MS: Paving Way for Vouchers

Mississippi has long been considered America's Armpit of Education.

Educational lists? You name it, they've consistently ranked near the bottom. It qualified as news when Nevada beat them for dead last in EdWeek's Quality Counts list in 2016, because that was their first step up in years(and it can be argued that they didn't so much improve as Nevada just became even worse.)

Sharing another excellent investment opportunity

They've tried any number of dumb ideas, from jumping on the bandwagon for failing third graders who don't pass the Big Standardized Test in reading, to fining schools for not observing the Pledge of Allegiance. Plus the occasional attempt to force teachers to be silent on any education related issues at all.

What they haven't tried is actually funding their school system. Mississippi ranks close to the bottom there as well, with a per pupil outlay in the $7K area. Back in 1997, the legislature attempted to address this by passing the Mississippi Adequate Education Program (because when you're working on education, "adequate" is plenty good enough). MAEP laid out a funding formula that the state then promptly ignored. The legislature has only voted four times to fund schools as the MAEP says they should-- and two of those times they took it back mid-year. Last year some folks tried to add some actual teeth to the law, and the legislature promptly buried the referendum in a flurry of bloviating baloney.

But Mississippi's educational finances were not going to be ignored. Instead, the GOP called upon EdBuild and their CEO, our old friend Rebecca Sibilia.

You may remember her as the woman who gleefully observed that bankrupcy is a great way to blow up a district, which is no problem for kids, but a great opportunity for charter operators. Arielle Dreher, who has been doing a bang-up job covering all this for the Jackson Free Press, does a nice job of recapping the EdBuild story--

EdBuild is in its infancy as a company (it started in 2014), and Sibilia came from an education-policy background, first working in the Washington, D.C., education department and then moving to the nonprofit Students First, run by Michelle Rhee. The former chancellor of Washington, D.C., public schools, Rhee was a controversial figure, after firing over 200 teachers in D.C., mainly due to poor performance, she said then.

EdBuild's board of directors includes Derrell Bradford (NYCAN), Angelia Dickens(general counsel for StudentsFirst), Michael Hassi (Exponent Partners), Josh McGee (Manhattan Institute, Arnold Foundation), Henry Moseley (CFO, Washington Convention Center), Hari Sevugan (270 Strategies, former DNC press secretary, and just helped a "national, non-profit education reform group get off the ground), and Stephanie Khunrana (Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation). EdBuild's website hammers away at the notion that "current funding systems are outdated, arbitrary and segregating."

Sibilia's background is soaked in reformy swellness. If that doesn't give you a hint where EdBuild's "study" for educational financing in Mississippi is headed, note also that the quarter-million dollar study was half paid for by the legislature, and the other half with "private funding from unnamed EdBuild donors." Those donors? The Broad, Draper Richards Kaplan, Bill and Melinda Gates, CityBridge, Walton Family, and the Center for American Progress.

Mississippi reached out for help from these giants of education investment because Mississippi is, on the whole, in financial trouble. The GOP and Governor Phil Bryant last year pushed through a huge tax cut, and now state revenues are way down. Go figure.

Against that backdrop, EdBuild and GOP legislators met behind closed doors to rewrite the state's funding formula while pretty much everyone else complained about being left out of the whole process. EdBuild has produced a nifty report  full of fun recommendations, and while we could plow through the whole eighty pages, there are basically only eleven recommendations, and those recommendations boil down to one Big Idea:

Student-centered funding.

Don't fund schools. Base your formula on cost-per-student.Because that makes it way easier to implement a full-on voucher system (and in the long run, I'll predict, it makes it easier to deny budget increases).

There are other details in the recommendations. Recommendation 1 is about giving an extra bump for students who qualify as poor. And while you're doing that, redefine what "poor" means; in Georgia, these kind of shenanigans resulted in many, many people being redefined right out of poverty, even though they had no more money than ever. Recommendation 2 calls for extra support for ELL students, and #3 adds a per-pupil bump for students with special needs, depending on how special their needs are. #4-- same for gifted. #5-- extra money to schools for college-and-career-ready programs, and #6 looks after rural and "sparse" schools.

Recommendation #7 is novel-- fund schools based on enrollment rather than attendance, which strikes me as an idea that would really help charters in general and cyberschools in particular. #8 is to eliminate the 27% rule, a rule that essentially says that the state must shoulder 73% of the funding burden. #9 is about financial transparency.

#10 says, Let's look at all the rules, regulations and accreditation standards that cost money and see if they are "critical to student success"-- presumably so we can get rid of them. Oh, and create a system of "earned autonomy," where schools with good test scores earn a Get Out Of Following the Rules card.

#11 says to phase all this in, and Sibilia agrees, noting that some schools will get more money and some less, so go easy.

One other bizarre feature of this big financial plan is that it includes no dollar amounts or projections at all.

Sibilia said the dollar amount is up to lawmakers, and told the Jackson Free Press that figures used in the 80-page report are "examples only," not base figures for legislators to use.

Will this save the state money? The legislature has kept the grand total for MEAP level, but they've also fully funded the system twice in twenty years. Can you reform a system you've never actually used in the first place? Should you evaluate a new system based on the assumption that it won't be correctly funded when implemented? We have no answers. Would it help you to hear from one more reliable reformy spokesperson?

As a concept, weighted student funding aims for equity, focusing on funding the highest student needs. Dr. Eric Hanushek, the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at Stanford University, analyzes the economics of educational issues. Weighted student funding, Hanushek says is a sensible idea, especially since the goal in most cases is to put money towards school districts that have disadvantaged kids or those that need special education. Weights, however, are the political part of the process, he says.

If we aren't adding any money to the pot, but just shifting the old money around with a new formula, how does that save money or improve education? Well, maybe that's another political question, but I suspect the answer is, "It opens the door to increased and easier voucher/charter/choice programs." Just slap a backpack full of cash on each student and let the mad scramble begin. There's not an ounce of evidence that it will serve the students well, but plenty of evidence that it will help privateers and profiteers open the otherwise closed education market and really expand their own share.

And why target Mississippi for such a program? Well, the one thing that really helps boost a voucher/charter/choice program is a public school system that has been broken down, starved, and beaten into a highly unattractive condition-- Mississippi's public schools are already halfway there. EdBuild is just there to take advantage of that failure, because the collapse of public schools is a great investment opportunity for investors and privatizers, much like the collapse of the weakest antelopes at the watering hole is a great opportunity for lions and hyenas.

Which Choice Would You Choose?

If you were (or are) a parent, which one of the following options would you prefer?

OPTION A

Your neighborhood is served by a single public school.

That school is well-staffed with a range of young and experienced professional educators, well-trained and committed to the needs of their students, and they are well-managed and well-paid so that they stay on as the foundation of a stable school community. The school is a well-maintained facility, clean and safe. It offers a wide variety of quality programs under one roof, with the flexibility for students to explore different educational paths and even change their minds (because young folks sometimes do that), as well as allowing them to enrich one path with samplings from others (in other words, your future biologist won't have to give up band). The school is fully funded and has a full range of up-to-date quality resources.

The school is transparently managed and controlled by an elected board of local community members who meet in public and are available to be contacted by any resident or taxpayer in the district. The management of the school is nimble, flexible, and open to input from all stakeholders.

OPTION B

In this option, your neighborhood is served by many schools, and you have plenty of choices that you may be able to access by using your voucher or some other sort of choice mechanism.

Choice #1: Never mind. This elite private school is out of your price range, even with your state-issued modest voucher.

Choice #2: This Christ-centered private school will gladly accept your child, as long as that child behaves properly, which includes a properly worshipful attitude in daily devotions and Bible readings. And don't worry-- we won't be teaching your child any of that foolish evolution-filled "science" stuff.

Choice #3: Our experts have determined that this is the kind of school People Like You need for their children. Strict, no excuses, speak only when spoken to regimentation. It certainly wouldn't fly over in East Egg, but it's just what the children of You People need to take your proper place in the world.

Choice #3A: If you're in the South, there's also this school, but you can only send your kid here if you're white. Because Those People need to be kept on their own side of town.

Choice #4: We will provide a program much like a regular public school, except we don't have any adaptations for students with special needs or English language learners. You're certainly welcome to send your child with special needs, or who is five years behind in English language acquisition, but understand that we aren't going to do anything special for them.

Choice #5: We decided to launch a special math-centered school. We make room in the budget for super-math stuff by cutting music, art, sports and history. All students attend the same English class which meets every other day in the auditorium. But our math program is definitely more than adequate.

Choice #6: This school was started by some Very Nice People who thought, "How hard can it be to run a school?" It looks like a nice enough place, but none of the teachers have been paid for a month and it will probably close before Easter.

Choice #7: Big National Chain Charter School. The program is already packaged and all our brand-new staff members need to do (it's always brand new because no staff stays here for more than a year or two, which is okay because we don't need to hire actual certified teachers anyway, so they're easy to replace) is open the binder and follow the program. If you would like to talk about changes to the program, feel free to contact our corporate headquarters, which are not actually in your state.

Choice #8: What do you want? Look at our glossy advertisements! We will promise you all sorts of stuff. We will never deliver any of it, but by the time you figure that out it will be too late-- we'll have your money and you'll have to decide how badly you want to disrupt your child's school year in the middle.

Choice #9: Your public school. It still exists, but the other eight schools have drained so much money from it that it is now a sad, limping, underfunded shadow of a real school.

With the exception of Choice #9, none of these schools are managed or operated publicly. You can't attend the meetings, you can't see the books, and you can't contact the board members easily, if at all. You don't get a voice-- the only stakeholders who matter are the people who own and operate the school, and they'll give you the choice they feel like giving you.

THE PUZZLE

Voucher advocates-- particularly the ones who advocate for "parental choice" or "parent rights"-- seem to insist that Option 2 is the better one. Their argument is that Option 1 is a choice that only wealthier families get to exercise by virtue of their ability to buy a house in that school's neighborhood. And they aren't wrong-- linking school funding to the power of the real estate market means that schools in richer neighborhoods get better funding. That is a problem worth addressing.

And yet, Option 2 does not address it. The school in Option 1 is still not available to less wealthy parents. They are presented with only the choices that other choosers choose for them, and in the process, they lose even a limited ability to influence what those choices are going to be. So they lose a shot at improving their public school, and get little-to-nothing in return.

Parent choice advocates might argue that Option 2 is still a better option because choice is such a great value, in and of itself, that providing choice to parents is more important than anything else-- including making sure that the available choices are actually any good.

But I keep coming back to the same idea-- if we want all students to be able to choose the school in Option A, why not do what it takes to transform every public school into Option A? Option A actually offers more choice, more flexibility, but most of all, more of the things that families actually want. Once upon a time reformsters made noises about charters developing great ideas to create great schools, but we already have a plethora of model public schools-- why not use them as a template? Why not muster the sort of "War on Poverty" or "Get To The Moon" or "Endless Battles in Other Countries" willpower we've mustered before and direct it toward making all schools great schools?

If I were a cynic, I might conclude that it's because no private operators can make a bundle under that plan.

Choicers will argue that I've stacked the deck, that these aren't the real options. Real World Option A, they'll say, is one lousy school, and while that may be true in some communities, how is multiple lousy choices better than one lousy choice-- and if you only had so much money, would you rather try to fix up one house or a whole bunch of houses with that money? Real World Option B, they'll say, has more awesomely wonderful choices than I represent here, and you know, there was a time I believed that might be theoretically possible, but reality seems to be stubborn in this regard. It's almost as if running a school is hard, and doubly hard if you're trying to make a business out of it.

But seriously-- what parent would choose Option B over Option A? It's really no choice at all.

Booking.com and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Ad

The folks at booking.com put out this advertisement.



I've never established a Hall of Fame here, but if I did, this letter would go into it:

After watching your ad several times I am moved to do something I've never done before- write a company to complain of the image they are portraying of my profession. As a 15 year veteran teacher, I can assure you that my stress does NOT come from the students in my classroom. My stress comes from endless meetings forcing me to enact tactics that do not help my students learn and achieve; my stress comes from not getting a cost of living raise in 10 years; my stress comes from national figures who know nothing of public education working to destabilize our system in favor of private, religious, and for-profit charter schools that are free to discriminate against differently-abled children with no penalties. 

Isn't there enough teacher bashing without you adding to the myth of the inattentive, non-caring, child-hating teacher? 

If you want to show a teacher needing a vacation, how about showing one burnt out on caring too much? Giving of her own time and money to her kids while an uncaring administration makes ridiculous demands on her? That would be relatable and not turn off the 3.1 million public school teachers in the US. 

Thank you,

That letter is from Alana Milich, God bless her.

Because, yes, it's absolutely hilarious how this teacher is apparently incapable of doing her job is not very interested in trying, because children are awful wild malevolent creatures and teachers would certainly be doing anything else if they possibly could.

"There's nothing more important to me than my vacation"??!! Really? I'm pretty sure that teachers have a long list of things that are far more important to them than their vacation. "Now I can start relaxing before the vacation begins." Sure-- that's what teachers want to do. Anything except our jobs.

Do not tell me that it's "just a joke" and I shouldn't take it so seriously. Passive-aggressive attacks masquerading as humor are never funny. "Hey, honey-- move your fat ass! Oh, don't give me that look-- I'm just kidding." Hi-larious.

I'm not sure what makes this okay. If this were a bored, incompetent, slack-eyed housewife dreaming of getting away from her kids, or a husband dreaming of getting away from the wife he hates, or a doctor standing over an open patient on the table while the doctor absently severs organs and dreams of getting away from stupid sick people or a minister who can't stand his congregation or a national elected politician who can't stand his job and dreams of going golfing every weekend-- well, you get the idea. I know as Americans we get yuks out of people who hate their jobs or their lives or the people around them, but damn-- do we really need one more suggestion that teachers really just suck? And if someone were telling you that's how they see your children, would that be okay with you?

Booking.com sent Milich (and apparently a few other complainants) a tepidly generic response:

Thanks for your feedback.

We’ll be sure to pass it on to those relevant. At Booking.com we value all professions, including teachers, and this ad was only intended as a light-hearted bit of fun. We are passionate about connecting our customers with great stays, empowering them to experience the world in the easiest, most seamless ways possible, which this advert aimed to convey.

Kind regards,

Those relevant what, exactly? "Light-hearted" doesn't really fit, I'm afraid, unless you're the kind of person who considers Ann Coulter books a wacky romp. "We were just teasing" is, unfortunately, a whole long distance away from "We are sorry. We respect teachers and should not have treated them so insultingly."

If you'd like to add to the chorus of unamused audience members, here are some places to try.

Booking.com has a Facebook page. Their twitter handle is @booking.com. You may also be interested to know that they are part of the Priceline group, along with Kayak, Agoda, and Open Table. And while none of the categories is exactly "Complain about our insulting advert," you can find many customer service contact options here-- why not use, well, many?

Join the many folks already complaining. While this is certainly not on the order of, say, threats to gut public education and destroy the teaching profession, these folks deserve to be part of a flap-- maybe even a kerfuffle. It would be nice if advert-makers would think two seconds before they used shots at teachers for cheap punchlines. Do better, booking.com.

MD: University Privatization

The University of Maryland University College is pioneering a new business model, and not everyone thinks it's a very good idea.

George Kroner is a UMUC graduate and a former employee who worked on the tech side of things as UMUC developed a variety of on-line education and analytics programs (he is also, I should note, a former student of mine). But in the nine months since Kroner has left UMUC, he has noticed some disturbing trends.

For one thing, there has been a large administrative turn over-- and not just of personnel as some old school positions like "VP of Academic Affairs" are replaced with new-fangled jobs like "VP, Strategic Partnerships." These business-sounding titles seem to be in keeping with a new model being followed by the university:

As of the time that I left, my impression is that the university was beginning to struggle with finding a balance between its core mission focused on academics and the business aspects of focusing on future innovation. The noted shifts in the Cabinet membership seem to reflect these changes in priority and focus.  As much respect as I have for the university President, he seemed quite enamored with finding ways to use public resources to found private educational technology startup companies – instead of with the core academic mission of the university. The thinking was that the university might use excess income from these startups, or the proceeds from selling them off, to fund scholarships. This is a noble goal, but the business of edtech is extremely risky at best and can result in losing hundreds of millions of dollars for even the largest and most successful educational technology companies.

Inside Higher Ed writes about the "unbundling" university. UMUC has been a pioneer in distance and on-line learning (Kroner himself earned an advanced degree while still being able to hold down a regular job thanks to evening and online classes at UMUC). The university did big business with students attached to the military, including those on active duty.

But times are a-changin' and UMUC was looking for a way to be more sustainable. President Javier Miyares (who left Cuba after his father was taken prisoner in the Bay of Pigs invasion-- so there's another person for your immigration list) took over the office in 2012 with no intent to instigate drastic changes.

Now Miyares thinks its time to pare UMUC down to its "core mission" and part of that has turned out to be "spinning off" departments into private businesses. So the Office of Analytics became the company HelioCampus. This joined other spun-off units under a UMUC non-profit umbrella holding company. UMUC used various departments to raise money two ways-- either outright selling them off, or spinning them into private businesses. And the hiring them to do what they used to do-- so spinning off and outsourcing, all at once.

Either way, say critics, it's a dubious use of public money and the products of that public money. Eyebrows wet up when the university decided to spin off/outsource its entire IT department under the UMUC ventures brand. But outsourcing without a bidding process because they're hiring a business that they are still sort of attached to. That's a lot of spin.

Supporters say it can grow the endowment for the university. Critics point out that it puts UMUC in the business of being in business. That may be why Miyares has been making a bunch of noises that translate to, "No, really-- we're most concerned with the whole academics and teaching and students thing." But there's no getting around it-- the taxpayers of Maryland are now financing both a university and a large-scale business enterprise. And the university and the business now do business with each other:

“For the regents, it was important that there was a really clear line of control,” Miyares said. “We are very satisfied that what we are getting from [HelioCampus] in terms of analytics services is what we were getting before, but that involved very well-crafted service-level agreements. The same thing will have to be done with IT … to make sure we continue to get what we need. At the end of the day, if we don’t, well, I can appoint new directors at any time.”

Which is a bizarre conversation to have. "Let's make sure that these people who used to work for us directly still give us the service they would have given us as a matter of course if they were still working for us." It's like a divorcee saying to their ex as they leave divorce court, "But we'll still get together and the sex will be just as good as ever, right?"


The ins and outs of public-private university partnerships are always a complicated web, whether you're talking health care research or might-as-well-be-pro sports. But UMUC seems determined to push right up to the edge of the question, "When does a public university stop being a public university?" And that question lives right next door to, "If a public university is really a private business, should it be paid with public tax dollars?"

Netflix and the Myth of Personalization

Today Slate has an analysis of how Netflix began the process of personalizing marketing, of using "algorithms to micromanage distribution, not production" in particular in the multi-pronged marketing of House of Cards by creating multiple trailers to appeal to particular slices of the Netflix customer pool, based on their "likes."

In the middle of the article, we find this paragraph:

House of Cards thus embodies one of the most seductive myths of the algorithmic age: the ideal of personalization, of bespoke content assembled especially for each one of us. In fact, the content, or at least the costly, aesthetically rich content we care about, like Fincher’s show, is still fairly limited. There is only one House of Cards, but there are as many ways to market the show as there are to target Netflix viewers. This is what information theorist Christian Sandvig calls “corrupt personalization”: the ways that algorithmic culture blurs the lines between our genuine interests and a set of commodities that may or may not be genuinely relevant, such as products “liked” by our friends on Facebook even if they did not knowingly endorse them.

The piece on corrupt personalization is worth the side trip, but it's a bit much to squeeze in here. But let me toss out three context-free quotes that may ring bells.

It’s as if on Facebook, people were using the yellow pages but they thought they were using the white pages. 

In sum this is again a scheme that does not serve your goals, it serves Facebook’s goals at your expense.

Money is used as a proxy for “best” and it does not work. That is, those with the most money to spend can prevail over those with the most useful information. The creation of a salable audience takes priority over your authentic interests.


And I will bring back Greene's Law-- the free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing.

Personalized learning, whether we're talking about a tailored-for-you learning program on your computer screen or a choose the school you'd like to go to with your voucher, is not about actual personalization. It's about another path for marketing, a way of personalizing the marketing of the product, the edu-commodity that someone is already trying to make money from.

We're being sold (and in many cases are arguing against) an AI that spits out just the digitized worksheet that Student 12-5452 needs to continue studies, but that's not where we're headed. Look, for instance, at the new, improved PSAT that returns both a score and some recommendations. "Looks like you need to log in to Khan Academy's lesson series for calculus." Or "You would really benefit from the AP Calculus course-- talk to your guidance counselor today."

That's the personalized learning dream-- students with vouchers paying for education one course or micro-credential at a time, and each exercise on the "parent" program ends with, "Good job! You should probably sign up for Edubizwang Corp's Intro to Pre-Pre-Calculus next-- just enter your edu-voucher account number." Marketing that can be directed with laser-like precision at each individual consumer. Marketing that can tell the consumer, "Yeah, this-- this is what you really want."

It's not a personalized product, but the personalized marketing will make you think it's just what you want. Netflix is just the beginning. 

IN: Vouchers and Changing the System

Indy Ed is a website devoted to exploring one idea-- "There are so many changes swirling around our schools that it’s hard to get straight answers." Their focus is Indianapolis, one more urban center suffering from a plethora of education problems, not the lest of which is a government that doesn't want to spend too many tax dollars on Those People. But Indy Ed seems to prefer focusing on that most magical of solutions-- vouchers and choice.

There's no big scam or fraud or misbehavior here. But in one simple piece, Indy Ed gives us a picture of many of the ways that vouchers open up the market and let profiteers and religious ed folks get past the system that has stood in their way for so long.

"Vouchers May Not Be a Panacea But They Are Really Working for Some Families" is the headline for this piece highlighting Oaks Academy, an example of vouchers working for some people.

So before we read the piece, what do we know about Oaks Academy? Well, here's the pitch at the top of their website:

The Oaks Academy is a Christ-centered school that exists to provide a rich, classical education to children of diverse racial and socioeconomic backgrounds, preparing them to succeed in a rigorous secondary educational program and to demonstrate spiritual, social and emotional maturity.

Indy Ed tells us that the student population of Indianapolis is three-quarters black and brown, but the header photo for OA (which Indy Ed also uses for its piece)shows a group of students who are two-thirds white.

OA has a whole page devoted to Teacher Support which highlights such great features as their outstanding professional development (so much better than public schools). One might think they are really working at recruiting and retaining teachers (you can also do Americorps or VISTA work there). Their student profile shows a blend of socio-economic backgrounds and a racial breakdown closer to 50-50 than 25-75 (Britt actually cites a 30% black population in the school, which is smaller than what the school's own graph shows). But they do great on that ISTEP (Indiana's version of the Big Standardized Test). And they've been thriving-- in the 1998-1999 year they opened with 53 students enrolled. This year they have 732 (pre-K through 8). The material is quiet about students with special needs, but that would seem to be one more area in which The Oaks does not resemble the Indianapolis student population. Reader ocg in the comments below offered this background:

The IDOE's Compass website tracks demographics, test scores, etc. for every school corporation in the Indiana, public or private. Their data shows that all three Oaks Academy campuses have far fewer rates of students on free or reduced lunch (ranging from 23.6% to 34.4%) as compared to both Indianapolis Public Schools (68.3%) and the state as a whole (45.7%).
Although lunch status is a very rough way of looking at whether a population is “low income” or not, those numbers do make me scratch my head.
Their racial demographics are also not reflective of Indianapolis schools. All three Oaks Academy campuses are about 50-55% white, 30% black, and 15-20% Asian/Hispanic/multiracial. Indianapolis Public Schools have slightly different demographics.
And then there's special ed numbers. The Oaks Academy with the highest rate of special ed students is their Fall Creek campus, at 8.1%. The other two campuses have special ed rates of 4.1% and 4.7%. The entire state has a rate of 14.5%. IPS's rate is 17%. Hmm.**

But back to our Indy Ed profile. The writer, Baratto Britt, wants to argue that vouchers are actually a "liberal, almost socialist" thing with the mission of providing poor families with the same choices that rich families enjoy. About half of the students at Oaks are voucher students. 83% get some sort of tuition assistance (the toll is $10,300-- so now I'm a little confused because Indiana vouchers only provide about $5K). Board policy reportedly says that 50% of the student body must be from poor families.  But Britt also says that the school attracts hefty philanthropy ("juggernaut" is the word he uses); their website promises "an unmatched philanthropic experience." Almost 40% of the budget comes from donations; voucher money provides about 20%. Also, Oaks "acquired" a public middle school that had been "underutilized".

The school was profiled by Ebony last fall as an example of diversity in action as an educational tool, and while The Oaks is diverse, it is far whiter than the Indianapolis public system. According to school CEO Andrew Hart, that takes some deliberate work:

We want to be diligent about maintaining this tricky balance. It’s something so unique to this place but very fragile. “The admissions pool is dominated by white families, who are moving back into the neighborhoods,” Hart added. “It would totally relieve our philanthropic burden, which would be great, but we want to make sure this unique proposition that Oaks is maintained over time

Hart graduated from UNC at Chapel Hill with an MBA, put in four years at Eli Lilly, then came to The Oaks.

Britt wants to suggest that Oaks does not cream or pick only the most-likely-to-be-successful students, but on top of the whole Christ-centered approach (about which the school is not shy, nor should they be) the school also has another requirement that Britt lays out

Additionally, parental involvement is not optional for all Oaks Families, but mandatory as a caring, committed adult must participate in various activities during the admissions cycle and school year to ensure all stakeholders have skin in the game.  

So, Jesus, plus a supportive family both willing and able to contribute work to the school, which is itself supported by extra funding from philanthropists. Is there any school, public or private, that could not achieve success with those advantages?

The Oaks is a private Christian school that self-selects for families with a commitment to their children's education, all of which is perfectly fine-- for a private school. But under Indiana's system, public tax dollars are being sent to this religious private school (and some of the taxpayers' buildings as well).

I decided to write about this precisely because The Oaks shows no signs of fraud or scandal or the kinds of egregious abuse of the system that we often see with vouchers. Except, of course, that the vouchers are completely flouting the separation of church and state by sending public dollars to a private Christian school, and that school has shown us nothing about education that we didn't already know. With a different student body than the parent district, supportive families, free labor, and extra funding you can get good results?! Do tell!

The Oaks' own history page and several press accounts note that the school was started by neighbors and concerned citizens who wanted an urban alternative, and their first school was in a less-than-stellar neighborhood. Voucher supporters can and do point to The Oaks as the sort of school that can save students. They seem like Very Nice People, and not crooks at all-- and yet, they have completely changed the rules of public education, to the point that it's not public education at all.

But at some point we have to decide if saving only some students (and only those we consider deserving) is good enough. A nationwide voucher system will not be about providing choices for poor families, but about changing the entire purpose of education in this country. Vouchers will shift us from a system whose mission is to do its best for all students-- ALL students, no matter what-- to a system whose mission is to save some students, the right students, the students with the right kind of families, who belong to the correct faith. Like it or not, it's a huge mission shift for the country, and the end of public education as we know it. We should be talking about that.

** I'm copying the rest of the reader comments here to preserve the links (which blogger does not do-- man, if I had had any idea what this blog was going to be lieke when it grew up, I would have picked a different platform). Here you go::

Finally, their claim that 85% of their students receive tuition assistance is pretty worthless in this state. Another choice school in Indiana, Delaware Christian Academy (godawful website, I know - somehow this school stays open), could not even open its doors in a timely manner last year, and yet they claim that 95% of their students got full scholarships. Either they're lying, or getting tuition assistance to attend a choice school in this state is, um, extremely easy.

Anyway, the choice climate here in Indiana has very clearly hobbled certain school corporations (like IPS, and especially Gary, whose enrollment has gone from ~16,000 students to ~6,000 students in 12 years). It has also led to some very interesting data sets, like this choice school's graduate rate trend (look at the bar graph). Wonder what happened there.

The Map of the World

Boston Public Schools just caused a stir by adopting a new map of the world.

"Boston public schools map switch aims to amend 500 years of distortion"reads the headline in the The Guardian, and "amend" is a good choice of words, because BPS decided to replace one set of distortions with another.

Boston had been using the Mercator Projection (1569), a version that we're all pretty familiar with.

Mercator distorts by spreading out the world as it approaches the poles, so that by the time we get to Greenland or Alaska, the land masses are looking much larger than they actually are. Mercator was mostly trying to help with navigation, and this map was fine for that. And since his audience/customers were mostly starting from Europe, his map reinforces the idea that Europe is the center of the world. And it makes Africa and South America look relatively smaller.

This is many people's mental map of the world, complete with its built-in distortions.

BPS decided to switch to the Gall-Peters projection (1855/1967) a map that sets out to render each land mass equally, so that the relative sizes of the land masses are accurate.

But because the projection is still onto a rectangle, Gall-Peters combats one distortion with another distortion. The Marcator inflates land area by stretching it out at the bottom and the top; Gall-Peters fixes that by squishing the map in at the top and the bottom until the land areas are comparable and "correct."

This version is not necessarily very useful for navigation, but in the late 20th century it stirred up a bit of a mess. Arno Peters was actually duplicating the 100-year-old work of James Gall, and he promoted it as a more just and socially aware map than the Mercator, annoying the crap out of the cartographic community, which had been trying to downplay, improve upon, and replace Mercator for a couple of centuries. But Peters managed to build a cottage industry around his map (and even eventually acknowledged that Gall had gotten there a century earlier). The Brits use the map, and UNESCO has based some of its mappery on it, the argument in favor of it being that it shows nations in their proper relative size, even if shapes and distances are distorted.

Are there other options? You bet there are.

Try, for instance, the Cassini projection (1745), which keeps its distances somewhat standard and lets you see the poles.














Or how about the various Eckert projections (1906) that avoid lots of distortion by not trying to fit the surface of the globe on a rectangle.

And once we've chucked the whole rectangular map thing, we can get the equal-area maps right and show every land mass in proper proportion to the others. Here's the Goode homolosine projection (1923).

And cartographers haven't stopped playing. This Bottomley (that's the guy's name) equal-area projection from 2003:

We'll stop now, but there are even freakier versions of the earth in existence. There are many, many maps of the world out there-- some good for navigation, some good for figuring distances, some for showing proper relationships between land masses, some focused on ocean shaped and depths. But here's one thing we know about all of them--

They are all wrong. They are all incomplete. They are all distorted in some fairly major way.

This is to be expected. When you take something that is huge and complex and multidimensional and try to render it onto a small two-dimensional surface, you must sacrifice some major chunks of the truth. For that reason, you have to be fairly deliberate about and conscious of what parts of the truth you are sacrificing for whatever specific utility you wish to get from your map. And you have to keep trying, because every solution you come up with will be inadequate in some major way. And you must always remember that your map is inadequate in some major ways and not mistake the two-dimensional rendering for the real thing.

That's the lesson here, or rather the reminder, because we already knew all this but certain people prefer to pretend they don't, is that whenever you try to render, describe, display, or create a measured model of something complicated (like a school or a teacher or a student's mind or learning) you will absolutely fail in some major ways. Furthermore, if you get to thinking your map of that world is perfect, you will make terrible mistakes.

It is hard to make a map of the world. You will always fail, and if your goal is to achieve perfection, you are doomed to lose in a fool's game. If, on the other hand, you do the best you can, keep trying, and remain aware of your shortcomings so that you don't bet the farm or attach huge stakes to a map that's not True-- well, you might have a chance. If you think your Big Standardized Tests and data sets based on them and numbers kicked out by your fancy formulae are a perfect guide to what's going on in schools, you are doomed to be lost. And it would be really nice if you didn't drag the rest of us with you on your doomed journey.