just say, "You know, talking about global warming is just getting old, so let's talk about something else" or "I'm tired of hearing about the oppression of minorities-- let's talk about something else instead." Charter promotion is an attempt to change the fundamental purpose and mission of public education in this country, and it has so far been an attempt to change that purpose without having any serious national conversation about it.
The rise of charters is nothing less than an assault on democracy and equality in this country. We should be talking about it every day, and twice a day on weekends.
Addressing Bias and Opening Up To Different Storylines
Here's Hendrie to once again say what shouldn't need to be said.
“Don’t go into a community with the story three quarters written,” advised EWA’s Hendrie. “Expect to be surprised. Keep your eyes and mind open.”
Yes. That would be reporting. Russo advocates for being open to different points of view, but in the education field, reporters have to first open up their minds about what "different points of view" mean. Some education writers, for instance, think the battle is between Common Core advocates and the teachers unions, which is like reporting that World War II was a war between Italy and Russia-- a somewhat less-than-complete picture. But at every step of the story of ed reform, Common Core, charters, data collection, and de-professionalism of teaching, there have been reporters who couldn't tell the story well because they didn't even understand who the main players were. I just wish I could find again the story written by a reporter who, to get a "teacher perspective," spoke to a first-year Teach for America recruit.
As with reporting on any subject, it's not just a matter of bias-- it's a matter of knowing what the hell you're talking about.
What's missing?
In all of these ideas, Russo comes close to another important aspect of Education Reporting and What It Needs-- but he never quite nails it, and if education reporting is ever going to be less sucktastic, it has to be nailed.
To Whom Are You Speaking?
Education reporting is what political reporting would look like if no reporter ever spoke to the politicians running for in the election being covered. It's reporting on the Syrian refugee crisis without ever speaking to a single Syrian. It's like business reporting without ever doing anything but reading official company press releases.
I get why education reporters so rarely talk to actual teachers. We're a widespread bunch, we're hard to find, and our work schedule is really inconvenient. But education reporters pretty much never speak to actual teachers.
There are so many voices that have been left out of the conversation. Part of this is the very structure of the ed debates. On the one side, we have reformsters who have a mountain of money at their disposal, and they have used it to push their message out. There are guys like Mike Petrilli (cited twice in Russo's piece and a million other times in everyone else's pieces) for whom this whole gig-- talking to reporters, putting out opinion pieces, arguing for the reformster message-- is the actual job. People love to quote Petrilli because he's easy to get ahold of, easy to talk to, and ready to offer some comments-- almost like it's what he's paid to do. Meanwhile, if you want to talk to someone like me, well, if you call me between 8:25 and 9:09, or during my lunch half hour, as long as I don't get pulled into a meeting or a student doesn't need me for something-- well, maybe then I can talk to you. Because being a press contact for the resistance is not my real job. The reform movement is rife with organizations and people who are already well-connected. Those of us speaking against the reform movement are mostly civilians trying to get our two cents in while still meeting all of our real world obligations. We have always been at that disadvantage, and press coverage of education issues has always been tilted because of it.
And it's not just the reformsters. Ed reporters also keep getting surprised because they assume that Lily Eskelsen Garcia and Randi Weingarten speak for all teachers, that union positions are shared by all classroom teachers. That's a bad assumption; union leadership was (is) still beating the drum for Common Core long after rank and file teachers widely lost patience for the standards.
And EWA has deliberately made it worse, by declaring that if you're just a blogger, just a person who's writing about education on the side and not getting paid for it, you aren't a member of the club. Which is too bad. Some of the best research in the field is being done by people like Mercedes Schneider. Some of the best interviews-- interviews that nobody else is bothering to do-- from all across the spectrum are being done by people like Jennifer Berkshire. We're a feisty bunch, and yeah, some of us are perhaps not as polished as a "real" reporter, but we Know Stuff. Teachers don't have press agents, publicity assistants, or organizations to help us get our word out. That does not mean we don't have something to say. A reporter would be wise to cultivate some ed blogger connections.
You can occasionally hear our howls of anguish. Remember back around 2012-2013, when a bunch of writers and policy-makers suddenly lifted their heads and said, "Hey, you know-- this No Child Left Behind thing that says all students must be proficient by 2014? That can't really happen, can it." That next distant sound you heard was millions of teachers slapping their foreheads and hollering, "We've been telling you that for a decade." Ed reporters repeatedly ponder whether anyone could have foreseen certain developments while actual teachers in the field have been foreseeing them, unheard and unheeded, for years.
Sure, there are some reporters who are doing their homework. But far too many are just running with the press release that landed on their desk without ever asking questions about the group that it came from. Too many are just listening to a thinky tank or astroturf advocacy group without asking who's paying the bills.
Sure, there are ed reporters out there who are getting the job done, and doing it pretty well. In the end, Caroline "Captain Obvious" Hendrie is right-- we don't need to talk about making education reporting great again. If we could just make it reporting again, that would be a huge help.
Reporting with Greater Authority
Folks have noted that a little fact checking might have been useful during this dumpster fire of an election season, just as many folks have called out the media's repeated insistence on false equivalency, insisting that two viewpoints are equally valid, as if the Flat Earth Society is just another point of view.
Says Education Writers Association executive director Caroline Hendrie, “We need to report when people are saying things that are wrong. We do not want to pass them along.” And, well, yeah, that's true, it's a measure of how lost journalists have become that such a thing even needs to be said out loud. It is only half a step less obvious that, "We need to report using words in the native tongue of our readers."
 |
| Did he once ask where all the women went? |
Russo asked on twitter if anyone had seen or passed on stories that were not true. My first thought was, yeah, how about several years of stories insisting that Common Core was written by teachers, then developed and adopted freely by states with no federal involvement. And that's before we get to the kind of spin and selectivity routinely used for a new "study" on various testing results. So, yes, this attention to accuracy issue is definitely a thing.
Resisting the Illusion of Certainty in Numbers
I will give Russo a big Standing O for this one. The entire reformster movement has made a deliberate effort to try to assign numbers to all sorts of things so that we can call those numbers "data" and then mistake them for "facts." That in turn creates an illusion of certainty. Are you certain that this reading program helps students get better jobs? Why, yes, of course-- look at these numbers! Can you certify that you know exactly whether or not this eight-year-old is on track for college? Absolutely, because we have generated this number!
This is one of the reasons that so much of reformer policy makes me nuts. It comes down to this conversation:
Me: This whole policy rests on having knowledge of things that cannot be known.
Reformsters: Of course they can be known. We have numbers right here!
Getting Out Of The Urban/Charter Coverage Bubble:
I will give him the urban thing. As someone who works in a small town/rural setting, I can absolute certify that almost nobody is paying any real attention to what goes on here. And when you start talking about charters and choice in the states where there are fewer than a million people in the whole state-- well, get serious.
He also mentions getting out of the "everyone must go to college" bubble, which is an excellent idea.
But the notion that some people are stuck in the charter-choice bubble because that's comfortable? I don't think so. We're stuck discussing charters all the time for a couple of reasons. First, because charters are exerting never-ending pressure to sell their product and the policies that promote it. There's a bubble in part because charteristas are working day and night to inflate that bubble. Second, we can't desert the charter-choice story for the same reason that we can't just say, "You know, talking about global warming is just getting old, so let's talk about something else" or "I'm tired of hearing about the oppression of minorities-- let's talk about something else instead." Charter promotion is an attempt to change the fundamental purpose and mission of public education in this country, and it has so far been an attempt to change that purpose without having any serious national conversation about it.
The rise of charters is nothing less than an assault on democracy and equality in this country. We should be talking about it every day, and twice a day on weekends.
Addressing Bias and Opening Up To Different Storylines
Here's Hendrie to once again say what shouldn't need to be said.
“Don’t go into a community with the story three quarters written,” advised EWA’s Hendrie. “Expect to be surprised. Keep your eyes and mind open.”
Yes. That would be reporting. Russo advocates for being open to different points of view, but in the education field, reporters have to first open up their minds about what "different points of view" mean. Some education writers, for instance, think the battle is between Common Core advocates and the teachers unions, which is like reporting that World War II was a war between Italy and Russia-- a somewhat less-than-complete picture. But at every step of the story of ed reform, Common Core, charters, data collection, and de-professionalism of teaching, there have been reporters who couldn't tell the story well because they didn't even understand who the main players were. I just wish I could find again the story written by a reporter who, to get a "teacher perspective," spoke to a first-year Teach for America recruit.
As with reporting on any subject, it's not just a matter of bias-- it's a matter of knowing what the hell you're talking about.
What's missing?
In all of these ideas, Russo comes close to another important aspect of Education Reporting and What It Needs-- but he never quite nails it, and if education reporting is ever going to be less sucktastic, it has to be nailed.
To Whom Are You Speaking?
Education reporting is what political reporting would look like if no reporter ever spoke to the politicians running for in the election being covered. It's reporting on the Syrian refugee crisis without ever speaking to a single Syrian. It's like business reporting without ever doing anything but reading official company press releases.
I get why education reporters so rarely talk to actual teachers. We're a widespread bunch, we're hard to find, and our work schedule is really inconvenient. But education reporters pretty much never speak to actual teachers.
There are so many voices that have been left out of the conversation. Part of this is the very structure of the ed debates. On the one side, we have reformsters who have a mountain of money at their disposal, and they have used it to push their message out. There are guys like Mike Petrilli (cited twice in Russo's piece and a million other times in everyone else's pieces) for whom this whole gig-- talking to reporters, putting out opinion pieces, arguing for the reformster message-- is the actual job. People love to quote Petrilli because he's easy to get ahold of, easy to talk to, and ready to offer some comments-- almost like it's what he's paid to do. Meanwhile, if you want to talk to someone like me, well, if you call me between 8:25 and 9:09, or during my lunch half hour, as long as I don't get pulled into a meeting or a student doesn't need me for something-- well, maybe then I can talk to you. Because being a press contact for the resistance is not my real job. The reform movement is rife with organizations and people who are already well-connected. Those of us speaking against the reform movement are mostly civilians trying to get our two cents in while still meeting all of our real world obligations. We have always been at that disadvantage, and press coverage of education issues has always been tilted because of it.
And it's not just the reformsters. Ed reporters also keep getting surprised because they assume that Lily Eskelsen Garcia and Randi Weingarten speak for all teachers, that union positions are shared by all classroom teachers. That's a bad assumption; union leadership was (is) still beating the drum for Common Core long after rank and file teachers widely lost patience for the standards.
And EWA has deliberately made it worse, by declaring that if you're just a blogger, just a person who's writing about education on the side and not getting paid for it, you aren't a member of the club. Which is too bad. Some of the best research in the field is being done by people like Mercedes Schneider. Some of the best interviews-- interviews that nobody else is bothering to do-- from all across the spectrum are being done by people like Jennifer Berkshire. We're a feisty bunch, and yeah, some of us are perhaps not as polished as a "real" reporter, but we Know Stuff. Teachers don't have press agents, publicity assistants, or organizations to help us get our word out. That does not mean we don't have something to say. A reporter would be wise to cultivate some ed blogger connections.
You can occasionally hear our howls of anguish. Remember back around 2012-2013, when a bunch of writers and policy-makers suddenly lifted their heads and said, "Hey, you know-- this No Child Left Behind thing that says all students must be proficient by 2014? That can't really happen, can it." That next distant sound you heard was millions of teachers slapping their foreheads and hollering, "We've been telling you that for a decade." Ed reporters repeatedly ponder whether anyone could have foreseen certain developments while actual teachers in the field have been foreseeing them, unheard and unheeded, for years.
Sure, there are some reporters who are doing their homework. But far too many are just running with the press release that landed on their desk without ever asking questions about the group that it came from. Too many are just listening to a thinky tank or astroturf advocacy group without asking who's paying the bills.
Sure, there are ed reporters out there who are getting the job done, and doing it pretty well. In the end, Caroline "Captain Obvious" Hendrie is right-- we don't need to talk about making education reporting great again. If we could just make it reporting again, that would be a huge help.
FL: Charter Teacher Fired for Assigning Reading
The Franklin Academy charter chain of Florida says it takes its inspiration from Ben Franklin, "a founding father who personified the pursuit of excellence, discovery and creativity." But they apparently also credit Franklin with being a champion of compliance and test prep, and they apparently don't share his respect for teaching.
7th grade English teacher Elliott Herman has been fired by the Palm Beach branch of the charter chain. His offense was, apparently, trying to add some actual reading to the test prep curriculum required by the chain. From a story in local media:
“Teachers want to teach more but we’re told not to,” said Herman.
He was teaching his English class “The Giver,” a book he taught the class last year, too. However, this year the school removed “The Giver” from the curriculum.
“They said we don’t want you wasting time reading in the class,” said Herman.
So Herman had his students read the book at home and asked them to be ready to analyze the book in class.
But after his most recent in-class review, he learned the school didn’t want that either.
It's possible this was a sort of double-violation, as the Franklin Academy FAQ page promises that as long as your child is on track, there will be no homework. But the charter has, of course, declined to offer any explanation for Herman's dismissal, so all we know is what's out there now.
The chain says they base their educational philosophy on a Ben Franklin quote-- “Tell me and I forget, Teach me and I remember, Involve me and I learn" -- and if you have been on the internet for more than a week, you can guess what I'm going to tell you next: Ben Franklin didn't say that. Best research says that's Chinese philosopher Xun Kuang as quoted in the Xunxzi.
Franklin Academy has been in trouble before. Back in 2013-2014, Governor Rick Scott pushed money out to all Florida schools earmarked to give each teacher a $2,500 "raise," but the newly-opened Boynton Beach campus of Franklin Academy decided they'd just go ahead and keep that money for the general budget.
You'll be shocked to learn that Franklin Academy has trouble holding onto personnel. That same Boynton Beach campus lost their principal three months into their first year (whether she jumped or was pushed was a topic of some conjecture). And a reviewer on Glassdoor.com, the rate-your-employer website, had this to say about Franklin Academy:
Administration is VERY disorganized, high staff turn over, seasoned teachers leaving. No job security- over 30 staff changes in one year. If Admin likes you or you fly under the radar it is very peaceful, but if for whatever reason something changes they create a hostile work environment. The Admin has been dubbed as "mean girls" by some of the staff.
The Franklin Academy chain is actually run by Florida Charter Foundation, Inc. So let's wander down that alley for a moment.
The Florida Charters Foundation was first registered in 2006, with Scott Sznitken listed as their principal and five other names who are still on the governing board today, all listed at the same Ft. Lauderdale address. The offices are in a smallish building along with ten other businesses, including a couple of restaurant management firms, but several of those businesses appear to be managed by another business in the building, Waldera and Brown, P.A.. The office building is (I swear, I am not making this up) across the street from a church and next door to "Sugar and Spice Boudoir Photography." Ah, Florida.
The original names of the board were Catherine Arcabascio, Jacqueline Greenberg, Alexandra Lonsdale, Deborah Platz, and David M Thomas, and with the exception of Alexandra Lonsdale, they are hard to pin down. Lonsdale got her Masters in Education from UF in 2008 and has worked mostly as a teacher. She is the only person but one on LinkedIN to list this board. The other four could likely all be lawyers, but it's hard to be certain. Scott Sznitken is a lawyer with a background in managing tech solutions for various industries like health care. The Florida Charters Foundation does not have any website beyond the Franklin Academies site.
The six campuses are big and beautiful. How does a modest charter management group pull off that trick? Well, the for-profit investment group making nice retirement money for charter investment whiz Andre Agassi-- they built the Boynton Beach facility for Franklin Academy, and Agassi even came and walked around his new source of investment income.
The chain has been growing rapidly and appealing to other charter and private school families. This growth is reflected in the 990 forms that the non-profit Florida Charters Foundation must file with the IRS (you can view this stuff at guidestar.org, but you'll need to set up an account). In 2012, FCF reported gross receipts of $8,360,951. In 2015, the number was $36,314,859. In 2012 they finished the year with just under $2 million in assets; in 2015, it was $5.5ish million.
The chain contracted out a few areas of expense. They spent $1.4 million to a leasing company, $1.1 million for insurance, and $1 million for health insurance. $897 K for "leasing and insurance" to a corporation in Los Angeles, and a little over $700K for school supplies. Board members were unpaid, and Sznitken received $113,608 as executive director, which honestly is not that impressive. Eva Moskowitz wouldn't get out of bed for that kind of chump change.
The chain listed $33,955,623 in revenue from government grants. It also reported almost $8 million in deferred rent payments, so if nothing else, they have a patient landlord.
And I've spent far more time on these folks than I had any intention of spending. Bottom line: these guys may not be laundering a gabillion dollars through their schools, but neither is this some school realizing Shanker's vision of teachers finding a way to better do the job of teaching.
Which brings us back around to Mr. Herman's problem. There are a couple of lessons to learn here, and charters are going to continue to do well until these lessons sink in to the public:
1) If you go to work for someone who can fire you for any reason, and the corporation that hired you doesn't really know anything about how to do your job, sooner or later they will probably fire you for some dumb reason. Either that or you're going to knuckle under to perform some sort of educational malpractice.
2) If you send your child to a charter school, and you don't like something that happens at the school, you will not be able to find somebody in the organization that has to listen to you. You might not be able to find anybody at all. The lead on this story has been that parents have turned to the press to air their grievances, to which I say, well, yes, of course. If your child is at a charter school, that's pretty much your option-- take to some form of media and hope you can raise sufficient fuss that someone in charge has to pay attention (to date, the Franklin Academy Palm Springs Facebook page is quiet and happy).
Charters have told us repeatedly, directly and indirectly, that they do not function like public schools. At some point folks have to stop being surprised when that turns out to be true, and they can do things like fire English teacher for trying to interrupt test prep with actual education.
7th grade English teacher Elliott Herman has been fired by the Palm Beach branch of the charter chain. His offense was, apparently, trying to add some actual reading to the test prep curriculum required by the chain. From a story in local media:
“Teachers want to teach more but we’re told not to,” said Herman.
He was teaching his English class “The Giver,” a book he taught the class last year, too. However, this year the school removed “The Giver” from the curriculum.
“They said we don’t want you wasting time reading in the class,” said Herman.
So Herman had his students read the book at home and asked them to be ready to analyze the book in class.
But after his most recent in-class review, he learned the school didn’t want that either.
It's possible this was a sort of double-violation, as the Franklin Academy FAQ page promises that as long as your child is on track, there will be no homework. But the charter has, of course, declined to offer any explanation for Herman's dismissal, so all we know is what's out there now.
The chain says they base their educational philosophy on a Ben Franklin quote-- “Tell me and I forget, Teach me and I remember, Involve me and I learn" -- and if you have been on the internet for more than a week, you can guess what I'm going to tell you next: Ben Franklin didn't say that. Best research says that's Chinese philosopher Xun Kuang as quoted in the Xunxzi.
Franklin Academy has been in trouble before. Back in 2013-2014, Governor Rick Scott pushed money out to all Florida schools earmarked to give each teacher a $2,500 "raise," but the newly-opened Boynton Beach campus of Franklin Academy decided they'd just go ahead and keep that money for the general budget.
You'll be shocked to learn that Franklin Academy has trouble holding onto personnel. That same Boynton Beach campus lost their principal three months into their first year (whether she jumped or was pushed was a topic of some conjecture). And a reviewer on Glassdoor.com, the rate-your-employer website, had this to say about Franklin Academy:
Administration is VERY disorganized, high staff turn over, seasoned teachers leaving. No job security- over 30 staff changes in one year. If Admin likes you or you fly under the radar it is very peaceful, but if for whatever reason something changes they create a hostile work environment. The Admin has been dubbed as "mean girls" by some of the staff.
The Franklin Academy chain is actually run by Florida Charter Foundation, Inc. So let's wander down that alley for a moment.
The Florida Charters Foundation was first registered in 2006, with Scott Sznitken listed as their principal and five other names who are still on the governing board today, all listed at the same Ft. Lauderdale address. The offices are in a smallish building along with ten other businesses, including a couple of restaurant management firms, but several of those businesses appear to be managed by another business in the building, Waldera and Brown, P.A.. The office building is (I swear, I am not making this up) across the street from a church and next door to "Sugar and Spice Boudoir Photography." Ah, Florida.
The original names of the board were Catherine Arcabascio, Jacqueline Greenberg, Alexandra Lonsdale, Deborah Platz, and David M Thomas, and with the exception of Alexandra Lonsdale, they are hard to pin down. Lonsdale got her Masters in Education from UF in 2008 and has worked mostly as a teacher. She is the only person but one on LinkedIN to list this board. The other four could likely all be lawyers, but it's hard to be certain. Scott Sznitken is a lawyer with a background in managing tech solutions for various industries like health care. The Florida Charters Foundation does not have any website beyond the Franklin Academies site.
The six campuses are big and beautiful. How does a modest charter management group pull off that trick? Well, the for-profit investment group making nice retirement money for charter investment whiz Andre Agassi-- they built the Boynton Beach facility for Franklin Academy, and Agassi even came and walked around his new source of investment income.
The chain has been growing rapidly and appealing to other charter and private school families. This growth is reflected in the 990 forms that the non-profit Florida Charters Foundation must file with the IRS (you can view this stuff at guidestar.org, but you'll need to set up an account). In 2012, FCF reported gross receipts of $8,360,951. In 2015, the number was $36,314,859. In 2012 they finished the year with just under $2 million in assets; in 2015, it was $5.5ish million.
The chain contracted out a few areas of expense. They spent $1.4 million to a leasing company, $1.1 million for insurance, and $1 million for health insurance. $897 K for "leasing and insurance" to a corporation in Los Angeles, and a little over $700K for school supplies. Board members were unpaid, and Sznitken received $113,608 as executive director, which honestly is not that impressive. Eva Moskowitz wouldn't get out of bed for that kind of chump change.
The chain listed $33,955,623 in revenue from government grants. It also reported almost $8 million in deferred rent payments, so if nothing else, they have a patient landlord.
And I've spent far more time on these folks than I had any intention of spending. Bottom line: these guys may not be laundering a gabillion dollars through their schools, but neither is this some school realizing Shanker's vision of teachers finding a way to better do the job of teaching.
Which brings us back around to Mr. Herman's problem. There are a couple of lessons to learn here, and charters are going to continue to do well until these lessons sink in to the public:
1) If you go to work for someone who can fire you for any reason, and the corporation that hired you doesn't really know anything about how to do your job, sooner or later they will probably fire you for some dumb reason. Either that or you're going to knuckle under to perform some sort of educational malpractice.
2) If you send your child to a charter school, and you don't like something that happens at the school, you will not be able to find somebody in the organization that has to listen to you. You might not be able to find anybody at all. The lead on this story has been that parents have turned to the press to air their grievances, to which I say, well, yes, of course. If your child is at a charter school, that's pretty much your option-- take to some form of media and hope you can raise sufficient fuss that someone in charge has to pay attention (to date, the Franklin Academy Palm Springs Facebook page is quiet and happy).
Charters have told us repeatedly, directly and indirectly, that they do not function like public schools. At some point folks have to stop being surprised when that turns out to be true, and they can do things like fire English teacher for trying to interrupt test prep with actual education.
Thursday, November 17, 2016
The Faux Progressive Polka
It has always been one of the curiosities of the reformster movement-- the insistence that they are Progressives and Democrats, while they have embraced and pushed policies linked to the privatization of public education.
How could it be that Bush II's ed policy could flow seamlessly into Obama's? How could it be that Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton saw each other as simpatico when it came to education?
The answer, of course, is that ed reform has been driven in large part by faux progressives. Probably the most spectacular example would be Democrats For Education Reform (DFER), a title in which the only accurate word is "for." Here, from his filmic ed reform magnum opus "A Right Denied," is DFER founder and hedge fund giant Whitney Tilson's explanation of how they decided to put the D in DFER:
“The real problem, politically, was not the Republican party, it was the Democratic party. So it dawned on us, over the course of six months or a year, that it had to be an inside job. The main obstacle to education reform was moving the Democratic party, and it had to be Democrats who did it, it had to be an inside job. So that was the thesis behind the organization. And the name – and the name was critical – we get a lot of flack for the name. You know, “Why are you Democrats for education reform? That’s very exclusionary. I mean, certainly there are Republicans in favor of education reform.” And we said, “We agree.” In fact, our natural allies, in many cases, are Republicans on this crusade, but the problem is not Republicans. We don’t need to convert the Republican party to our point of view…”
But now the head of DFER has this to say about serving in a Trump administration.
It is, generally speaking, an honor for any person of any political persuasion to be asked by the President of the United States to consider a Cabinet-level appointment, but in the case of President-elect Trump, DFER encourages no Democrat to accept an appointment to serve as Secretary of Education in this new administration. In so doing, that individual would become an agent for an agenda that both contradicts progressive values and threatens grave harm to our nation’s most vulnerable kids.
Exactly which agenda would that be? Attacking teachers unions and their work to try to establish and maintain a safer, more productive educational environment for students? The spreading of choice and voucher programs that will suck precious resources away from all schools, particularly the poor schools that can least afford it? The dismantling of a fundamental democratic public institution in order to create money-making schemes for private individuals? Because all of those things sound just like Trump, and just like DFER.
Perhaps reformsters have in many cases tried to paint themselves as left-leaning progressives because they believe, as Rick Hess does, "that the center in education is two standard deviations to the left of the American public." Hess just tried to parse out the left-right thing, but some of his historical recap does not look familiar to me.
What usually gets missed, however, is that for the past decade, this clash has primarily existed between two wings of the Democratic Party. The "reformers" have mostly been passionate, Great Society liberals who believe in closing "achievement gaps" and pursuing "equity" via charter schooling, teacher evaluation, the Common Core, and test-based accountability. And their opponents have been the Democratic Party's more traditional, New Deal wing. Other than occasional guest appearances by the likes of centrist Republicans such as Jeb Bush and Lamar Alexander, this has mostly been an intramural fight.
Not how I remember it. I remember lots of more-than-guest (let's call them "featured") appearances by Mike Petrilli and Checker Finn and Andy Smarick and Hess himself, among others, working for an assortment of right-leaning thinky tanks. Much of the reformster agenda percolated along quite nicely under the Bush II administration. Conservatives have not been observers in these debates, though some tried to retroactively back away once Common Core blew up in their face. And if reformsters are Great Society Liberals, I am the Queen of Rumania.
Since I first started mucking around in this pool, the left-right thing has puzzled me (I'm from good New Hampshire stock-- political labels have never been a big thing in my family). Where are the acual progressives in education? How can anyone call a Moskowitz or a She Who Will Not Be Named a progressive Democrat? What exactly separates, policy-wise, a Dmitri Melhorn from a Mike Petrilli, a Peter Cunningham from a Rick Hess? As near as I've been able to tell, only two things-- well, two and a half.
1/2) Some of the right generally doesn't care for Common Core (any more) and the left (or at least the left-for-reformy-purposes left) thinks the Core matters (unless, like Petrilli, they're in the CCSS promotion biz).
1 1/2) The right thinks schools should be privatized because business and competition do a better job, and the left-for-reformy-purposes thinks schools should be privatized because equity.
2 1/2) The left wants to talk about using education to fix civil rights and poverty. The right wants to talk about using schools to fix any excuses for being poor. The Trump Right, whatever the hell that is exactly, is probably not going to be super-concerned about the civil rights thing.
And I can still find exceptions for those distinctions.
But now everybody has to confront a grim reality-- Donald J. Trump thinks charters and choice are awesome and the Common Core sucks (though he doesn't really understand it). What's a DFER to do? On the one hand, they are trying to look like Democrats. On the other hand, they agree with every dot and tittle of Trump's likely ed policy.
There are any number of explanations-- Trump has no actual convictions on any political scale, the backers for various policies have shifted, blah blah blah. I think the most likely explanation is that privatization was never a progressive idea, ever, but when faux progressives were controlling the political conversation, it behooved people in search of power and support to put on their own progressive masks.
So what's the play now? Stop pretending to be progressives and throw in their lot with the Trumpians (who are themselves only pretending to be conservatives)?
But modern charter schools, the testing industry, the data mining of America-- none of that was ever governed by a political ideology as much as it's guided by a deep love of money. In this, as in many other areas, Trump has if nothing else ripped the pretense off a lot of high-flung baloney. Trump is about power and profit, and power and profit are all the motivation you need to come up with a program of privatizing, monetizing, and digitizing US education. You can add some political philosophizing after the fact, but it's really beside the point.
Modern corporate reform is congealed around neither right nr left; it's heart beats to the neo-liberal rhythm which means we shall have social programs (yay, liberals!) that are contracted out to the free market (yay, conservatives!) But neo-liberalism serves righties far better than it serves lefties. They get their money, but privatized programs have yet show real quality.
And then there's the dark underbelly of modern reform, particularly charter choice programs that remove democratic process from non-wealthy non-white neighborhoods, giving our lesser what we think is best for them and, in the case of No Excuses schools, the kind of tight domination and control that Those People need. This view of Those People is also not incompatible with Trumpism.
We can play the left-right game all day. Schools tend to attract people who are oriented toward helping and uplifting other people, so the school world should skew left. But schools are also old, hidebound institutions that rely heavily on tradition and stability-- so, conservative. But that left-right dichotomy is not the problem reformsters face.
What they face is a unique and striking dilemma. Under Trump, they can have every policy they ever wanted, save Common Core. But they can only have the policies bare and stripped of any pretense. DFER and Jeanne Allen's Center for Education Reform can have almost everything they want, but they can only have it in a Trump-tied bow. They can only have their policies by admitting that their policies are not progressive at all (and by admitting they're totally okay with Trumpian awfulness as long as they get choice and charters). They can only oppose Herr Trump by disowning their own policies. Or they can dance around in a faux progressive polka, doing their best to respond to the music they never asked for, but which is everything they want. For grifters like She Who Will Not Be Named (formerly of DC schools) this is just a practical problem of angling for success; for sincere reformsters (yes, I believe such things exist), it's a real moral dilemma.
Their best hope may be the path hinted at by Hess-- if we pretend that all reform is progressive and Trump is conservative, well then, we can sell Trump plus some reformster as a compromise that brings us to the sensible middle. That would be a lie. That version of the faux progressive polka will just get us years of policy that just extend the last two decades of reformster policy, and in one more area the most faux anti-establishment President of them all will just keep dancing the same old reformster path-- red to the right, blue to the left, and green all the way to the horizon.
How could it be that Bush II's ed policy could flow seamlessly into Obama's? How could it be that Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton saw each other as simpatico when it came to education?
The answer, of course, is that ed reform has been driven in large part by faux progressives. Probably the most spectacular example would be Democrats For Education Reform (DFER), a title in which the only accurate word is "for." Here, from his filmic ed reform magnum opus "A Right Denied," is DFER founder and hedge fund giant Whitney Tilson's explanation of how they decided to put the D in DFER:
“The real problem, politically, was not the Republican party, it was the Democratic party. So it dawned on us, over the course of six months or a year, that it had to be an inside job. The main obstacle to education reform was moving the Democratic party, and it had to be Democrats who did it, it had to be an inside job. So that was the thesis behind the organization. And the name – and the name was critical – we get a lot of flack for the name. You know, “Why are you Democrats for education reform? That’s very exclusionary. I mean, certainly there are Republicans in favor of education reform.” And we said, “We agree.” In fact, our natural allies, in many cases, are Republicans on this crusade, but the problem is not Republicans. We don’t need to convert the Republican party to our point of view…”
But now the head of DFER has this to say about serving in a Trump administration.
It is, generally speaking, an honor for any person of any political persuasion to be asked by the President of the United States to consider a Cabinet-level appointment, but in the case of President-elect Trump, DFER encourages no Democrat to accept an appointment to serve as Secretary of Education in this new administration. In so doing, that individual would become an agent for an agenda that both contradicts progressive values and threatens grave harm to our nation’s most vulnerable kids.
Exactly which agenda would that be? Attacking teachers unions and their work to try to establish and maintain a safer, more productive educational environment for students? The spreading of choice and voucher programs that will suck precious resources away from all schools, particularly the poor schools that can least afford it? The dismantling of a fundamental democratic public institution in order to create money-making schemes for private individuals? Because all of those things sound just like Trump, and just like DFER.
Perhaps reformsters have in many cases tried to paint themselves as left-leaning progressives because they believe, as Rick Hess does, "that the center in education is two standard deviations to the left of the American public." Hess just tried to parse out the left-right thing, but some of his historical recap does not look familiar to me.
What usually gets missed, however, is that for the past decade, this clash has primarily existed between two wings of the Democratic Party. The "reformers" have mostly been passionate, Great Society liberals who believe in closing "achievement gaps" and pursuing "equity" via charter schooling, teacher evaluation, the Common Core, and test-based accountability. And their opponents have been the Democratic Party's more traditional, New Deal wing. Other than occasional guest appearances by the likes of centrist Republicans such as Jeb Bush and Lamar Alexander, this has mostly been an intramural fight.
Not how I remember it. I remember lots of more-than-guest (let's call them "featured") appearances by Mike Petrilli and Checker Finn and Andy Smarick and Hess himself, among others, working for an assortment of right-leaning thinky tanks. Much of the reformster agenda percolated along quite nicely under the Bush II administration. Conservatives have not been observers in these debates, though some tried to retroactively back away once Common Core blew up in their face. And if reformsters are Great Society Liberals, I am the Queen of Rumania.
 |
| Actual Queen of Rumania |
Since I first started mucking around in this pool, the left-right thing has puzzled me (I'm from good New Hampshire stock-- political labels have never been a big thing in my family). Where are the acual progressives in education? How can anyone call a Moskowitz or a She Who Will Not Be Named a progressive Democrat? What exactly separates, policy-wise, a Dmitri Melhorn from a Mike Petrilli, a Peter Cunningham from a Rick Hess? As near as I've been able to tell, only two things-- well, two and a half.
1/2) Some of the right generally doesn't care for Common Core (any more) and the left (or at least the left-for-reformy-purposes left) thinks the Core matters (unless, like Petrilli, they're in the CCSS promotion biz).
1 1/2) The right thinks schools should be privatized because business and competition do a better job, and the left-for-reformy-purposes thinks schools should be privatized because equity.
2 1/2) The left wants to talk about using education to fix civil rights and poverty. The right wants to talk about using schools to fix any excuses for being poor. The Trump Right, whatever the hell that is exactly, is probably not going to be super-concerned about the civil rights thing.
And I can still find exceptions for those distinctions.
But now everybody has to confront a grim reality-- Donald J. Trump thinks charters and choice are awesome and the Common Core sucks (though he doesn't really understand it). What's a DFER to do? On the one hand, they are trying to look like Democrats. On the other hand, they agree with every dot and tittle of Trump's likely ed policy.
There are any number of explanations-- Trump has no actual convictions on any political scale, the backers for various policies have shifted, blah blah blah. I think the most likely explanation is that privatization was never a progressive idea, ever, but when faux progressives were controlling the political conversation, it behooved people in search of power and support to put on their own progressive masks.
So what's the play now? Stop pretending to be progressives and throw in their lot with the Trumpians (who are themselves only pretending to be conservatives)?
But modern charter schools, the testing industry, the data mining of America-- none of that was ever governed by a political ideology as much as it's guided by a deep love of money. In this, as in many other areas, Trump has if nothing else ripped the pretense off a lot of high-flung baloney. Trump is about power and profit, and power and profit are all the motivation you need to come up with a program of privatizing, monetizing, and digitizing US education. You can add some political philosophizing after the fact, but it's really beside the point.
Modern corporate reform is congealed around neither right nr left; it's heart beats to the neo-liberal rhythm which means we shall have social programs (yay, liberals!) that are contracted out to the free market (yay, conservatives!) But neo-liberalism serves righties far better than it serves lefties. They get their money, but privatized programs have yet show real quality.
And then there's the dark underbelly of modern reform, particularly charter choice programs that remove democratic process from non-wealthy non-white neighborhoods, giving our lesser what we think is best for them and, in the case of No Excuses schools, the kind of tight domination and control that Those People need. This view of Those People is also not incompatible with Trumpism.
We can play the left-right game all day. Schools tend to attract people who are oriented toward helping and uplifting other people, so the school world should skew left. But schools are also old, hidebound institutions that rely heavily on tradition and stability-- so, conservative. But that left-right dichotomy is not the problem reformsters face.
What they face is a unique and striking dilemma. Under Trump, they can have every policy they ever wanted, save Common Core. But they can only have the policies bare and stripped of any pretense. DFER and Jeanne Allen's Center for Education Reform can have almost everything they want, but they can only have it in a Trump-tied bow. They can only have their policies by admitting that their policies are not progressive at all (and by admitting they're totally okay with Trumpian awfulness as long as they get choice and charters). They can only oppose Herr Trump by disowning their own policies. Or they can dance around in a faux progressive polka, doing their best to respond to the music they never asked for, but which is everything they want. For grifters like She Who Will Not Be Named (formerly of DC schools) this is just a practical problem of angling for success; for sincere reformsters (yes, I believe such things exist), it's a real moral dilemma.
Their best hope may be the path hinted at by Hess-- if we pretend that all reform is progressive and Trump is conservative, well then, we can sell Trump plus some reformster as a compromise that brings us to the sensible middle. That would be a lie. That version of the faux progressive polka will just get us years of policy that just extend the last two decades of reformster policy, and in one more area the most faux anti-establishment President of them all will just keep dancing the same old reformster path-- red to the right, blue to the left, and green all the way to the horizon.
MA: Charter Lessons
By now, you've heard that the folks who threw a giant pile of money at Question 2, the initiative to free charter-preneurs from their chains so that they could romp freely in fields of money-- those guys lost, and lost hard.
There have been plenty of pieces that dissected the victory for public education from the public education advocate side of things. But I found some interesting points to note in the Boston Globe, just one of the media outlets that was shoveling coal for the charteristas. How did this loss look to the losers? What lessons can be gleaned? Here they are, in no particular order:
Who wants charters?
Charteristas tried hard to sell the narrative that selfish wealthy white suburbanites were denying non-wealthy non-white city dwellers the chance to get great schools. This turned out to be hugely wrong and exactly backward-- the only areas that voted in favor of 2 were the wealthy white suburbs. Even the neighborhoods of the lowest achievers voted against charter expansion. The Globe has half a clue here:
But civil rights advocates say families of color yearn for something deeper: A robust commitment and plan to improve the quality of education in the city’s school system so they don’t need alternatives.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. People don't want choice. They want what they want. People mostly don't want a selection of schools; they want their school, the school they already have, that already serves their community, to be a good school.
And they want to work in partnership with policymakers rather than having outsiders coming in and proposing a solution.
Folks are starting to catch on to the heart of the charter deal-- "we will give you our idea of a good school, but you must give up having any say in how the school runs." In the age of charter businesses, citizens are expected to trade their democratic rights in exchange for someone else's idea of what the citizens need.
Who has a stake?
Here's a really curious quote from a charter booster attempting to explain the loss:
“The vote is overwhelmingly made up people who are not involved in the public schools,” said Bill Walczak, cofounder of Codman Academy Charter School in Dorchester.
Who, exactly, is not involved in public schools? Most voters pay taxes. All members of the community must live next door to, employ, work with, and share space with people who come out of the public schools. Explain to me, please, who doesn't have a stake in pubic schools?
This has always been part of the charter playbook-- to frame public education not as a public good, shared by all citizens, but as a sort of service provided to parents alone. Whether this is deliberate spin or feckless ignorance, this shows a profound misunderstanding of what American Public Education is for.
Reality beats spin, sometimes.
Eileen O’Connor, spokeswoman for Great Schools Massachusetts, the organization behind the ballot question, has this to say. “The opposition’s success at falsely blaming charters for funding and performance challenges in Boston’s districts schools was very effective.”
Perhaps it was effective for the same reason that people tend to get wet when they stand in the rain. There is no more effective way to spread the word than for every local school district to be experiencing its own version of a tight budget because of money lost to charter operators. When the elected directors of school districts who sit and work with the budget and know where the money comes from-- when those folks step up to say that they know exactly how much money charters are costing them, it makes a difference that all the shiny professional PR in the world can't make up for.
There is no "falsely" in this situation. Charter fans and reformsters most commonly lose in areas where they have drunk their own kool-aid, and stop understanding what the reality is on the ground, where the actual voters live.
Speaking of which...
The myth of the evil monolithic teacher union
Man, at some point reformsters have got to grok that all of their woes are not caused by the nefarious, sneaky, evil teachers union, with its vast resources and its mindlessly obedient drones. It's just not true, and to insist that it is is insulting and dismissive of teachers, parents, and other stakeholders in the communities. Why not just take out a full page ad that says, "We think you're all stupid tools!"
Charter backers in Massachusetts didn't know the territory, didn't know the people, and didn't acknowledge the reality of the situation. They just kept hammering away with expensive PR that was mostly impossible to believe. They weren't beaten by the union or the parents or the mysterious voters who were disconnected from public schools but thought they would just screw with charter businesses because reasons. No, the charter crew was beaten by a reality that couldn't be spun or massaged into some shiny dream, no matter how much money they threw at it.
There have been plenty of pieces that dissected the victory for public education from the public education advocate side of things. But I found some interesting points to note in the Boston Globe, just one of the media outlets that was shoveling coal for the charteristas. How did this loss look to the losers? What lessons can be gleaned? Here they are, in no particular order:
Who wants charters?
Charteristas tried hard to sell the narrative that selfish wealthy white suburbanites were denying non-wealthy non-white city dwellers the chance to get great schools. This turned out to be hugely wrong and exactly backward-- the only areas that voted in favor of 2 were the wealthy white suburbs. Even the neighborhoods of the lowest achievers voted against charter expansion. The Globe has half a clue here:
But civil rights advocates say families of color yearn for something deeper: A robust commitment and plan to improve the quality of education in the city’s school system so they don’t need alternatives.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. People don't want choice. They want what they want. People mostly don't want a selection of schools; they want their school, the school they already have, that already serves their community, to be a good school.
And they want to work in partnership with policymakers rather than having outsiders coming in and proposing a solution.
Folks are starting to catch on to the heart of the charter deal-- "we will give you our idea of a good school, but you must give up having any say in how the school runs." In the age of charter businesses, citizens are expected to trade their democratic rights in exchange for someone else's idea of what the citizens need.
Who has a stake?
Here's a really curious quote from a charter booster attempting to explain the loss:
“The vote is overwhelmingly made up people who are not involved in the public schools,” said Bill Walczak, cofounder of Codman Academy Charter School in Dorchester.
Who, exactly, is not involved in public schools? Most voters pay taxes. All members of the community must live next door to, employ, work with, and share space with people who come out of the public schools. Explain to me, please, who doesn't have a stake in pubic schools?
This has always been part of the charter playbook-- to frame public education not as a public good, shared by all citizens, but as a sort of service provided to parents alone. Whether this is deliberate spin or feckless ignorance, this shows a profound misunderstanding of what American Public Education is for.
Reality beats spin, sometimes.
Eileen O’Connor, spokeswoman for Great Schools Massachusetts, the organization behind the ballot question, has this to say. “The opposition’s success at falsely blaming charters for funding and performance challenges in Boston’s districts schools was very effective.”
Perhaps it was effective for the same reason that people tend to get wet when they stand in the rain. There is no more effective way to spread the word than for every local school district to be experiencing its own version of a tight budget because of money lost to charter operators. When the elected directors of school districts who sit and work with the budget and know where the money comes from-- when those folks step up to say that they know exactly how much money charters are costing them, it makes a difference that all the shiny professional PR in the world can't make up for.
There is no "falsely" in this situation. Charter fans and reformsters most commonly lose in areas where they have drunk their own kool-aid, and stop understanding what the reality is on the ground, where the actual voters live.
Speaking of which...
The myth of the evil monolithic teacher union
Man, at some point reformsters have got to grok that all of their woes are not caused by the nefarious, sneaky, evil teachers union, with its vast resources and its mindlessly obedient drones. It's just not true, and to insist that it is is insulting and dismissive of teachers, parents, and other stakeholders in the communities. Why not just take out a full page ad that says, "We think you're all stupid tools!"
Charter backers in Massachusetts didn't know the territory, didn't know the people, and didn't acknowledge the reality of the situation. They just kept hammering away with expensive PR that was mostly impossible to believe. They weren't beaten by the union or the parents or the mysterious voters who were disconnected from public schools but thought they would just screw with charter businesses because reasons. No, the charter crew was beaten by a reality that couldn't be spun or massaged into some shiny dream, no matter how much money they threw at it.
Wednesday, November 16, 2016
Chait Sends Ed News from Alternate Universe
New York magazine ran a piece by Jonathan Chait that considers some more ed policy possibilities from the upcoming Trump administration-- but just to switch things up a bit, his article throws around pieces of news from some alternate universe.
"Will Trump Give Education Reform the Kiss of Death?" is a legitimate question, but Chait throws in some ideas that are just counterfactual. The hook here is to consider the hypothetical Ed Secretarydom of either Eva Moskowitz (Success Academy) and She Who Will Not Be Named (former DC Chancellor and reformster cover girl). These hypotheticals are certainly legitimate-- hell, Trump may well appoint Britney Spears to the post, so any conjecture has a non-zero chance of accuracy.
But in the article, Chait keeps dropping little anti-truth bombs.
First, this little piece of ed reform history:
Teachers unions revolted, eventually joining with congressional Republicans to block funding for low-income schools in order to prevent the department from influencing local control.
That's based on Chait's misunderstanding of the debate over the supplement-not-supplant argument waged between John King and Congress. It's not a particularly simple issue, involving questions like "how do we actually count the money being spent in schools" and "is it okay for the ed department to ignore the barely dry letter of the newly minted education law and just do what they'd rather." There are plenty of reasons to believe that King's idea will actually hurt poor schools, but Chait simplifies the whole debate to "King wanted to give poor schools money and the GOP and unions stood in his way." This is not so much lacking nuance as ignoring big chunks of the issues.
It is possible that the Trump administration would continue the de facto alliance it has cultivated with unions.
I think a lot of (or "most" or even "all") folks would be surprised to learn that there was an alliance between Trump and the unions. Chait doesn't really explain himself, but I think the suggestion here is that Trump and the Unions both hate Common Core. Except that AFT and NEA leadership have mostly been for Common Core. I've been in the room for one of the many times that Randi Weingarten and Lily Eskelsen-Garcia stood up for it in front of a group that was fairly hostile to the whole thing. Chait moves straight from the Core to charter schools, on which Trump and the unions are pretty much in complete disagreement. So what his exact evidence for this "de facto alliance" might be is, well, not available in this universe.
Chait's not completely off-planet all the time. He notes that Trump surrogate (and real estate/charter school grifter) Carl Paladino's claim that Arne Duncan and the Ed Department were in the unions' pockets was completely off base, as the unions had "fought bitterly" with Duncan and demanded his resignation. Well, members did. Union leadership dragged their feet on this issue as well.
Both Rhee and Moskowitz have strong credentials as urban-school reformers. But both have pursued education in the center-left mode, which emphasizes strong central oversight, accountability, and mechanisms to evaluate and close failing schools of the charter or neighborhood variety.
"Center-left mode"??!! What is he even talking about? Moskowitz and She Who Will Not Be Named are center-left only in the sense that they have pretended to be democrats. But they are neither red nor blue nor even purple; the color of their concern is green, and their structural model is anything that they maintain central control over.
Chait calls their approach the opposite of "Trump's know-nothing" approach, but as he himself acknowledges in this article, mostly their policies are exactly like Trump's-- expand privatization and let business people with no actual education expertise make a whole bunch of money.
Chait says this imaginary policy territory that Moskowitz and She have staked out would conflict with Trump first because Trump wants to spend all his money on other domestic policy stuff. But Trump has already declared that he'll spend $20 billion on spreading charter schools as well as demonstrating that having an actual source for all the money he plans to spend is not a big concern of his.
And then there's this whopper.
Both Rhee and Moskowitz have yielded dramatic and even revolutionary improvements in education outcome for underprivileged urban children, establishing as proof of concept a model that can wipe out the achievement gap between students in high-poverty neighborhoods and affluent ones. It is one of the most promising achievements in American social reform in decades.
Not on this planet, they haven't. She's supposedly made great strides in DC, but it now looks like those strides had less to do with great education policy and more to do with widespread cheating on the tests. Moskowitz has shown that having political connections, a bunch of extra money to spend, intense test prep, and carefully selected students really pay off. None of that represents an innovation. Eliminate the achievement gap? Certainly not in DC, and in New York Moskowitz has never filled one of her academies with a true broad sample of poor neighborhood children. Challenging students in Moskowitz's world end up on the Got To Go list.
Chait also cites the charter defeat in Massachusetts as the result of union agitation, a profound misunderstanding of how deep and wide the parent and community grassroots was that defeated the hedge funders pushing charters on neighborhoods that didn't want them under such conditions.
Chait correctly notes that reformsters who have tried to pitch their ideas as civil rights solutions will take a hit if their ideas are suddenly backed by "America’s most famous racist." And that brings him to his wrap up where he suggests that the Trump administration will be such a dumpster fire that reformsters should probably steer clear of it if they want to preserve the cause.
There's a worthwhile point buried in here somewhere. Lots of reformsters who have pretended to be social justice crusaders or Democrats to help further the cause now find that they are soldiers who are wearing jungle camouflage in an arctic battle, and they will need to change disguises if they hope to prosper (for reformsters who actually believe in their social justice rhetoric, these will be even harder times).
Back in may, Jeanne Allen of the charter-loving Center for Education Reform said she didn't want to hear her issues coming out of Donald Trump's mouth. She's since found a way to adjust; many other reformsters will have to follow her lead. Corporate education privatizers are going to need a new map of the territory. I just suggest that they not buy their new map from Chait.
"Will Trump Give Education Reform the Kiss of Death?" is a legitimate question, but Chait throws in some ideas that are just counterfactual. The hook here is to consider the hypothetical Ed Secretarydom of either Eva Moskowitz (Success Academy) and She Who Will Not Be Named (former DC Chancellor and reformster cover girl). These hypotheticals are certainly legitimate-- hell, Trump may well appoint Britney Spears to the post, so any conjecture has a non-zero chance of accuracy.
But in the article, Chait keeps dropping little anti-truth bombs.
First, this little piece of ed reform history:
Teachers unions revolted, eventually joining with congressional Republicans to block funding for low-income schools in order to prevent the department from influencing local control.
That's based on Chait's misunderstanding of the debate over the supplement-not-supplant argument waged between John King and Congress. It's not a particularly simple issue, involving questions like "how do we actually count the money being spent in schools" and "is it okay for the ed department to ignore the barely dry letter of the newly minted education law and just do what they'd rather." There are plenty of reasons to believe that King's idea will actually hurt poor schools, but Chait simplifies the whole debate to "King wanted to give poor schools money and the GOP and unions stood in his way." This is not so much lacking nuance as ignoring big chunks of the issues.
It is possible that the Trump administration would continue the de facto alliance it has cultivated with unions.
I think a lot of (or "most" or even "all") folks would be surprised to learn that there was an alliance between Trump and the unions. Chait doesn't really explain himself, but I think the suggestion here is that Trump and the Unions both hate Common Core. Except that AFT and NEA leadership have mostly been for Common Core. I've been in the room for one of the many times that Randi Weingarten and Lily Eskelsen-Garcia stood up for it in front of a group that was fairly hostile to the whole thing. Chait moves straight from the Core to charter schools, on which Trump and the unions are pretty much in complete disagreement. So what his exact evidence for this "de facto alliance" might be is, well, not available in this universe.
Chait's not completely off-planet all the time. He notes that Trump surrogate (and real estate/charter school grifter) Carl Paladino's claim that Arne Duncan and the Ed Department were in the unions' pockets was completely off base, as the unions had "fought bitterly" with Duncan and demanded his resignation. Well, members did. Union leadership dragged their feet on this issue as well.
Both Rhee and Moskowitz have strong credentials as urban-school reformers. But both have pursued education in the center-left mode, which emphasizes strong central oversight, accountability, and mechanisms to evaluate and close failing schools of the charter or neighborhood variety.
"Center-left mode"??!! What is he even talking about? Moskowitz and She Who Will Not Be Named are center-left only in the sense that they have pretended to be democrats. But they are neither red nor blue nor even purple; the color of their concern is green, and their structural model is anything that they maintain central control over.
Chait calls their approach the opposite of "Trump's know-nothing" approach, but as he himself acknowledges in this article, mostly their policies are exactly like Trump's-- expand privatization and let business people with no actual education expertise make a whole bunch of money.
Chait says this imaginary policy territory that Moskowitz and She have staked out would conflict with Trump first because Trump wants to spend all his money on other domestic policy stuff. But Trump has already declared that he'll spend $20 billion on spreading charter schools as well as demonstrating that having an actual source for all the money he plans to spend is not a big concern of his.
And then there's this whopper.
Both Rhee and Moskowitz have yielded dramatic and even revolutionary improvements in education outcome for underprivileged urban children, establishing as proof of concept a model that can wipe out the achievement gap between students in high-poverty neighborhoods and affluent ones. It is one of the most promising achievements in American social reform in decades.
Not on this planet, they haven't. She's supposedly made great strides in DC, but it now looks like those strides had less to do with great education policy and more to do with widespread cheating on the tests. Moskowitz has shown that having political connections, a bunch of extra money to spend, intense test prep, and carefully selected students really pay off. None of that represents an innovation. Eliminate the achievement gap? Certainly not in DC, and in New York Moskowitz has never filled one of her academies with a true broad sample of poor neighborhood children. Challenging students in Moskowitz's world end up on the Got To Go list.
Chait also cites the charter defeat in Massachusetts as the result of union agitation, a profound misunderstanding of how deep and wide the parent and community grassroots was that defeated the hedge funders pushing charters on neighborhoods that didn't want them under such conditions.
Chait correctly notes that reformsters who have tried to pitch their ideas as civil rights solutions will take a hit if their ideas are suddenly backed by "America’s most famous racist." And that brings him to his wrap up where he suggests that the Trump administration will be such a dumpster fire that reformsters should probably steer clear of it if they want to preserve the cause.
There's a worthwhile point buried in here somewhere. Lots of reformsters who have pretended to be social justice crusaders or Democrats to help further the cause now find that they are soldiers who are wearing jungle camouflage in an arctic battle, and they will need to change disguises if they hope to prosper (for reformsters who actually believe in their social justice rhetoric, these will be even harder times).
Back in May, @JeanneAllen said of Trump: "I don't want my issues coming out of his mouth." Warned he would get 2nd and 3rd stringers on edu. https://t.co/DzoQpe6YmN— Politics K-12 (@PoliticsK12) November 16, 2016
Guilty in May. Much changed after, 4 all involved, including selecting @mike_pence & @KellyannePolls https://t.co/nwLl4YdYcs— Jeanne Allen (@JeanneAllen) November 16, 2016
Back in may, Jeanne Allen of the charter-loving Center for Education Reform said she didn't want to hear her issues coming out of Donald Trump's mouth. She's since found a way to adjust; many other reformsters will have to follow her lead. Corporate education privatizers are going to need a new map of the territory. I just suggest that they not buy their new map from Chait.
Trump Teaching Lesson
There's an aspect of Candidate Trump's success that I think is both under-discussed and also a good lesson/reminder for those of us in the teaching biz.
Trump never made folks feel stupid.
Seriously. Members of the public would figuratively run up to him hollering, "Good lord, did you see this terrible story on the internet," and without batting an eye, Trump would respond "I know!! Incredible, right?" Like Walt Whitman, he could declaim at length about his own awesomeness without ever having to belittle the crowd around him to embiggify himself (because he's just that awesome). He is large; he contains multitudes.
Meanwhile, Clinton could not avoid making people feel stupid. She was the stern one, incapable of not figuratively rolling her eyes at the latest stupid thing that voters had said. She would point out something stupid that Trump had said, not understanding that her message was, "How stupid do you have to be to believe this guy?"
People hate feeling stupid. Hate it. But Trump, with all the basic markers of success like money and fame and arrogance-laced confidence, still managed to say to voters, "Hey, you're all cool." And he augmented that with a natural instinct for the use of third person-- the people who were stupid or bad, those people were "them" or "they." Trump invited folks to join him in being the smart one, the smartest one of all, so smart you wouldn't even believe the smartitude. Meanwhile, Clinton et al just couldn't help letting it slip how dumb the think the yokels are, or trying to move the discussion to questions of facts and data and policy and ethical issues like how to treat other human beings, and all that wonky smarty-pants book talk also made some folks feel stupid. You've got a choice between people who make you feel stupid, and people who make you feel cool and smart-- who are you going to choose?
Certainly that was not the only dynamic at play, but it's the one I'm interested in at the moment. And, for our purposes, I'm going to skip the whole question of whether some people feel stupid because they are stupid. For the teaching perspective, that doesn't matter. Or rather, it matters because we deal professionally with people who Don't Know Some Stuff.
What we need to remember is the graphic, clear display of what people do when you make them feel stupid-- they feel resentment and anger and they step into a voting booth and vote to get rid of you.
Everyone has had that teacher-- that miserable, awful teacher that made students look stupid, feel stupid. Everyone who had that teacher remembers that teacher because they hate that teacher. If they could have voted to get rid of that teacher and replace her with Mrs. Trump, the nice one who makes everyone feel special and lucky to be in her awesome classroom, they would totally do it.
Sometimes teachers take a cold, hard, Darwinian-libertarian approach-- if you don't want to feel stupid, then study and be less stupid. But as this election reminds us, that is not how people work. Make people feel stupid and they quit. They block you out. But make them feel smart and important, valued and clever, and they will go to the wall for you.
We've occasionally tried to codify this. Recognizing "ebonics" was in part a recognition that approaching some students with a stance of, "You must be stupid if you talk like that" was not really helping anyone.
So that's one teachable reminder-- when you make people feel stupid, they get angry and withdrawn and uncooperative. And if you need to be reminded again, just watch for the next year as Trump turns out to have lied about most of his campaign promises, and a whole bunch of people get to feel stupid, again.
Trump never made folks feel stupid.
Seriously. Members of the public would figuratively run up to him hollering, "Good lord, did you see this terrible story on the internet," and without batting an eye, Trump would respond "I know!! Incredible, right?" Like Walt Whitman, he could declaim at length about his own awesomeness without ever having to belittle the crowd around him to embiggify himself (because he's just that awesome). He is large; he contains multitudes.
Meanwhile, Clinton could not avoid making people feel stupid. She was the stern one, incapable of not figuratively rolling her eyes at the latest stupid thing that voters had said. She would point out something stupid that Trump had said, not understanding that her message was, "How stupid do you have to be to believe this guy?"
People hate feeling stupid. Hate it. But Trump, with all the basic markers of success like money and fame and arrogance-laced confidence, still managed to say to voters, "Hey, you're all cool." And he augmented that with a natural instinct for the use of third person-- the people who were stupid or bad, those people were "them" or "they." Trump invited folks to join him in being the smart one, the smartest one of all, so smart you wouldn't even believe the smartitude. Meanwhile, Clinton et al just couldn't help letting it slip how dumb the think the yokels are, or trying to move the discussion to questions of facts and data and policy and ethical issues like how to treat other human beings, and all that wonky smarty-pants book talk also made some folks feel stupid. You've got a choice between people who make you feel stupid, and people who make you feel cool and smart-- who are you going to choose?
Certainly that was not the only dynamic at play, but it's the one I'm interested in at the moment. And, for our purposes, I'm going to skip the whole question of whether some people feel stupid because they are stupid. For the teaching perspective, that doesn't matter. Or rather, it matters because we deal professionally with people who Don't Know Some Stuff.
What we need to remember is the graphic, clear display of what people do when you make them feel stupid-- they feel resentment and anger and they step into a voting booth and vote to get rid of you.
Everyone has had that teacher-- that miserable, awful teacher that made students look stupid, feel stupid. Everyone who had that teacher remembers that teacher because they hate that teacher. If they could have voted to get rid of that teacher and replace her with Mrs. Trump, the nice one who makes everyone feel special and lucky to be in her awesome classroom, they would totally do it.
Sometimes teachers take a cold, hard, Darwinian-libertarian approach-- if you don't want to feel stupid, then study and be less stupid. But as this election reminds us, that is not how people work. Make people feel stupid and they quit. They block you out. But make them feel smart and important, valued and clever, and they will go to the wall for you.
We've occasionally tried to codify this. Recognizing "ebonics" was in part a recognition that approaching some students with a stance of, "You must be stupid if you talk like that" was not really helping anyone.
So that's one teachable reminder-- when you make people feel stupid, they get angry and withdrawn and uncooperative. And if you need to be reminded again, just watch for the next year as Trump turns out to have lied about most of his campaign promises, and a whole bunch of people get to feel stupid, again.
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