Charterizing from Within

The next big threat to public education, the next big arm of the corporate privatizing octopus, is Competency-Based Education, formerly known as Outcome Based Education, sometimes known as Proficiency Based Learning, and often dressed up in a nice suit as Personalized Learning.

Probably not going to end well

It takes a whole subdivision of the public school advocacy movement to keep track of the slow, steady creep of CBE into public education. I frequently turn to Wrench in the Gears and Emily Talmage's Save Maine Schools as well as Hack Education to stay up on these issues (there are more-- go look around), but it is a recent Wrench in the Gears piece that sparked my attention. In a recent piece, the blog addresses the forces that are lined up against Rhode Island, and as usual, there are a great many connections to follow to find all the players. It's a worthwhile piece, but in it, I found a phrase that really hit--

Now they anticipate “reforming” districts internally through online “personalized learning” programs. For more information see my prior post on blended learning, and how it’s being used to charterize public schools from within.

I've had some trouble getting folks to see any threat from CBE. After all, as with Common Core, it seems as if there are aspects to like (also, as with Common Core, some objectors are... um... extremely passionate and agitated to the point of being a little off-putting for civilians). CBE provides an alternative approach to assessment that could conceivably do away with PARCC-type testing. The personalization seems like it could be a really good thing for students.

But wrench is right-- it's charterization from within.

The modern charter strategy has been pretty straightforward. Target a public school (you can use Big Standardized Test scores to target it, or you can chronically underfund it so it's an obvious collapsing mess). Build a new charter school across the street. Take the students and the money that you want. Ka-ching.

But what if there were another way? What if you didn't have to get your hands on a building, or set up a whole new administrative structure? What if you could just take over a public school a piece at a time.

So this year you buy the CBE/Personalized service to provide remediation to your low-score students. Then you shift more students into that "class"? Then you hand over an entire department to the service, and so on, until a huge portion of your curriculum is purchased and delivered via internet-based software, beamed straight into your school. Meanwhile, the school could also outsource janitorial services, alternative education, the cafeteria, transportation, and maybe even the actual staffing. You'll still have some teachers, but their main job will be Management By Screen-- checking student progress charts on the monitor and intervening if anything seems off. By the time you get here, most of your school "managing" is being done by the companies you've hired, not your front office. Ka-ching.

Instead of building a complete new charter school, you simply take a public school and slowly swap out all the parts. At what point does it become a charter school and not a public one? The vendors don't care-- you can call it a blue cheese school if you want, as long as a ton of that sweet, sweet public tax money is headed for private corporate coffers.

CBE is a great way for folks to get into the charter school business without having to bother with so much of the actual business of running a school. They can just slip into an already-running school from the inside, replacing the heart of the school with their own proprietary software. Perhaps there will be sufficient pushback along the way as parents hear the disgruntled student tales of spending much of the day at a screen, rarely being taught by a live human. Or perhaps the public won't figure out what's happening until it's too late to put everything back that has been lost. I do have my doubts about whether or not CBE will ever really fly.

But in the meantime, this is a useful way to understand what's so bad about CBE and how to recognize that it's happening. It's the wolf devouring the sheep from the inside, until there's nothing left but a well-fed wolf in what remains of the sheep's clothing.

MN: Vergara III: The Attack on Tenure Continues

You probably remember the Vergara lawsuit, the California suit that was intended to destroy teacher tenure. You may even remember that a sequel was filed in New York. 

The Vergara suit was simply beaten. The New York suit turned into a circus, starting with competition to see who could be out in front of the suit-- Campbell Brown or Mona Davids.Then Andy Cuomo floated his own plan for kicking teachers in the face, rendering the lawsuit mootish.

The original Vergara was brought to us by David Welch, one more unelected tech gazillionaire who wants to force parts of society to work the way he wants them to. In New York, the mantle was picked up by Campbell Brown's Partners for Educational Justice, a group fronted by Brown and funded primarily by the Waltons and Eli Broad (though for a long time Brown was adamant about not revealing that info because the poor frail dears would have been Made Real Sad by such public exposure).

For the Minnesota suit, PEJ was joined by Students for Education Reform, a younger-faced sock puppet group for the Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) the group of hedge-fundie privatizers and profiteers. It was filed about a year ago, and I called baloney at the time. The plaintiffs are concerned that during budget cuts, the wrong teachers will be fired-- but they're not concerned about budget cuts. And they toss around the old lie that tenured teachers can't be fired.

The Minnesota lawsuit was thrown out last October when Judge Margaret Marrinan ruled that a clear connection could not be made between academic achievement and due process for teacher tenure laws PEJ and SFER were back in January to appeal. Perhaps they were waiting for the holidays to be over, or perhaps they were waiting for the results of the Presidential election so that they'd know what the chances were once they drove this bulldozer all the way to the Supreme Court (the preferred result in these cases, as these folks generally would like to use a suit to punch teachers in the face all across the nation and not just in one state).

The plaintiffs are four moms from Minnesota (you get a picture here of how PEJ "found" them), including lead plaintiff Tiffani Forslund, a charter school teacher currently running for a seat on city council. Since the days of Vergara, the people crafting these lawsuits have learned to angle more toward Saving Poor Children, because it's much easier to attract teachers to underfunded schools with tough populations when you can promise those teachers that they will have no job security at all. The lawsuit wants to implement a solution of "protecting our best teachers and replacing low-performing teachers with effective teachers" which seems magical and simple and completely unrelated to whether or not teachers have tenure.

Just last week the cause was joined by our old friends TNTP (sister organization of TFA), and the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ). TNTP has long agitated for the end of tenure and the use of test scores to make employment decisions about teachers. They are also that guy in the bar who will corner you to tell you about this one cool thing he did years ago; in TNTP's case, it's a "report" called "The Widget Effect," and it's not that cool. NCTQ-- well, I have heaped a lot of abuse on a lot of reformster organizations over the past few years, but there is no group I take less seriously than NCTQ, a group that has at various times evaluated teacher programs that don't exist, judged course difficulty by looking at commencement programs, and just generally cranked out the laziest faux research ever generated.

Anyway, these two reformster groups have sent along an amicus brief just last week, offering their two cents to the court that's hearing the case (because when it comes to the law, folks get to vote, I guess). Elizabeth Ross (NCTQ) and Daniel Weisberg are here to say that the suit is all about "Minnesota students' fundamental right to an education," which as always makes me wonder when they'll be filing a lawsuit about fully funding schools or developing better ways to attract top teachers. Nope. Just got to get rid of tenure.

Well, replace it, anyway, with New! Improved! Tenure Lite, as explained by TNTP's cool graphic:

Current tenure is premature? I've never understood this exactly, but the anti-tenure stuff want to make it take longer, presumably so that more teachers are fireable and staff churn can be maximized. New York tried a sort of tenure twilight and proved that if you really underline for someone that their job is not secure, they'll leave for one that is. What they didn't prove was whether they knew how to target good and bad teachers. Saying that tenure is irrevocable is meaningless-- your job is always revocable, and that's the point. They're correct that appeals can drag on forever.

But their alternative? "Tenure awarded for sustained strong performance" means good students Big Standardized Test scores, which means that schools serving poor communities will turn over staff regularly, because you know who gets low test scores? Non-wealthy non-white students. This is not because those students are less capable or smart-- it's because BS Tests are crappy, and schools that are underfunded and underresourced face greater challenges. Maybe TNTP would like to comment on a lawsuit about that. In TNTP's version you can't contest the conclusion of your evaluation-- you just have to prove it was bad faith. Good luck with that. And while I agree that drawnout hearings are bad for everybody, maybe we can come up with something fairer than putting someone's career on the line in just one day.

At this stage of the game these folks are barely pretending that these lawsuits have anything to do with helping schools do a better job of meeting students' needs. But apparently the reformsters are calling in some buddies to help and they're all going to keep trying to undercut the teaching profession some more, despite their lack of evidence to support their case. It's like having a bull at cheerleading tryouts; you can't take it seriously, but you can't afford to ignore it, either.

Supreme Court Rules on IEPs

The Supreme Court has ruled on the case of Endrew F. vs. Douglas County School District, a case that gave the Supremes a chance to rule on just how much education is "enough."

The case was brought by the parents of Endrew F., an autistic student whose education was, according to his parents, not nearly enough. But Douglas County Schools (Colorado) took the position that they had provided "de minimis" which is what some folks believe the law requires and what they interpreted to mean "the absolute least we can get away with, even if it's not very much."

How Douglass decided to let itself get dragged all the way to the Supreme Court is beyond me, but once the case arrive, many many many people decided to chime in because the case potentially had huge repercussions for schools across the country.

The court decided the case unanimously, and in a mere sixteen pages. Chief Justice Roberts wrote the decision, and it doesn't hand a full win to either side, but it does provide some clarification for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) which will no doubt result in memos flying to and from special education directors across America.

Roberts referred back the case of Amy Rowley, centering on "starkly different understandings" of Free and Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) and another case in which the parents and school disagreed; the court somewhat split the difference saying essentially that the district wasn't obliged to provide every single item that parents demanded, but it couldn't just slack off, either. He also notes that in Rowley, the court was deliberately avoiding inserting itself as an ultimate definer of educational programming.

In the case of Endrew, the parents had placed him in a private school after feeling he was stalled in the publics, and feeling that his IEPs were simply recycled same old same old. That was apparently even more problematic after the private school employed some strategies that helped with some of the behavior issues that had gotten in the way of his education (screaming, running away from school, extreme reactions to ordinary things like flies). Now the F's knew it could be done, and yet the school was proposing to repeat the same unproductive approaches of previous years. The Fs declined the school's attempt to woo them back, demanding instead that the private school tuition be paid by the district. And so here we are.

The District tried to cite Rowley, arguing that they couldn't promise a particular level of student achievement, and as long as there was progress of some sort, they had done their job.But Roberts says that Douglass cited the Rowley decision a little too precisely, setting select sentences free from their clarifying follow-ups. In the end, said Roberts, "We cannot accept the school district's reading of Rowley."

Roberts discusses at length IDEA's requirements for crafting an individualized program for the students, and notes that while the district says these are just procedural requirements, "the procedures are there for a reason." In other words, simply going through the motions of writing an IEP is not enough.

When all is said and done, a student offered an educational program providing “merely more than de minimis” progress from year to year can hardly be said to have been offered an education at all. For children with disabilities, receiving instruction that aims so low would be tantamount to “sitting idly ... awaiting the time when they were old enough to ‘drop out.’”[the quote is from Rowley]. The IDEA demands more. It requires an educational program reasonably calculated to enable a child to make progress appropriate in light of the child's circumstances.

And there you have your Supreme Court definition of what IDEA requires.

Not that this was a win for the Fs, either. Their argument was that the IEP child should have the same opportunities and show the same basic progress as other students without special needs. Roberts rejects that as well, saying that the majority rejected that standard in Rowley as well. Roberts rejects defining FAPE as "the same as what all the other students are getting."

We will not attempt to elaborate on what “appropriate” progress will look like from case to case. It is in the nature of the [special education law] and the standard we adopt to resist such an effort: The adequacy of a given IEP turns on the unique circumstances of the child for whom it was created.

Roberts echoes Rowley in saying that the absence of any "bright-line rule" is not an invitation for other courts to substitute educational judgment for those of local education authorities. It is the education professionals who ultimately need to decide this stuff.

So, who won?

Well, for students with special needs, it's a confirmation by the Supremes that IDEA means districts can't just squeak by with de minimis, but must actually set out with a reasonably ambitious plan. For school districts, it' confirmation by the Supreme Court that educational experts are indeed the real authority on these matters, and the court should not substitute their own judgment for that of actual education professionals. Phew-- now if only the other two brnaches of government could get on board with that.

Don't They Understand...?

The attempts to do away with teacher tenure. The work to break the teacher unions, resulting in lower pay and less job protection. The initiatives for driving down teacher pensions. The legislative moves to take away sick and bereavement leave. The continued scapegoating of teachers. Lots of teachers look at all that and ask--

Don't they understand that this is making teaching less attractive? Don't they understand that this is making it harder to recruit and retain good people in the profession? Don't they understand that they are pushing people out the door?

Do they get it? Do they get that making teaching a profession that provides less and less job security, less and less ability to support a family, and less and less respect makes it less and less likely that people will choose teaching as a lifetime vocation?

There are, I think, three answers:

No, because teaching is a calling...

Some folks believe that teaching is such a calling and teachers are so closely identified with their profession that a teacher can't choose to not be a teacher any more than a tall person can choose to be short. It simply does not occur to these folks that a person has a choice, that a person can decide to enter the profession or leave it (and if the person does choose to leave teaching, well, that just means she wasn't really a teacher after all).

So it doesn't matter what you do to the profession-- real teachers will always want to be teachers.

No, because teaching is just a lady job...

Some folks still think of teaching as a job that some nice lady does for a few years while her husband is the real breadwinner in the home. It's like a really convenient part-time job that lets them work the same hours that the kids go to school and make a little extra money to cover grocery shopping or a nicer vacation. But it's not a real job, and they aren't really depending on it for their families or anything, so the working conditions don't need to be all that great. It should be noted that there are some teachers out there who don't exactly help counteract this stereotype.

So it doesn't matter what you do to the profession because it's not a real profession anyway.

Yes, they know exactly what they're doing.

Too many folks assume that there must be a misunderstanding or failure to Grasp the Situation, because surely nobody would want to drive people out of the profession on purpose.

But teaching is being lined up for dismantling like many jobs before it. From car-building to meat-packing, corporate leaders have found financial savings in being able to replace skilled workers with assembly-line drones. Breaking down a profession has numerous advantages if you're in power.

Teachers who don't stay also don't get expensive pensions.

Teachers who don't stay don't become active union members. They don't start speaking up for changes or challenging management decisions.

Teachers who don't stay don't get raises.

For some folks in the corporate reform movement, the teaching ideal is a Teach for America model-- the teacher comes, works for a few years, goes away. That teacher is easily replaced because in this model, the teacher is just a content delivery specialist who delivers the teacher-proof curriculum-in-a-box, or switches on the personalized learning computer and helps the occasional student deal with an issue. The easily replaced teachers is cheap-- not just because she doesn't stick around long enough to need a raise, but because her health insurance and pension costs are minimal. And because all the teachers in the building are coming and going, they don't have a chance to band together and start making noise over anything from teaching conditions to wages to the mistreatment of students by administration. And the lack of job protections (no tenure, no seniority, one year contracts) means that anybody who does look like any kind of trouble at all can be removed. You'll want to keep around one or two "team players," whose decent salaries can be used as enticement for recruitment and who can be counted on to help you keep everyone in line.

That's the dream. Sure, it means that parents and students walk into school every fall to see familiar-ish faces gone and new strangers in classrooms. But so what? Isn't school about pumping test-prep info and skills into their little heads, and not relationships?

And as an added bonus, the breaking of the union helps negate unionism as a political force. From the local level, where teachers can no longer get involved in school board elections, to the national level where NEA, the largest union in the nation, has less political juice (though, as long as they keep doing boneheaded things like supporting the Common Core, backing Arne Duncan, and giving Clinton an early-bird endorsement without talking to the membership, the NEA is not necessarily a big, scary threat).

Teachers are generally reasonable, educated people and it can be hard for them to see when opponents don't share "obvious" values. Surely, we think, these people can't want to actually drive people out of the profession. But the signs are clear that some people do, in fact, want to remake teaching in a new image, just as Ray Kroc and the McDonalds brothers remade restaurant chefs into minimum-wage assembly line workers.

For the people who see education as a $600 billion egg just waiting to be cracked, converting the education workforce into an easily replaced, high churn, low cost labor force is a worthwhile goal. Will it provide better education for children? Who cares? Did the McDonalds worry about whether or not they could crank out gourmet food? No, the goal is to get the revenue flowing away from public school workers and toward private pockets while simultaneously making that work force more compliant, less troublesome, and more easily managed.

So yes-- they understand exactly the effects of what they're doing. That's why they're doing it. 

ICYMI: April Is No Fool Edition (4/2)

Keep reading. Keep sharing. I keep meeting people who say things like, "Boy, I wish I could blog about this stuff, but I just don't have the time/confidence/typing skills/etc." But you can take the things that you read and which make sense to you, and you can pass them on. Share what should be shared. Spread the word. We can all do that. Here's just some of what was worth sharing this week.


The Pahara Institute Proliferation of Corporate Ed Reformers

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider peels back some layers on yet another gathering-place of well-heeled corporate ed reformers. Some great research here and some disturbing new information.


Private Practice

Jennifer Berkshire interviews Ken Zeichner about how the attempts to break teacher preparation programs fit into the goals of the privatization movement.

Nashville's Charter School Industry Unraveling

Nashville has been out in front of the charter biz for a while. Now it's all starting to fall apart.

What the Public Doesn't Know About High Performing Charter Schools in Arizona

Carol Burris takes another guest spot at The Answer Sheet to show one more example of how a supposedly high quality charter chaoin can turn out to be a big fat scam.

Madame Secretary, May I Offer You A Screwdriver?

Mike Petrilli provides a compendium of Betsy DeVos's tone-deaf missteps, including a few I'd missed, and suggests that she broaden her view a bit.

The Disadvantages of Competitive Learning

Nancy Flanagan makes a compelling case for keeping competition out of the classroom.

Who Moved My Teachers

Patrick Caldwell at Mother Jones looks at how Scott Walker's successful war against the teachers of Wisconsin has gutted their school system

Driverless

If you only read one piece on the list... Audrey Watters takes a good hard look at the Uber-education analogy that's suddenly a reformster fave. Here's where it falls apart and where it's view on the dangers facing public ed.

Defending Public Education From Trump

Russ Walsh with some education-related thoughts about the resistance.

Betsy DeVos's Mom's Teaching Career

Mercedes Schneider has been on a roll this week. Here's a well-researched piece on exactly what DeVos's teaching career actually was. Follow it up with Schneider's piece on what happened to the school where Mom taught. 

Inactive Data

So about that actionable data...

One of the frequently-offered reasons for the Big Standardized Tests is that they are supposed to provide information that will allow classroom teachers to "inform instruction," to tweak our instruction to better prepare for the test better educate our students. Let me show you what that really means in Pennsylvania.

Our BS Tests are called the Keystones (we're the Keystone State-- get it?). They are not a state requirement yet-- the legislature has blinked a couple of times now and kicked that can down the road. Because these tests are norm-referenced aka graded on a curve, using them as a graduation requirement is guaranteed to result in the denial of diplomas for some huge number of Pennsylvania students. However, many local districts like my own, make them a local graduation requirement in anticipation of the day when the legislature has the nerve to pull the trigger (right now 2019 is the year it all happens). The big difference with a local requirement is that we can offer an alternative assessment; our students who never pass the Keystones must complete the Binder of Doom-- a huge collection of exercises and assessment activities that allow them to demonstrate mastery.  It's no fun, but it beats not getting a diploma because you passed all your classes but failed on bad standardized test.

Why do local districts attach stakes to the Keystones? Because our school rating and our individual teacher ratings depend upon those test results.

So it is with a combination of curiosity and professional concern that I try to find real, actionable data in the Keystone results, to see if there are things I can do, compromises I can make, even insights I can glean from breaking that data down.

The short answer is no. Let me walk you through the long answer. (We're just going to stick to the ELA results here).

The results come back to the schools from the state in the form of an enormous Excel document. It has as many lines as there are students who took the test, and the column designations go from A to FB. They come with a key to identify what each column includes; to create a document that you can easily read requires a lot of column hiding (the columns with the answer to "Did this student pass the test" are BP, BQ and BR.

Many of the columns are administrivia-- did this student use braille, did the student use paper or computer, that sort of thing. But buried in the columns are raw scores and administrative scores for each section of the test. There are two "modules" and each "module" includes two anchor standards segments. The Key gives a explanation of these:

I can also see raw scores broken down by multiple choice questions and "constructed" answers. The constructed answers can get a score of 1 through 10.

Annnnnnnnd that's it.

You might think that a good next step would be to look at student results broken down by questions with those questions tagged to the particular sub-standard they purport to measure. That's not happening. In fact, not only are these assessment anchors not broken down, but if you go to the listing of Pennsylvania Core Standards (because we are one of those states that totally ditched renamed Common Core), you will see that L.F.1 etc only sort of correspond to specific Core Standards. 

You might also think that being able to see exactly what questions the students got wrong would allow me to zero in on what I need to teach more carefully or directly, but of course, I am forbidden to so much as look at any questions from the test, and if I accidentally see one, I should scrub it from my memory. Protecting the proprietary materials of the test manufacturer is more important than giving me the chance to get detailed and potentially useful student data from the results.

You'll also note that "reading for meaning" is assessed based on no more than six or seven questions (I don't know for a fact that it's one point per question, but the numbers seem about right based on student reports of test length-- not that I've ever looked at a copy of the test myself, because that would be a Terrible Ethical Violation).

So that's it. That's my actionable data. I know that my students got a score by answering some questions covering one of four broad goals. I don't know anything about those questions, and I don't know anything about my students' answers. I can compare how they do on fiction vs. non-fiction, and for what it's worth, only a small percentage shows a significant gap between the two scores. I can see if students who do well in my class do poorly on the test, or vice-versa. I can compare the results to our test prep test results and see if our test prep test is telling us anything useful (spoiler alert-- it is not).

But if you are imagining that I look at test results and glean insights like "Man, my students need more work on interpreting character development through use of symbolism or imagery" or "Wow, here's a list of terms I need to cover more carefully" or "They're just now seeing how form follows function in non-fiction writing structures"-- well, that's not happening.

In the world of actionable data, the Keystones, like most of the Big Standardized Tests, are just a big fat couch potato, following a design that suggests their primary purpose is to make money for the test manufacturing company. Go ahead and make your other arguments for why we need to subject students to this annual folly, but don't use my teaching as one of your excuses, because the BS Test doesn't help me one bit.

FL: Burning Down the Schoolhouse

Florida (Motto: If you can't make a buck from it, what's the point?) is taking steps to bring its public school system into the final stages of Death by Charter. It's time to spread some more gasoline and light yet another match.

Because this is a purely political move, it has to have a ridiculously cynical name. So the Florida legislature is working on a bill to move students to "Schools of Hope." Actually, the bill used to call them "Schools of Success," but somebody probably figured that was promising waaaaaay too much, so "Schools of Hope" it is.

The bill, which just passed out of the House Education Committee, commits $200 million to opening charter schools in the same neighborhoods as schools with low grades on Florida's A-F scale.

Here's the idea. Say your school cafeteria is having trouble. Many of the students it serves are malnourished and come to school hungry. The facility is underfunded and in disrepair, and the budget doesn't allow you to get the very best of food (in fact, you have reason to believe that some the funding for your cafeteria that serves mostly black students has been shifted cross town to a mostly-white cafeteria). Students often can't afford to buy full meals in your cafeteria. The state judges your effectiveness on how much the students weigh. You beg for help, but instead the legislature adds an ever-increasing number of hurdles to getting your work done and berates you for thinking that they can just throw money at the problem.

And then, one day, they decide that the solution is to offer a multi-million-dollar grant to any McDonald's that will build a restaurant across the street from the school.

Or maybe you live in a house that's been in your family for decades, and the state comes and sets fire to it, and then refuses to send a fire department. But they do offer multi-million dollar grants to any hotels that want to build a place across the street.

That's the proposal. Let's see if we can put the final touch on killing these public schools and moving all the students into charters. 

Of course, the legislators are totally doing it For The Children.

Here's House Speaker Richard Corcoran, one of the leaders of this initiative. "No longer will we rob children of dignity and hope. Now every single child will be afforded an opportunity of a world class education." Because nothing is more dignified and hopeful than being used as a profit-generating pawn.

"We have tried everything else," said Rep. Manny Diaz Jr., R-Hialeah. "It is our moral responsibility to make this move and provide an option for our kids." Well, almost everything. Not actually investing in and providing resources for public schools. But that would be crazy. And Diaz must know what he's talking about, because helps run Doral College, a fake college that lets students at some charter schools pretend they're taking college courses.

And the legislature wasn't flying blind-- they did talk to some experts to help craft the bill, according to Gary Fineout, an AP reporter who has covered many Florida crazy-pants education stories:

Rep. Michael Bileca, a Miami Republican and chairman of the House Education Committee, said legislators met with charter school operators and asked what it would take for them to set up schools in the neighborhoods now served by traditional public schools. He said one answer was that they needed help paying for new buildings to house the school.

Cathy Boehme of the Florida Education Association pointed out the obvious:

You are saying funding matters. You're saying good strategies matter. And then you turn around and keep those strategies from schools that you could save from these turnaround options.

But wait-- there's more!

This new bill is on top of a bill that has been kicking around for a few years. This bill would require public schools to share property tax revenue with charter schools-- and it would limit districts' ability to spend on construction. The bill is co-sponsored by Rep. Diaz and Rep. Erik Fresen, and Fresen should know about these things because he works as a $150,000-a-year consultant for Civica, an architectural firm that specializes in charter school buildings. Oh-- and Academica, the 800-poung gorillas of Florida charter management, employs his sister and brother-in-law as executives. And Academica is also the group that sends its students to Diaz's fake college! So it's all one big happy family down there.

But if you want to see end-stage Death by Charter, travel up to the panhandle of Florida and little Jefferson County, the only Florida county that touches both Georgia and the Gulf of Mexico. The county has fewer than 15,000 residents and 700 school students. And come this fall, they might be the first district in the state to become all-charter.

The district has had problems with test scores, growth scores, and teacher retention. It has consolidated its schools under one K-12 roof to save money. But Grand High Education Poohbah Pam Stewart delivered an ultimatum back in January-- the district had to close its doors or hand the keys to somebody else. The district could not get an outside operator to come run the district, and other turnaround plans were rejected by the state. So the board has now voted to convert to charter, to basically shut down the district and let a charter take over.

“I know change needs to occur for our children and I’m all for that. But here we go again rushing into something and we’re not even sure if we can get a charter company to take our school. And I can’t wait until July for them to tell me I have a job or I don’t have a job," says Jefferson teacher Terri Clark. She says the district has never followed through on what it approves. And she’s not confident it will happen now.

There are many interesting new problems that come with such a decision (stay in the retirement system? keep the old staff?) but the first big challenge is to get a charter operator to come in. Because here's the thing-- charters schools are not public schools and they don't have to serve anyone they don't want to serve. Jefferson is staring straight into the face of the biggest issue with states like Florida that are determined to set their public schools on fire so that people will abandon them and become charter customers--


What do you do if you burn down your public schools, chase all the students out, and then no charter wants them? The worst possible outcome of Death by Charter is not an all charter system. It's not even a bad all-charter system. The worst possible outcome is a whole community with no schools at all.

Jefferson is facing the Big Lie of school choice. The students and their families don't get to choose schools-- the schools get to choose them. Florida's self-serving legislators can make mouth-noises all day about how students deserve super-duper awesome school systems and they can keep chopping their public system off at the knees (and hips and shoulders and neck), but it's up to them to make sure that all their students have what they need-- not just the ones that live in profitable market shares. Florida has spent over a decade setting itself up as the vanguard of choice and charters and all things reformy, and they are well on track to show us how horribly wrong it can all go, how a state could end up with a pile of ashes. And it won't be good For The Children.