Unionizing Charters (PT. 3)

So I've been working my way through the newly-launched conversation about how teacher unions and charter school fans could become BFFs. (Here are Part 1, Part 2, and a sort of Prelude). After plowing through all that, I'm going to try to articulate what I think we're looking at and how I feel about it.

The Need

This is all in reaction to the Ascent of Herr Trump and his Secretary of Education-in-Waiting Betsy DeVos. As many have noted, their arrival creates a bit of a problem for folks who have worked the progressive side of the street for the reformsters. On the one hand, much of the proposed policy, including especially the emphasis on charters, is right in line with the policies of the last sixteen years and fully in keeping with what we would have had under a Clinton Presidency.

On the other hand, having Clinton and her old CAP hands out in front of this would have made lots and lots of Democrats and progressives feel pretty okee-dokee about dismantling public education and selling off the pieces. Teacher unions would have had a comfy seat at the table, and faith in the Dems would have reassured many folks that what was happening with charters and public schools couldn't possibly be bad for children or education.

Democrats and progressives, however, are not nearly so comfortable when these policies are being championed by an unbalanced cheeto-skinned narcissist and a public-school hating billionaire heiress.So folks like Peter Cunningham have a doubly-difficult double task. Task 1 is to watch and see just how many people will suddenly pull a Gingrich or a Romney or Cruz or-- man, it's a long list-- and suddenly decide that Herr Trump isn't so loathsome after all. Task 2 is to make sure that Democrats and progressives don't suddenly stampede away from the cause of Ed Reform.

The Strategic Choice

But what of ed reform could be salvaged?

Common Core is already on the ropes, an amorphous blob of who-knows-what-they-are-exactly standards. Trumps denunciation of them means that Common Core are now, after years of battering and beat-downs, finally and absolutely underground.

Standardized Testing has also taken too many hits to be a viable Cause any more. It's too profitable to fully abandon, but too hated to be a marquee cause.

Teacher accountability is likewise wobbly, particularly since after all these years, nobody knows how to do it in a reliable or valid manner. But mostly it's a loser here because if one of our goals is to keep the national union leadership working with reformsters, this is definitely not the issue that will do it.

But charter schools? That issue might have a shot. If we can shade some issues, glide past some sharp edges, and make our pitch maybe-- just maybe-- we can get teachers invested in charters and keep them in the Big Reformy Tent.

And reformsters have been laying the groundwork for a bit. For example, this big glossy booklet from Education Reform Now--one of the other arms of DFER-- explaining how charters have always been a totally Democrat progressive civil rights thing. This is NOT some money-grubbing business-oriented conservative GOP thing, nosiree-- charters are 100% progressive Democrat bleeding heart lefty all the way.

How do we explain the fact that somehow Herr Trump and the Divine Ms. DeVos both love 'em? Well, um, see, DeVos really wants vouchers (which is totally GOP) and she wants charters without any accountability while we want to make sure that we only have charters with good solid accountability in place and no frauds or scams or money-grubbing business-only outfits. Why, we think it might even be a good idea to have unionized charters. Does that sound like Trump or the GOP? Not a bit. We are totally different.

The Scam

The real beauty of this is it gets everyone off the real question of charter schools-- should we have any at all. Making the New Debate about what kind of charters we should have is like when the car salesman starts getting you to decide which color you want and what kind of upholstery and which sound system because no matter what you pick, you've already accepted the idea that you are going to buy that car.

Charter will be happy to argue all day about what kind of charters we'll have because that assumes the sale, assumes that we have all agreed that we want to have charter schools.

The Pitch

So unions and charters, together like coffee and lemon juice. How would that work exactly? The pitch seems to include several parts.

False Equivalency

I swear we get this one every time there's a call for a New Conversation. Reformsters talk as if the state of conflict is one of equal culpability, as if both sides own the conflict. This is not true, and it has never been true. There's no question that some folks on the side of public education have at times lashed out angrily and even meanly-- but that did not come out of nowhere.

Public education supporters did not seek reformsters out to start a random argument about whether teachers suck or not or whether public education is failing or not or whether unions are destroying education or not. All of those arguments were launched by reform fans, and while some have occasionally acknowledged that and even called for their own side to back off, all too often it plays out like a guy who mugs you in a dark alley, and then when you start fighting back, yells out, "Hey, why can't we just admit we're both wrong and try to get along."

Albert Shanker

Apparently folks are just going to repeat "Albert Shanker created charter schools" over and over and over again as a sort of anchor to the listing ship that carries the assertion that charters are totally a progressive Democrat thing.

This technique of repeating something until everyone believes it has had mixed results. It worked for "public schools are failing," but not so much for "teachers wrote the Common Core." Only time will tell if "charter schools are totally a progressive Democrat thing" is going to catch on.

Who Really Needs To Be Sold

As far as benefits for teachers if charters unionized, I don't think there's a problem since it basically boils down to "You could have the same working conditions at a charter that you can have at a decent unionized public school."

Would it be great if charter schools embraced teacher job protections and decent pay and solid support and useful professional development and a mechanism for letting teacher voices be heard? It absolutely would. It would not negate other charter issues like, say, the tendency to suck resources away from all the students in public schools, but it would all be good stuff.

But there's an irony here-- on the whole list of Cool Things That Unions Could Bring To Charters, there isn't a single thing that charters couldn't do on their own without any union involvement at all. There's no mystery about how to implement things like a decent pay scale or job security-- but charter operators don't want to do it.

And there's the challenge. It's not unions that need to be convinced to go to charter schools; it's charter school promoters, operators, advocates and boosters who have consistently, loudly, insistently and repeatedly told us that they don't want unions, don't want the things unions insist on, don't even necessarily want trained professional teachers. The charter industry has made it clear that what they value most is their ability to manage the school however they want without having to answer to much of anyone, and most especially not to have to answer to their employees.

If Cunningham et al really want to sell this, they have to sell it to the charter folks, and they will need to be way more persuasive than anything I've seen so far. If they're serious about selling unionized teachers to the charter industry, they'll have to build a far more forceful case (particularly more forceful than the article that argues, "You can have unions, only they won't actually be like, you know, unions"). And it's not that I don't think such a case can be built...

I'm Just Not Sure They're Serious

There are several possible goals here.

One is to convince charters and unions to live in perfect harmony. If that's the goal, then what I said above applies-- it's charters that need the most convincing. Talk to them.

Another possible goal is simply to convince teachers that the charter operators mean them no harm and are really the friends of teacher unions, so let's all us nice charter people and charter-loving unionists join together to pursue Good Charters in defiance of awful President Cheeto. To achieve this goal, nobody has to get charters to change-- they just have to get teachers and unions to look at charters differently.

The third possibility is that the audience for this is neither charteristas nor teachers unions, but all the progressive Democrats in the peanut gallery. "Look," someone will say, "See how the unions and charters are living together happily? It's totally okay to support charter schools even if President Cheeto does, because he's simply stolen/co-opted/stepped into a cause that belongs to us progressives. So stay here in the Big Reformy Tent."

And of course underlying all of these is the goal of getting everyone to say, "Let's all have charter schools" without even realizing they've said it.

Bottom Line?

If nothing happens beyond some charter advocates stop badmouthing teachers and our unions, then that's not a bad thing. If charters unionize more widely, turning them into less awful places for teachers to work and students to learn, that's not a terrible thing either.

I have always believed that under the right conditions, there could be a place for charters in the education world. And I have never lost my affection for Shanker's original vision-- teachers starting schools of their own, run the best way they know how, free of the various idiot laws imposed on schools by state and federal authorities. We are living through an age just chock full of idiot laws; that makes the idea of being free of them that much more appealing. Buried in all of this political bobbing and weaving, there are little nuggets that could be Good Things. 

But if this is just a new political dance with no real outcome except to keep the charter money train still running comfortably to fat city while public school students continue to get the shaft, then this is not okay. Not even a little. Most troubling of all? No matter how I turn this thing over and look at it, I don't see any angle from which it becomes and obstacle to the destructive policies that Trumpmeister and the DeVostator have planned for public education. And anything that doesn't actively and effectively interfere with federal plans to dismantle public education to replace it with private charter business-- well, anything that doesn't help is hurting, and anything that is hurting is just bad news for all of us.

Unionizing Charters (PT. 2)

As I noted in Part I, Peter Cunningham and others from the Why Of Course We're Liberal Democrats Who Support Charter Schools crowd have been trying to rustle up a new conversation about unions and charters and why they should be BFFs. This newly minted conversation has cropped up and there, but Ed Post has whipped a whole little flurry of discussion on its own millionaire-charter-lover-backed website.

 Anchoring the conversation was a post by charterista Dirk Tillotson, who provided some creative re-interpretation of history, but also some thoughts going forward. Cunningham rounded up at least four responses to that piece, and I'm going to look at each of them here.








Eric Lerum-- Looking at Charter Contracts

Lerum is a reformy consultant, currently in Newark with America Succeeds, (a "business-led" reformy group), has also been with StudentsFirst, and the team that reformed the crap out of DC schools in the oughts.

He notes that nobody knows much about the charter union contracts that exist, so he went to look at them. He found that these contracts looked a lot like regular contracts in public schools, with occasional splashes of innovation and a side order of No Striking Allowed. He argues that negotiating such contracts can strengthen the school and provide more authentic teacher voice.

Lerum thinks we should look more at these contracts and also regular public school contracts. I think his piece might have been more informative if he had compared union charter contracts to the kinds of contracts used in non-union charters, with at-will clauses and really wacky stuff like non-compete requirements.

Scott Pearson-- Unionizing Would Be Innovative

Pearson executively directs the DC charter school board, but his pedigree is typical reformster. Obama administration, charter school founder, businessy job at AOL, management consultant at Bain Capital, no actual education training or classroom experience. Yeah, that sounds about right.

But Pearson is at least honest:

Most charter leaders look at the prospect of a unionized workforce with horror. Work rules, seniority-based placement, and onerous due process all are at odds with the charter model of flexibility, nimbleness, and a single-minded focus on kids’ learning.

Well, honest in the first sentence. In the second he confuses charter-boosting baloney PR with reality. But he's here to list some ways in which charters can benefit from unions, based on what he saw at Green Dot charters (not an encouraging choice). At any rate, here's how charters can benefit:

1) Giving teachers an organized channel to express themselves to management. A friend of mine who works in the private sector says the same thing-- having an open channel to a functioning union means that he's always got a working line of communication to and from his employees. Pearson says that it can help with teacher retention, tossing in the dubious claim that "charter leaders constantly search for ways to keep teachers longer"-- there's not a ton of evidence to support that claim, but if it were true, it's true that a union would be one way to facilitate the kind of communication that could keep people happy enough to stay.

2) Unionizing makes it easier to hire teachers, mostly because it creates a more stable work situation. Allow me to change sides for a moment and observe that charters don't need unions to do this-- they could just stop hiring teachers with one year at-will-employee contracts. It's true a union would signal that job stability was a thing, but any charter operator could create job stability any time they wanted to. Mostly they haven't wanted to.

3) Union connections might help the charter grease the political wheels (depending on where the charter is located). In other words, if unions were the team-mates of charter operators instead of opponents, unions might help get charters okayed instead of fighting them. Could well be.

Pearson ends by noting that DC has never received a charter proposal that included the idea of a unionized charter. That in itself should tell him that charter operators have a resistance to unionized teachers far beyond the power of these three little points to dispel (as further witnessed that charters were always able to accomplish these objectives without needing a union to do it-- they just don't want to).

Maddie Fennell-- How This Team-up Would Help Unions

Fennell is a 27-year classroom vet, current NEA teacher fellow, and 2007 Nebraska Teacher of the Year-- which makes her an odd candidate for this piece since Nebraska does not have a charter school law. 


Charter schools should be incubators of innovation for public schools, held accountable to the taxpayers. Why can’t this innovation include unionizing charters to bring innovation to the labor-management relationship?

She gives an example of why a young teacher didn't want to join the union, which mostly demonstrated that the young teacher doesn't understand what tenure is. But Fennell does, and her first argument is that charters could provide the sort of teacher protection that can blunt the bad impact of bad administration in a school. Truth!

She also suggests that charters could show how to more creatively manage training and development and advancement. This kind of assumes that charters know something about these things that nobody else knows, and there's no evidence of that, but sure-- couldn't hurt.

She also argues for micro-credentials (which-- ugh-- are barely micro-useful) and notes that she couldn't afford to get an advanced degree for many years because it was so expensive-- which is totally a local contract issue. In my neck of the woods, the state requires advanced coursework and most districts pay for it. So the solution to this issue is already in place in some states, and charter-union team-ups aren't needed to implement it.

Also, I'm beginning to think that everyone who is hired to write one of these charter + union pieces is required to include the Albert Shanker reference.

Anyway, not clear to me what a union would really get out of teaming up with charters other than the obvious-- more dues-paying members.

Max Marchitello and Kaitlin Pennington-- This Charter Union Thing Could really Work

Marchitello and Pennington are from the right-tilted, reliably reformy Bellwether Partners. They have some interesting twists to offer.

Over the years, charter proponents decided that not having unions was vital to their success perhaps because a non-unionized charter school has far greater control over the hiring and firing of teachers. With that in mind, it is hard to imagine a unionized charter school that retains control over its staffing.

Actually, I would rather that charter operators imagined a school governance system that didn't include "control" as a requirement. But Marchitello and Pennington go on to offer their own list of benefits to charters in allowing unions in the front door.

First, optics. Charters suffer from the "perception" that they demand longer hours, offer lower pay, have high turnover rates, and employ less experienced teachers. Well, yes. Also, my head suffers from the perception that I'm balding, and my waist suffers from the perception that I'm overweight. But the authors suggest that a union presence might somehow mitigate that perception (about the school-- not about my own personal issues). I can think of another way to change the perception that charters treat teachers poorly (spoiler alert-- treat teachers better), but okay.

Next, the writers acknowledge the right of all labor to organize. Then they proceed to management-splain how the teacher unions are doing it all wrong.

First, teachers unions should never speak up about anything not directly related to student learning. Instead unions speak up on "every education issue whether it affects teachers or not, which can create tension and impede reform." Yes, those damned teacher, speaking up like they're education experts or something. Why can't the help just learn to stay in their rooms and leave everything else to the grown-ups?

Next, be like the Green Dot teachers who traded job protections for a little more money (really?? anyone have real figures on this?) and a "more professional day."

Because above all else, make sure that your charter union is not affiliated with AFT or NEA, because those guys are just trouble. Sigh. On the one hand, anyone who wants to say mean things about national or state union leadership can get in line behind me. There's plenty to complain about. On the other hand, what the writers are describing is a local teacher club with no power or clout over and above what management is willing to gift them.

In other words, Marchitello and Pennington have delivered what they promised-- a "union" that doesn't interfere with charter management's full control of their school.

Those are the four "replies" that Ed Post has run so far and my mini-reviews. I'm looking at the length of this post and apparently I'm going to write a third installment to wrap up some overall reactions and thoughts.

Unionizing Charters (PT. I)

A curious conversation is unfolding over at Education Post, kicked off by this piece by Dirk Tillotson, founder and executive direct of Great Schools Choices, a charter advocacy group. It's a "provocative" piece simply because it is a charter fan writing in favor of unionizing charter work forces.

Tillotson kicks off his conversation by using classic passive voice weaseling to get around a fundamental fact of charter life:

 Charters and unions are often seen as diametrically opposed.

Are seen by whom, one wonders. Then one remembers that charters and unions are seen as diametrically opposed by the vast majority of charteristas, who have for years touted the non-union work force as one of the big selling points of charters. The CEO model of charters has always called for a visionary who doesn't have to answer to restrictive and confining union rules, with many charter player preferring Teach for America style workforces that don't unionize, don't object to enforced 80-hour work weeks, and don't stick around long enough to start telling the CEO what to do. Charters have been dragged into court for union-busting. Ed Secretary-in-waiting Betsy DeVos of course supported charters big-time in Michigan as well as a union-busting right-to-work rule.

One would be hard-pressed over the past decade to find a charter supporter who wanted to make sure that their charter school had a teachers union. In the vast majority of cases, charter support and anti-union stances go hand in hand.

Tillotson tries to gloss over this by observing that the diametrical opposition isn't "accurate" history becaus Great-godfather of charters Albert Shanker was a union guy (I have a sense we're about to hear that factoid brought up a lot), but that's baloney. The modern charter movement has been actively and vocally anti-union, and if Tillotson and Peter Cunningham and other lefty-ish charter supporters want to have a new post-Trump alliance-building conversation, a good start would be some honesty about how we got here.

This is the problem with Tillotson's argument-- though it contains some valid and worthwhile points, it keeps tripping over some uncomfortable truths about the real current situation.

Maybe charters could help teach unions develop a more professional, less industrial model? Sure, that might even be true. Tillotson offers an example and mentions the key-- trusting teachers to do their jobs and not acting as if they must punch the clock. I don't disagree, but the "punch the clock" model has two real sources: 1) districts that don't trust their teachers and demand time-card style "accountability," and 2) districts that can't be trusted to stop demanding "one more hour" of teacher time until teachers are working 100-hour work weeks. In both cases, it's not the union that is the source of the model. Tillotson's right-- a charter run on a more professional model could stop both of those issues. My question-- is there really any reason to believe that charters are more likely to embrace such a model than a public school?

Tillotson also suggests that since failure = death for a charter school (if only-- but let's skip that argument for now) the union is more invested in success for the whole school and not just protecting teacher rights. Protecting the school = protecting teacher jobs. That's an interesting and valid-ish point-- unless we're talking about a charter where survival = making enough profit or ROI for owner/investors of the business. Then it all becomes a little more complicated.

Tillotson suggests that the biggest benefit is an end to expensive time-wasting ugly charter-union wars, and he paints these as wars between equally-culpable combatants who battle on while parents and staff don't really care about this. He invokes the "putting adult concerns ahead of students" trope, which is an unfortunate choice since it's most commonly used to mean "teachers should strop arguing about their rights and let charter advocates do what they know is best" and gets us right back to "teachers working conditions are student learning conditions."

Too much blood is spilt and too much effort is wasted in the charter-union wars and it’s stupid. We’re basically arguing over the same kids, the same staff, and the same goals. We’re all just advocates coming from a different camp.

While I agree with the "wasted effort" portion of this statement, I'm not on board with the old "we're all in it for the kids" part. One of my problems with the modern charter movement is that many operators are clearly not in it for the kids at all; some are there for the money, and some because they believe it is their right and privilege to remake education as they see fit. And many who sincerely believe they are in it for the kids also believe that they, and they alone, know what's best for the kids-- and many of these folks are simply wrong. In other words, I doubt the good intentions of some charteristas, and for those who have good intentions--well, good intentions are not enough, particularly if you depend on expertise you don't actually have while excluding the expertise of people who actually know what they're talking about. So I think it's a bit more complicated than "we all just want the same thing, but disagree on methods."

There is much in Tillotson's piece that is on point--

Families want good schools where kids are treated fairly, and staff want schools where they are supported, can be effective, and are treated fairly.

Neither unionized schools nor non-unionized charters have a monopoly on serving families or treating staff well.

And I welcome reformster's new-found interest in making friends with teachers and their unions. But it's going to be hard to move forward if we can't be honest about where we are and how we got there.

Ed Post chief Peter Cunningham has been hard at work on this conversation, and has (so far) four responses to Tillotson's piece. Ed Post was established as a sort of war room PR operation, so if Cunnigham is doing all this (plus his piece with Shavar Jeffries of DFER), somebody has made some strategic decisions about this business, and that's worth some attention.

In the interests of space, I'm going to cover those four responses in another post to follow shortly.

Revising Reform for Trumplandia

If reformsters are good at anything, it's revising the narrative to match current conditions. They are masters of the retcon (a comics term referring to retroactively altering character continuity, like when Frank Miller introduced Elektra into Daredevil continuity and we suddenly learned that a character we had never heard about before had actually been-- oh, shut up. You're a nerd!).

Anyway, reformsters periodically go back and retroactively rewrite the story. What's that you say? No way-- Common Core was always intended to be flexible and adaptable for each school system. What's that you say? No, we never said that every school district must adopt the Common Core Standards! Teachers? We totally love them and never ever blamed all of education's ills on them. No, we never promised that charters would do more with fewer dollars. And of course we have always contended that charter schools are public private public private public private public private look, we'll get back to you on this one. Sometimes reformsters have been rewriting harder than a Soviet Russia historian and actual history has disappeared faster than Chuck Cunningham.

No Happy Days forthis guy-- gone and completely forgotten

The Rise of Trump has brought the erasers out in force.

Reformsters have a problem, exemplified by this set of tweets regarding Jeanne Allen, head and mouth of the very reformy Center for Education Reform:

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

Trump is ready to give reformsters most of what they want, yet to get it, they have to figure out how to embrace-not-embrace Trump himself.

Today brought a new attempt at this dance that both reveals the tack that reformsters are going to try as well as showing why they want to try it.

At Real Clear Education, Shavar Jeffries (Democrats [sic] for Education Reform) and Peter Cunningham (Education Post), both super charter school fans,  attempt to solidify the left-tilted reformster argument, based partly on a real distinction and partly on fake history of what has happened so far.

The distinction they'd like to make is between charter fans who want accountability and those who don't. Many charter supporters, they point out, have called repeatedly for strong accountability. This is a True Thing-- it wasn't that long ago that several charter organizations were themselves calling out the bogus money-sucking scam that is cyber-charter schooling. I have talked to several charter promoters who believe that charters must be held accountable because 1) nobody benefits from fly-by-night charter scams and 2) they risk making the rest of the charter industry look scary and bad and in need of tight government control.

Unfortunately, Secretary of Ed-in-Waiting Betsy DeVos doesn't believe in any of that accountability, and has spent decades spending great gouts of money to block any such accountability. The results are on display in states like Michigan and Florida, where all manner of charter shysters are allowed to run rampant with no regard for damage, waste and fraud. DeVos believes the market will sort these folks out, despite the glaring evidence that the market will do no such thing.

So Jeffries and Cunningham contend there is some dissension in the charter-loving ranks, and on this issue, I believe they are correct. However, they also have a story to tell about how we got here, and that part reads like a fantasy tale from an alternate universe.

School choice has a proud progressive history. 

Um, no. It really doesn't. Jeffries and Cunningham rattle off some names like Rahm Emmanuel and Andrew Cuomo, who barely qualify as Democrats at all, and Presidents like Clinton and Obama, who developed and perfected the technique of consolidating Democratic power by abandoning Democratic principles. The writers also try to invoke Albert Shanker, the Great-Godfather of charters, but they skip over the part where a few years into the experiment, Shanker turned his back on charters after seeing them become money-making businesses instead of engines of educational innovation.

Public school choice has an even more robust conservative history, based on conservative principles of free markets and competition.

That sounds a little more like it. But the writers bring this up in order to invoke the "bipartisan alliance" that has been behind the choice movement. Maybe. I would describe the alliance as one between people who say they want charters because they believe in the free market and people who say they want charters because it will bring social justice. What I've never been entirely certain is just how many people in the latter group are just running a con. It's fitting that the head of DFER is co-writing this piece, since DFER's origin was about finding a way to move the Democratic Party into line with reform.

Some of us have been pointing out the very non-progressive elements of the school choice movement for years, but today Shavars and Cunningham discovered some of them, too. The charter overwhelming preference for non-union teachers and the general assault on unions. The members of the choice community who are mostly interested in defunding education entirely. The duo retcon their way to this assertion:

The grand bargain at the heart of the school choice movement is accountability for autonomy. In exchange for performance goals linking a charter school’s survival to academic results and other student outcomes, they are freed up from bureaucracy and red tape that limits innovation and flexibility.

Nope. That has been the sales pitch, but in many areas, it has most definitely not been the grand bargain, the mediocre bargain, or even the blue light special. Where free market fans have led the charge (e.g. Ohio, Jeb Bush's Florida, DeVos's Michigan), charters have pressed for autonomy only. Charters have gone to court to fight hard to avoid being accountable to anyone.

Nor can these guys pretend to be surprised by any of this. For instance, when it comes to slamming the unions, nobody has done it more relentlessly than DFER. Shavars and Cunningham warn that "when the choice movement devolves into an anti-union movement, it loses support on the left," but DFER has been right on the front lines of that devolution.

So why are they suddenly so fretful about all this, anyway? The clue is in this article's warning that these behaviors will "lose support on the left," or as Cunningham tweeted it

Accountability is key to keeping progressives in the reform tent. @shavarjeffries @CharlesBarone https://t.co/qt3ruSeqv8

— Peter Cunningham (@PCunningham57) November 30, 2016

It's not the concern about principle, or allying with an odious and destructive administration, or even being revealed as hypocrites. A whole parade of reformsters have lined up, like Jeanne Allen, to announce that while they used to be horrified by Trump, maybe his administration will actually be swell. Hey, if Mitt Romney can be turned with a cheap meal, why wouldn't choice advocates be willing to change sides at the prospect of getting everything they ever wanted?

No, that's not the issue.

The issue is that the reformster movement managed to convince a whole bunch of progressives and Democrats to join in, play along, come get in the tent, and generally support the movement. They could sell it by talking about civil rights and making life better for poor brown and black children and most of all by pointing at a popular Democratic President who was the most elevated face of the reform movement. And now those actual progressives are experiencing a moment just like that one in the tower where Dorothy sees Aunty Em in the crystal ball, but then suddenly it's the Wicked Witch, and reformy folks are worried that Trump's scary face with chase away a bunch of erstwhile progressive reform supporters.

Look, for a couple of decades now, the choice charter movement has not been supported by a bipartisan alliance of Democrats and Republicans. It has been a neo-liberal privatization program, pushed by an "alliance" of neo-liberals who called themselves Republicans and neo-liberals who called themselves Democrats. It has been easy for neo-lib-GOP folks to sell the wonders of free market competitive privatizing to at least the business wing of the GOP. It has taken a bit more saleswork for the neo-lib-dems to sell privatization to their crowd, and now they have lost the allure and leverage and power of leading the ruling party. The neo-lib point people have never had trouble shifting gears and changing tunes, but the people who fell in line because they sincerely bought what neo-lib-dems were selling-- those people will be harder to keep in the big tent.

Neo-lib-dem leaders are going to have to come up with a new sales pitch, a way that progressives can oppose Herr Trumps DC dumpster fire and Billionaire Betsy's call to let public education burn while still pushing hard for charters and choice. It's going to take something more clever than an issue of "accountability," but be patient. This is just the first draft; I'm sure they'll come up with the next revision, a new argument, at which point, it will become the argument that they swear they've always been making.

Slowing Down

For the past several years, I have sometimes felt like Indiana Jones just a few feet in front of the damn giant boulder.

This is not entirely the result of various education reforms. We've been through some changes locally, including but limited to some schedule changing that has resulted in slightly shorter periods, and some changes in staffing that have led to slightly larger classes.

But of course like many other schools, we are being trickled down upon by the dripping ooze of school reform. We have lots of additional paper-- well, computer work that is meant to show how we're aligning our instruction to the standards (spoiler alert-- mostly by completing computerized paperwork). We spend time worrying about the numbers and part of my week is now set aside for sitting and fretting over various slabs of data. And when you add up all the days I lose to testing, or pre-testing, or practice testing, it all adds up to days and weeks of school during which I don't get to actually teach.

Meanwhile, the mountain of material that I feel I should be getting through looks more and more like, well, like two mountains, piled on top of each other and sitting on top of a third mountain that has been smushed into the ground so far that I'll have to dig it all out before I can deal with it. And so there is a voice yammering away in my ear, strained and urgent, reminding me that I only have X days left and if I don't hammer through this stuff today, and quickly, I'll never get to the other material which I really need to get to because these students are less than two years away from going out into a world that will demand every possible skill set from them and oh my good lord in heaven how am I ever going to get anything done if they want to talk about stuff and holy crap the boulder is right on my heels-----

It has become almost routine for me. Maybe it happens when I'm home unwinding with family and vacation, or maybe it happens when I suddenly see what I'm doing and realize I am losing the thread. But either way, I catch myself, I stop, I slow down. I breathe.

Today I used an exercise that I absolutely do not recommend for anyone. I started my forty minute classes with twenty minutes of material.

My solution is not the obvious one; I'm not allowed (by me) to fill up a class period with "study hall." The taxpayers pay me perfectly good money to work with students. So I have to find those other twenty minutes in the moment, in my students' concerns, in whatever jumps up and demands attention. I do stack the deck in my favor-- I don't try this on a day where, for instance, the lesson is about participial phrases. Today I wanted to talk to my students about what skills they think they'll need for adulting that they think the school hasn't, or may never, provide. And because I don't have enough "teaching" to fill the period, I have to shut up and let discussion flow. Maybe I listen. Maybe I prime the pump. Maybe I'll tell a personal story (my pedagogical justification being that modeling vulnerability in a safe place is important, as is their seeing that I'm a human). I can't plan this, not for every single second. I have to slow down and listen and watch and be there.

I confess that I used to work like this more often, and I'm not proud of doing it less. If I'm not careful, instead of a safe place where everyone can be heard and relationships are built, my classroom can become a racquetball court with one of those tennis ball cannons sitting in a corner firing off a ball every ten seconds. But we change in our practice-- when I began teaching, I had to put all my effort into creating energy, pushing it out, pumping it out, being, as my co-op said, punchy-quick. I was a quieter, more guarded person then. Now, in a classroom, I have to be sure to breathe, to lay back, to listen.

It's important to remember that while we are there to do the work, our conception of the work has to include the students as actors, as co-conspirators, as participants with agency. One of the most corrosive aspects of the modern reform movement is the conception of education as something that is done to students, who are supposed to sit there passively while we perform our magic tricks and pull numbers out of them like so many standardized rabbits out of identical hats. We can not, must not reach the point where we are so focused on getting away from that giant boulder that we trample right over the students in front of us.

The students are more important than the numbers. They are more important than the test results, more important than the lesson plans, more important even than the personal goals we set to "cover" exactly This Much material by the end of our days with them. The students are not there to serve us; we are there to serve them. Sometimes you just have to take a moment to get the thread back. Slow down.The boulder is just a fake, a movie prop, and you are tougher than it is.

Christmas Curmudgushopping

If you want a little something for the fan of education blogging in your life (because don't we all know dozens of such people), I'm going to make a quick pitch here for Curmudgucation gear. It almost physically pains me to say "Hey, buy my stuff," but 1) helpful people keep telling me to build my brand and 2) I've got twins on the way.



Here's a book! Featuring almost 100 hand-picked blog posts from the first year or so of the blog, covering most of the usual topics. Great for someone who wants to read bloggy stuff in short burst while holding an actual book in their hands.

I am also a fan of Cafe Press. I like being able to give friends and family custom decorated stuff, and I've always found the quality to be pretty good.

Here's a nifty large mug

I actually use this duffle for the gym and short trips. Sturdy

It's a tote bag. For toting.

Snappy t-shirt. Okay, some day I'll get fancier with the design.

I can guarantee that any of these products will put you in an elite group of people who are mostly related to me.

Online Teaching Credentials

Want to be a teacher, but just don't have the time or money to do all that, you know, college degree getting stuff? Well, you're in luck. Meet Teach-Now!

It's the Teach-Now Educatore difference (no, I didn't mistype "educator")! "Become certified to teach in virtually every subject, at virtually every level, in virtually every state" though it's more than that, because the company is international in its reach-- they have created "several strategic global partnerships that expanded our presence to Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America." It is the "most direct and cost effective pathway to teaching in the digital age."

Nice to know this product is still available today

You can keep doing what you're doing, squeezing this streamlines approach into your spare hours. You'll use the same "project-based learning technologies and project-based curriculum you will us" when you have your own classroom. You will get feedback through online streaming and working in a virtual classroom. Just nine months and about $6,000 and you can end up with a shiny new Masters Degree in education. The program does focus on people who are already grown up and out in the world; one entry requirement is to have a bachelor's degree.

This nifty business idea comes from education entrepreneur and former nun Emily Feistritzer, who in this laid-back PBS interview talks about her first job-- selling statues of the Virgin Mary that glowed in the dark. I swear that I am not making any of this up. Feistritzer became a nun at nineteen, left the convent at age thirty-one, landed a PhD in education, and began several decades worth of education-flavored business.

She became founder/CEO of the National Center for Education Information in 1979. Next she became founder/CEO of the National Center for Alternative Certification in 2003. Finally, she launched Teach-Now in 2011. According to the PBS interview, she launched that when she "plopped down a half-million dollars of her own money," and it now has fifteen full-time employees, revenues of around $4 million and a profit margin of around 20%. So the business of quicky internet teacher certification is apparently pretty healthy.

Back in 1985 she was behind a piece of federally-funded research that asked teachers about their sexual habits and their attitudes toward abortion. NCEI occasionally publishes surveys of teacher info, which, not surprisingly, look particularly at training pathways. And Feistritzer also took the nuns to court in 2002, accusing them of sexual abuse (that did not make it into the PBS piece). One gets the impression, reading through her history and watching her speak, that she is a tough and determined person.

Based in DC, Dr. Feistritzer apparently talks to lawmakers now and then and gets to put her two cents in with policy makers. She's a 2016 Brava Award winner for SmartCEO. Oh, and she's an actual member of the Education Writers Association, which is more than certain bloggers can claim.

The PBS-- well, it's hard not to think of it as an infomercial-- focuses on one African-American male student of the program, and highlights how neo-teachers rocketing through this program must do student teaching, which is monitored by video and on-line supervision. It talks about many of the things that are good about getting this young man into the classroom; it does not consider the question of why this program is the best way to get him there.

Teach-Now is, essentially, the teacher prep version of Competency-Based Education, the sort of remote decentralized we-don't-need-no-steenking-school-building version of education that some folks really want to have come down the pike. As with many similar oh-just-make-a-video-and-we'll-watch-that programs, I cannot for the life of me understand how a single camera POV can possibly give a supervisor enough information about what's going on in that classroom.

But hey. Modern, times, you know. I have a couple of friends who went on the internet and had themselves certified as ministers, so they can perform weddings and lead grace and all that cool stuff. Why not internet teachers, too-- both certified on the net and prepared to teach via the net. The program has reportedly produced about 1,200 of these internet teachers.

What nobody, including the happy-time PBS folks, says is whether the program is any good, whether it produces good teachers, or teachers that get jobs and stay in the profession for any amount of time. The only special qualities that are discussed ever are how it's quick, cheap, and convenient, and at that point my back is already up, because if quick, cheap and convenient are your metrics for an attractive experience, you probably aren't going to be happy in teaching in the first place, a profession that consumes time, costs you both the money you never earn and the money that you spend on the work, and which is an endless cavalcade of inconvenience (has any student ever asked for help when it was convenient). And I remain unconvinced that someone watching you being live-streamed through a smart phone is in any position to give you useful feedback on your classroom.

So while it's swell that one more person is getting rich from marketing another education-flavored product, I am doubtful that it's doing the profession any good.