Who's The Boss?

When someone tells you who they are, listen to them.

Representative Markwayne Mullin (Rep-OK) told his constituents a great deal this week, when in a town hall meeting he said this:

You say you pay for me to do this. Bullcrap. I pay for myself. I paid enough taxes before I got there and continue to through my company to pay my own salary. This is a service. No one here pays me to go.

And as a follow-up--


I’m just saying this is a service for me, not a career, and I thank God this is not how I make my living.

On the one hand, Mullin's point seems to be that he's not a professional politician and doesn't have to kiss a bunch of Oklahoma ass just to keep his cushy job. On the other hand, exactly who is he working for?*

Mullins has an interesting backstory-- he's one of two Native Americans in Congress (Cherokee Nation), a pentecostal, and a former mixed martial arts fighter. He once hosted a radio talk show about construction and fixing stuff up.

Other parts of his story are garden-variety rich kid fare. He took over his father's plumbing business (actually a conglomerate of several businesses). He railed against the Recovery Act in 2009, but his business accepted $370K in stimulus funds. In 2012, he won a six-way primary, followed by a run-off, to ultimate recapture a former Dem seat for the GOP.

So when he suggests that his Congressional salary is not how he makes his living, or that he's just getting back some of the tax dollars he's paid the feds over the years, he's not entirely wrong (a Representative makes about $174,000 plus benefits and perks). That is probably not enough money to make him think, "Woah-- I work for these people, and I'd better make sure I keep them happy."

Mullins is not an anomaly-- he's just a guy who accidentally said what he really thinks. He's actually representative of two current trends in government.

The first, and less obvious one, is influencing many policies, but none more so that education policies. It's the notion that once money comes into your possession, no matter how, it's your money-- and when you give some of it to the government in the form of taxes, it's still your money. If you can get it to come back to you-- well, that's just recovering what is rightfully yours. And if you can't, you can damn well follow its progress to make sure that it's not spent on things you would never, ever spend it on yourself-- like, say, schools in neighborhoods filled with non-wealthy non-white people. How dare they use my money for their lousy schools-- if they want to spend money on their schools, then they should get some money of their own.

The second is not a new problem, but it is certainly spread throughout this administration. When rich people take a government job for what is, to them, peanuts, then who are they working for?

This is not so much a question of wealth as it is a question of character. We've had plenty of rich folks in public service who were, in fact, interested in serving the public when they could have been home cheering on polo ponies and counting their money. But right now we're dealing with a different situation. Trump is proud that he doesn't need this job, and even though he's been hired as America's Number One Employee, it seems clear that Trump still works primarily for Trump.

Betsy DeVos, like most of the cabinet members, does not need her job for anything, and the actual salary probably wouldn't be missed if someone swiped it from the change bowl at the DeVos home. Does she work for the President? Does she work for the American public? Taxpayers? The interests represented by the USED? Or does she work for what she sees as her own interests? I'm not inclined to think that DeVos will be guilty of great self-serving in the office; I'm more afraid that she sees herself as working for her own personal ideology, or God (as she interprets Him to be).

I don't want to see government filled with people who desperately need their jobs to get by. Federal governance involves a whole lot of money, and that can be a huge temptation if you are person who hasn't had a lot and would really like to have more. There really is something to be said for people who can look at that kind of money and not be distracted.

But we still pay those folks a salary because it remains a tangible reminder that they work for us. I don't support officials forgoing their salaries for exactly this reason-- you guys work for us, and I want you to remember it.

Government is now infested with people who are there to serve interests other than public interests, who are there in many cases to work against the interests represented by their department. Unlike Mullins, most are not honest or foolish enough to say out loud, "You don't pay me to do this. I don't work for you. I'm doing you a favor by taking this stupid job. You should be grateful. You aren't the boss of me."

Who is the boss of them? The financial interests that helped them get the job. Their massive egos. Or they are rich enough to be self-employed. We've been working this puzzle in the area of school reform for several years now-- if we're going to replace public schools with something else, which masters will that something else serve? If the public isn't going to be the boss of education, then who is?

But while we've been focusing on education, the same questions have been working their way into our entire government. And when our elected officials stop working for us and start serving other masters, that's when our very government has been privatized.

Oh-- and Mullin canceled his next town hall, citing "safety concerns."


*Yes, yes, I know. The proper construction is "For whom is he working." It's a Saturday morning, I'm off duty, and I'm going to go with a more colloquial approach. Grammar police warrants can be served in the comments section

IN: Welcome UPSTART Pre-K Cyberschool

You probably thought this was going to be one of those posts where I made fun of some trend in education by extending it to its logical yet absurd extreme. Sadly-- I mean, really sadly-- that is not the case.

"Seriously, dude. What the hell."

Meet UPSTART, a company that... well, let me just quote from their home page:

UPSTART is an in-home, technology-delivered kindergarten readiness program that gives preschool-aged children individualized reading, math and science instruction with a focus on reading.

How does it work? Participants get a free computer and free internet, in return for which they to spend fifteen minutes a day, five days a week. The program is Personalized Learning for Tiny Humans:

UPSTART is designed for very young children. It uses large buttons, obvious directions, and support that helps children progress. Each child moves through a personalized learning path that is designed to meet his or her skills and needs. The software assesses the child's progress at key milestones to determine what type of instruction each child will receive.

The family receives some training, and a personal care representative is standing by if they need help. Teachers are, of course, unnecessary.

UPSTART has been up and running for a while in Utah. I actually wrote about them back then, and has this explanation for why they were getting the legislative boost:

Why has Utah decided to launch this brave new world in which fifteen minutes of computer-and-mouse-time (because if there's anything three- and four-year-olds are great at, it's operating a computer mouse)? Well, Utah is one of ten states that doesn't fund pre-school, and it is at the bottom of the barrel for per-student funding in K-12. So you could explain the appeal of this idea as the sponsor of the bill, State Senator Howard A. Stephenson,  does:

“We want to reach the greatest number of children with the resources that we have,” Stephenson said. “I don’t think we’re being cheap at all. We’re being smart.”

Or you might go with this theory:

“It’s wishful thinking by state legislatures,” said Steven Barnett, the director of the National ­Institute for Early Education ­Research at Rutgers University. “We want preschool, we want to get these great results, but we don’t actually want to spend the money.”

Yeah, why provide expensive high-quality preschool when you can just sign everyone up for some software?



Here's a promotional video for the program. My favorite parts? Watching a small child try to use a touch pad on a laptop, and the part where we're assured that UPSTART will provide "program sponsors" with data. Because, you know, it's never too early to start building your tiny human's data file, so that the trouble she had picking out vowel sounds when she was four flippin' years old can follow her around for the rest of her life.

In Indiana, the legislature wants to make UPSTART part of the Pre-K expansion bill.

Senator Luke Kenley, R-Noblesville, likes it because cyberschooling promotes family togetherness, and that's what many Kids These Days are missing. He said, "This really engages the whole family. I just believe it’s a much more wholesome approach that will have a better lasting effect.” The costs is about $1,400 per pupil (all those freebies mentioned above do cost somebody-- the taxpayers)-- which is a big chunk of money for some learning software. Waterford boast a total 450 hours of lessons, but of course if the learning is personalized, no child will be getting all 450 of those hours, right?. Kenley is the head of the appropriations committee, and a fan of programs like outcomes based funding.

Meanwhile, teachers have spoken out against the proposal:

“Kids need to be together in order to socialize. We need to learn how to raise our hand. We need to learn how to respect other people’s space and time and you can’t do that in front of a computer," American Federation of Teachers Executive Director Sally Sloan said.

Pre-K can be done in so many beneficial ways, but none of those ways are focused on academic achievement.What four year olds need to do is play, play slightly organized games, play unorganized games, play by themselves, play with others, and also play. If they feel inclined to explore reading or math or science or art or whatever, that should be encouraged. But enforced or required. No, no, no, and also no.

Supporters will say, "Lighten up-- we're only talking about fifteen minutes a day, five days a week." And I agree that beats some Pre-K classroom where students are expected to sit and study academic subjects for hours, just as being hit in the face with a hammer is better than being assaulted in the chest with a jackhammer.

But UPSTART also gives tiny humans an early close connection with a screen, introduces them to the idea of learning as a chore that must be done to someone else's satisfaction, and gets the whole family acclimated to being data mined. It's a sweetheart deal of the Utah-based Waterford company which makes out well whenever it can get legislators to purchase its product in bulk. Is this good use of Indiana taxpayer dollars? I doubt it. If I were an Indiana voter and taxpayer, I think I'd seriously question the aims of any Pre-K program, and I think I'd want my tiny humans to be interacting with real live humans, not software.

College-Ready Sixth Graders

Mike Petrilli, Big Cheese at the Fordham Institute, a reliably reformy thinky tank, is concerned. While he allows that some students and families are uber-stressing about the whole college thing, the rest of us should be in a greater state of panic:

We need the majority of parents and kids to be more stressed out. We need to shake them out of their complacency and tell them: You and your kids are heading toward a coming-of-age catastrophe, but you can avoid it if you act now! [emphasis his]

The source of all this chicken littling is NAEP scores, from which Petrilli and others draw the factoid that only one third of US teens graduate from high school ready for college. Another third, says Petrilli, go to college anyway and either get caught in a web of remedial courses or just drop out.

This is a long-standing reformy talking point, a variation on Betsy DeVos's Public Schools Are a Dead End That Couldn't Get Any Worse refrain. It's a long-time favorite of reformsters because if, for instance, public schools were doing just fine, then it would be a lot harder to sell charters and choice and other profitable reformy products. Sometimes this talking point is packaged as the Honesty Gap and sometimes it's just Arne Duncan saying white suburban moms don't want to know the awful truth. The basic idea is that American public school students are failing disastrously and the big lying liars who run schools won't tell them the awful truth.

Petrilli and others who think the NAEP reveals an Awful Truth might consider some of the NAEP debunking that has been done, in particular the 2007 study that showed that a full half of students rated "basic" by NAEP went on to graduate from college with a degree.

Petrilli has faith in the predictive power of many standardized tests. His faith is misplaced, and missing some sort of data to back it up. In fact, he cites the VAAS system sold by the folks at SAS as something that can predict a sixth-graders ultimate ACT scores. Here in Pennsylvania we've been laboring beneath PVAAS scores for years, and I'm prepared to say that they don't predict squat when it comes to individual students-- and it doesn't really pretend to. So I'm not sure what Petrilli wants us to do here-- warn a group of students as a whole that, as a whole, they are going to get low ACT scores? Except for the individuals who don't?

Petrilli also has faith in the NWEA MAP test, a test that I've been crunching data from for two years and, again, I'm here to tell you that the MAP test is useless as a means of informing instruction or delivering useful insights about individual students. Okay-- not completely true. The MAP test helps me pinpoint pretty precisely exactly which of my students are absolutely sick of taking standardized multiple choice tests.

But Petrilli's premise-- that we right now today have the technical testing ability to sit a middle school student down and tell her that she is or is not on the path to college-- his premise is simply false.

I can back that up with numerous arguments, but let me settle for this one-- if his premise were true, it would be the easiest thing in the world to track and generate data to prove. We'd be looking at studies that showed that 90% of all students who scored "basic" on the NAEP or MAP or Whatever Big Standardized Test You Prefer-- 90% of those students either failed to be accepted into college or flunked out. We'd be looking at data-- any data at all-- that drew a line between BS Test results and learning or knowledge. Not that we don't have data-- we do. The data says that students from higher socio-economic backgrounds do better on tests, get to go to college, and end up in good jobs. The data says that students who having a great BS Test score does not erase the challenge of a low socio-economic background.

But Petrilli and his tank-bros think that middle school parents need to be warned, so they took the admirable step of setting up a pilot program to try getting through to parents:

They could enter their child’s test scores into a website; it would spit out an ACT projection and list the types of colleges their kid might be able to get into. For many children, the news would be disconcerting, as it would predict remedial education in the offing. This might catch parents’ attention and spur them to action. 

We at Fordham decided to give it a try, so a few weeks ago our partner, the Gigawatt Group, held focus groups in Columbus to test it out on middle-school parents. It was not encouraging. Unsurprisingly, parents hate state standardized tests, but what they hate even more is the notion that test scores could tell them whether their children are on track for college—especially when their kids are still so young.

First-- projecting an ACT score is not a valuable predictor of college success or attendance. GPA, the kinds of courses they pursued, letters of recommendation, essays, a history that shows what kind of human value the student can add to the college-- these are the things that make the difference. No college ever rejected an awesome applicant solely on low scores, and no college ever accepted a terrible applicant simply because he had a high score (unless, I suppose, that score was stapled to a $2.5 million check).

Second-- the parents are right. The BS Tests are junk, and measuring "college readiness" is a fool's game. Ready for which college? Ready to major in what field?

Petrilli is concerned that parents mostly just listen to the schools and their kids' report cards, which show As and Bs because all students in America get As and Bs (this will come as news to the students in my classroom). He thinks that schools should sit down with families once a year and have a check-in check-up, including grades and state test results and other vendor products (like that MAP test).

And he asks, reasonably, if schools are doing anything like this, which is the question I set out to answer in this post, but, you know, context.

Petrilli is not wrong to wonder about the usefulness of a reality check. Every teacher, particularly those of us in the high school end, can tell stories of the student who had trouble learning how to write a complete sentence or remember time tables or come to school more than two days in a row, and yet was certain she had a future as a brain surgeon or corporate CEO. You certainly worry. And when we're talking about a reality check for middle schoolers-- well, that's rather an adventure already, isn't it. They know a lot about their future, including the true love that they'll be with for ever and ever.

We talk to students about their future all the time. Everything from formal career studies to informal class discussions. What do they want to do? What do they think they'd be good at? And it's an extra challenge in a small town/rural area like mine where students are not naturally exposed to a huge range of possible career paths. We talk about the kind of preparation they'll need for the particular path they think they might choose, based on the strengths and weaknesses they have to offer. We talk about the kind of expectations they have for college or trade school, and the kind of expectations those places have for them. We maintain a network of former students and real-world contacts so that we can connect students with people who do the job they think they want. We talk (a lot) about what to do if they aren't sure where they want their life to head. Not that all teachers can talk to all students-- I can't offer much to the student who wants to become a carpenter or an accountant, but there are people in the building who can.

Standardized tests are of no help in any of this. None. For my students, the PA Keystone test (our BS Tests) are a pointless hurdle they have to jump on their way to things that actually matter. The SATs are another obstacle. The MAPs-- well, they have no idea why we're bothering with those. But they don't see any of these tests as the tea leaves in which their future can be read, and neither do I. Their success in college will depend on skills and knowledge appropriate to the field they want to study, but it will also depend on their self-discipline, their drive, and the support system they have backing them up. None of these things-- including the skills and knowledge-- are measured by the BS Tests.

On Twitter I told Petrilli that the answer to his question about whether or not schools do this stuff was "yes and no." Do we talk with our students about their future and where they're going and how to become their best selves and how to stock up as many tools as they can for that future? Sure we do. All the time. Are standardized tests a useful tool in these conversations? No, they aren't.

Nor I do think we can stand next to a sixth grader and look down the long and twisty road ahead of them and say with certainty, "Let me tell you where your road lead, unless you change it." Yes, some outcomes are more likely than others, but hey-- we live in a country where either a black man or a charmless sociopath can become President. Every individual is a complex matrix of characteristics they've been handed, others they've built themselves, and some undefinable fire that may someday drive them in directions we haven't even heard of yet.

Petrilli says he doesn't want these check-ins to be catalogs of intractable doom, a list of characteristics that forge an unalterable deterministic future. More like "Here's where you are, and the road to some of the places yo might want to go leads off in that direction." In that respect, I can assure him that teachers and schools do that a few million times a day.

But he also seems to like the idea of a website where we plug in some test scores and the computer spits out a map to the future. That's not going to happen-- at least not as long as the school system is built around humans teaching other humans, and not a widget factory.

New Merit Pay Study Hits The Wrong Target

We're all going to be hearing about a piece of research, a working paper that suggests that teacher merit pay works. Sort of. Depending on what you mean by "works."

Matthew G. Springer, an assistant professor of public policy and education at Vanderbilt University, has produced a meta-analysis (that's research of the research) entitled "Teacher Merit Pay and Student Test Scores: A Meta-Analysis" in which he concludes that merit pay is connected to increased student test scores. Springer is also the director of the National Center on Performance Incentives,"a national research and development center for state and local policy" housed by Vanderbilt (he's actually had that job longer than his professor position).

During the past several decades, policymakers have grown increasingly interested in innovative compensation plans, including performance-based pay for K-12 educators. Yet, efforts to reform pay have lacked grounding in a scholarly base of knowledge regarding the effectiveness of such plans.

So I'm not sure whether the center's mission is "see if this stuff works" so much as it is "prove this stuff works," which is a somewhat less objective mission. And Springer does some worjk outside of Vanderbilt as well, like his post on the advisory board of Texas Aspires, where he sits with Rick Hess (AEI), Mike Petrilli (Fordham), Erik Haushek (Hoover Institute), Chris Barbic (Reformster-at-Large, now apparently with Arnold Foundation)and other reformy types.

Springer certainly has some ideas about teacher pay:

"The bottom line is the single-salary pay schedule does not allow systems to reward the highest performing teachers," Springer said. "These teachers deserve a six-figure salary, but we'll never get there with a single-salary schedule that would require all teachers of equal experience and degree attainment to get paid the same amount. It's just impossible."

The EdWeek quote would suggest that Springer and I do not agree on what a "high-performing teacher" looks like. Here's the quote from EdWeek that suggests to me that Springer doesn't entirely understand what he's studying:

The findings suggest that merit pay is having a pretty significant impact on student learning.

Only if you believe that Big Standardized Tests actually measure student learning-- a finding that remains unfound, an assumption that remains unproven, and an assertion that remains unsupported. My faith in their understanding of the real nature of BS Tests is further damaged by their reference to "weeks of earning." Researchers' fondness for describing learning in units of years, weeks, or days is great example of how far removed this stuff is from the actual experience of actual live humans in actual classrooms, where learning is not a featureless tofu-like slab from which we slice an equal, qualitatively-identical serving every day. In short, measuring "learning" in days, weeks, or months is absurd. As absurd as applying the same measure to researchers and claiming, for instance, that I can see that Springer's paper represents three more weeks of research than less-accomplished research papers.

Springer et al note some things they don't know in the "for further study" part of the paper.

EdWeek missed one of the big implications in the conclusion:

Teacher recruitment and retention, however, is another theoretically supported pathway through which merit pay can affect student test scores. Our qualitative review of the emerging literature on this pathway suggests that the positive effect reported in our primary studies may partly be the result of lower levels of teacher turnover. 

In other words, burning and churning doesn't help with your test scores. You know what doesn't encourage teachers to stay? Tying their pay (and job security) to the results of bad tests the results of which are more clearly tied to student background than teacher efforts. You know what else encourages teachers to stay? The knowledge that they are looking at a pay structure that at least helps them keep pace with the increases in cost of living, and not a pay structure that will swing about wildly from year to year depending on which students they end up teaching.

Springer also acknowledges a caveat parenthetically which really deserves to be in the headline:

our evidence supports the notion that opportunities to earn pay incentives can lead to improved test scores, perhaps through some increased teacher effort (or, nefariously, gaming of the performance measure system).

Yes, that nefarious gaming of the system, which in fact the remains the best and often only truly effective method of raising BS Test scores. This is a huge caveat, a giant caveat, the equivalent of saying "Our research has proven that this really works-- or that if you offer people money, some will cheat in order to get it." This research might prove something kind of interesting, or it might prove absolutely nothing at all. That deserves more than a parenthetical comment or two.

Springer's research suffers from the same giant, gaping ridiculous hole as the research that he meta-analyzed-- he assumes that his central measure measures what it claims to measure. This is like meta-analysis of a bunch of research from eight-year-olds who all used home made rulers to measure their own feet and "found" that their feet are twice as big as the feet of eight-year-olds in other country. If you don't ever check their home-made rulers for accuracy, you are wasting everyone's time.

At a minimum, this study shows that the toxic testing that is already narrowing and damaging education in this country can be given a extra jolt of destructive power when backed with money. The best this study can hope to say is that incentives encourage teachers to aim more carefully for the wrong target. As one of the EdWeek commenters put it, "Why on earth would you want to reward teachers with cash for getting higher test scores?" What Springer may have proven is not that merit pay works, but that Campbell's Law does.

[Update: Be sure to read the comments for Jersey Jazzman's explanation of just how little the numbers in this study tell us.]

PA: Charter Reform Sort of Revisited

Pennsylvania charter law is rather a mess. In April of 2016,  State Auditor General Eugene DePasquale issued a blistering report, dubbing PA charter law the "worst in the nation." There have been occasional legislative attempts to address the issue, but these bills have often confused "reform" with "give charters more freedom and opportunities to suck up public tax dollars."

Harrisburg has a history of using charter reform as a fig leaf to cover up charter giveaways. Early egregious attempts included a bill that would have taken a swipe at cyberschool funding but also would have made all sorts of folks authorizers of charter schools, making it infinitely easier to launch one in PA. There was an attempt to fix things, sort of,  back in 2015-2016 with proposed HB 530, a bill that public school organizations like the school board association declared a non-starter because it loosened accountability on charters, allowed the state charter appeal board to overrule local districts, and didn't address the out-of-control costs of charters in Pennsylvania. The reasons to oppose the bill were many. The bill passed both the house and senate, but was ultimately a victim of the Great Budget Snafu of 2016 and was last seen disappearing into the rules committee in June of 2016.

Now it's back.

Representative Mike Reese has revamped HB 530 into HB 97. Reese represents District 59 and has an actual BS in Education, though he went on for an MBA.

Here's his version of what HB 97 does. Highlights include:

* Allow an adjustmet in PA's ridiculous cyber-school payment system-- but only for two years.

* Set up a commission to study charter school funding.

* Limit charter school's excess fund balances (money that's just parked in the bank).

* Develop a performance matrix for "monitoring and improving academic quality"

* Charter teacher evaluation systems that "mirror" the public system.

* Create system to allow charter consolidation. The system would (this gets italics) leave initial and renewal approval authority in hands of local school districts.

* Make "more balanced" membership of charter appeal board.

* Give charters first dibs on any unused public school buildings.

And my personal favorite--

* Allow families with multiple cyber-school children to turn down multiple computers, printers and monitors. Because there have been plenty of cyber families complaining about being forced to accept multiple free computers.

So, is this actual improvement or reform?

If we dig into the actual bill (75 pages, so you're welcome), what do we find.

Some items are relatively minor. One item allows charters to put students in dual enrollment arrangements with colleges or universities. But then there are other parts.

The Charter School Funding Advisory Commission is supposed to "examine how charter school entity finances affect opportunities for teachers, parents, pupils and community members to establish and maintain schools that operate independently from existing school district structures" and while I appreciate that this does away with the whole "charters are public schools" baloney, it does skip past the questions of how, why or if charter schools should be pursued at all. The membership of the committee will be four representatives (two from each party, four senators (two from each party), the secretary of education, a wild card chosen by the governor, a business manager from a charter school, a business manager from a cyber charter, a business manager from a rural district, and a business manager from an urban school district. So no actual educators.

The committee is given the tasks of 1) meeting with charter representatives, school district personnel, and other public ed reps, 2) review charter finance laws across the nation, and 3) assess the actual cost of cyber-schooling students.

The committee is to make recommendations about an independent state-level authorization board, because charter folks hate that in most of PA, charters must be authorized by local school districts, which means charter operators must get the district declared FUBAR by the state, or get pro-charter people on board, or find a board that wants to slit its own throat by opening charters. The committee is also supposed to make recommendations about funding, and also, somehow how to use the matrix that we're going to get to for comparing schools. Plus other financial odds and ends.

They are to crank out their report in twelve months.

Entity. The bill widely replaces "charter school" with "charter school entity." Presumably that opens the door for any kind of education-flavored business and releases said business from any requiremet to look like a proper school.

Religious Loophole. Under the bill, it would not be a violation of the non-sectarian  requirement if the charter provides a "discrete and separate entrance" to the school part of an otherwise religious structure-- in other words, if your charter school is in a church, but students can enter through a back door and not the sanctuary. Also, "if the religious objects and symbols within the portion of the facility utilized by the school are covered or removed to the extent reasonably feasible" (emphasis mine) then you are good to go.

Ethics. Charter school officials will have to file a statement of financial interest with the State Ethics Commission.There are all sorts of new paragraphs forbidding various relationships to try to rue out self-dealing. And there are many new rules about who can be a charter trustee. Also, if you're convicted of a felony, fraud, theft, or some sort of moral turpitude, you'll be fired from your administrator job or charter board position. Because somehow we've arrived at a place where that has to be spelled out.

Sunshine. Well, this is interesting. The law would require charter's to have at least five nonrelated voting members, and at least one of them should have a child attending the school (unless it's a charter mainly serving adjudicated youth). And that board must comply with the same sunshine act that applies to public school boards.

Further down in the bill we find the stipulation that all charter records must be open to the local school board, and that charters must comply with FERPA. The charter should also form an independent audit committee, which must perform a thorough audit that includes enrollment and accounting for all money that passes in or out. The school's budget and various federal forms should be available "upon request."

Standard Application. Remember how charters don't like having to go to local school boards to get authorization to get their chartery selves allowed? Here's a bit of a solution-- the stae will create a one-size-fits-all application form, so that everyone has to use the same process. The good news here is that the list of what must be on the application is significantly increased by HB 97, including information about who's in charge, the CMO's track record, a clear description of responsibilities and who has them, and a draft contract laying out how the charter's success (or lack thereof) will be judged. Bad news for mom and pop charters.

How long can a charter flounder? The state would now give you five full years to get your act together. More than enough to completely waste half of a child's educational career. Both new and renewal charters would be for five-year spans. If they do well, they can be renewed for ten years. And if the school has not satisfied the academic quality benchmark-- yeah, still can get a five year renewal.

Balancing the charter appeal board. This is the group that can certify or override the decision of the local district. HB 97 would like to "balance" this group by adding more charter people, including switching the parent seat to a parent of a charter student seat. The resulting board would be far more charter-friendly. This would be the group that could tell taxpayers in your district that they are going to help support a charter school even though they and their duly-elected school board rejected it.

Building (Expansion). Most of this section is as promised-- charters get first grab of buildings that public schools can't fill. However, buried in this section is the addition that any charter that doesn't have a student enrollment cap "is permitted to operate its school at more than one location." Get a charter with no cap, and you can expand at will.

This would be a good time to remind you that under PA law, a charter can't be capped unless it agrees to be capped. 

Booze. This is one of those pieces of law where you just know there's a story that goes with it. Anyway, if a charter is caught serving or selling alcohol, it can be fined $1,000 the first time and $5,000 every time after.

Applications. There will be a standard form. Students will be assigned position on waiting list randomly. There's repeated addition of "regional charter school" to this section, as well as a rule tat students within the charter cachment area must get priority.

Pre-K Exemption. If your district doesn't offer Pre-K for four-year-olds, it doesn't have to make payments to a charter that does.

Cyber Reimbursement. The bill adds a bunch of new calculated exemptions to how a district computes the cost of sending a child to cyber-school. What it doesn't do is factor in any sort of numbers related to the actual cost of running a cyber school. Nor does it address the question of why Pennsylvania continues to fund these dens of cyber failure at all, when they have proven to be largely scams and wastes of time and money.

Evaluating educators. HB 97 has a brand spanking new section that says charter teachers must be evaluated using some of the same crappy test-based measures used in public schools. So, welcome to VAM, charter teachers. Is it progress to have charters suffer under the same bad and ineffective measures that hit public schools? I'm not really sure, but there it is in the bill-- you must use test scores and three other things of some sort.

Mergers and Acquisitions. Oh, there are many new rules for how charters may grow. Some of this comes down to some pretty fine tuning-- the bill's authors heard the objections to just letting charters merge and expand willy nilly, so they added the qualifier that the merger or expansion must be renewed/authorized by a local school board-- but the local school board that approved original charter, meaning that one charter-friendly school board could potentially okay a charter expansion into neighboring districts. And there is a whole bunch of information about how a charter can appeal the decision of the local board.

Unassigned fund balance. Charters can only bank 12% to 16% of their total budget, depending on how large that budget is. PA public schools have had rules against UFB for years now, and they easily dodge them by giving the funds they've parked in a bank some sort of designation, as in "That's not an unassigned ten million dollars sitting there-- that's a capital improvement fund waiting patiently for a project we haven't even thought of yet." Charters should have no problem making similar adaptations-- or they could just use the fund balance to pay their people a ton of money.

The Performance Matrix. Here's the part where the legislature, after giving the local school board all sorts of control and voice in these matters, takes it all away. The state will lay out exactly how the charter schools must be evaluated and on what. The On What will include (but not be limited to) student test scores, VAM scores, attendance, attrition rates, graduation rates, school safety, "other" standardized test scores (?!), parent satisfaction, accreditation, plus other stuff, like measures of teacher effectiveness (aka test scores yet again). The performance matrix will also include some sort of academic quality benchmark.

Whatever the state comes up with, nobody is allowed to use anything else. In other words, a charter may not be at all acceptable to the local taxpayers or school board, but if the state paperwork looks good, then that's tough noogies for local taxpayers. The local board must use the performance matrix as its "primary factor" in deciding the fate of the school. Which means that all the power the law puts into local school boards is actually no power at all-- charters will live or die at the pleasure of the state.

How will this matrix be developed? The state department of ed will convene a statewide advisory committee that will include a minimum of seven representatives from charter schools, regional charters, cyber charters, department folks, and school district personnel.

Bottom line:

No doubt more legally adept minds than mine will be looking at this bill that just popped up and is expected to zip trough legislature soon (the fast track is always a sign of super great lawmaking). But here's what I see.

On the one hand, some much-needed accountability and transparency rules for charter schools in Pennsylvania.

On the other hand, the bill falls far short in stopping cyber charters from sucking the money out of public schools and providing no real benefits or service in return.

On the other other hand, the bill wants to look like its resting control of charter decisions with local school districts while actually undercutting all of it by setting the rules in Harrisburg, and making sure that charters have a big say in how those rules are set, which is fine if you think that cigarette companies should help set smoking rules.

This is not a win for public schools, and not a real step forward in charter accountability. Let's hope this bill fails and a better one appears some day.

Corporations versus Human Persons

The story of United Airlines and the Shameful Assault on a Paying Customer has been more thoroughly covered than almost anything this week (congrats, Beloved Leader Trump, on a widespread distraction from your latest screwup). We've had lessons from the airlines in free market delights before, but this is an even more direct and clear example of why the corporate approach is a bad idea for public education.

And that is how you run a No Excuses airline

Note that the United screwup is even worse than is generally reported. Though folks have blamed this on an overbooking of the flight, but actually, the airline wanted to bump four paying customers so that they could fly four of their own employees to Louisville.

This means they absolutely had the option of saying, "We need these employees in Louisville? Well, the seats on the plane are already filled with paying customers, so obviously we'll have to solve this internal transportation problem some other way." But no. They had a clear choice to make between the interests of the company and the care of the customers, and they picked the company. Well, not exactly "picked," because there was no decision so much as an auto-default to choosing in the corporate concerns, a default so strong and obvious to them, that they clearly didn't even reflect on how this should look.

And why should they? Sure, it would be shabby treatment for four customers, but the airlines barely bump one customer out of a thousand, and when you're operating at large scale, the smooth wheels of corporate operation can afford to grind up a tiny number of customers. And the selection process carefully selects those customers for lousy treatment who are the least valuable customers to the company.

That's just part of a larger picture. Airlines have also been quietly deserting many cities and providing fewer choices, because the corporate goal, of course, is not to serve everybody, but to serve the people who are worth serving, the people who fit your business model, the people who can bring you the kind of return you want on your investment. As New York Magazine notes:

For decades, airlines have been cancelling low-volume routes, reducing service quality, raising prices, merging to achieve economies of scale, declaring bankruptcy, and sucking up billions in public subsidies, and the industry still teeters on the brink of insolvency.

The bloodied face of the passenger-- well, former passenger-- is the corporate mindset written in its hugest, starkest form. Customers are there to meet the needs of the corporation, not vice versa. At Deadspin, Albert Berneko argues for the human over the corporate. He quotes the tweeted response of two United staffers-- the man wouldn't deplane. What else were they supposed to do? The answer, of course, is almost anything except summon police to drag him off the plane:

Like any other corporation, its precise reason for existing is to interpose cold, absolute machine reasoning in between the humans who created it and the humans whose money and/or labor the former want; if it had humane or conciliatory answers—ones responsive to or even cognizant of any prerogative short of maximizing its own moneymaking efficiency—to questions like “What should United Airlines do when it f**** up?” it would be a malfunctioning corporation.

If you don't yet see the parallels between the airline industry and the burgeoning charter school industry, here's another excerpt from Eric Levitz's NY Mag piece:

But thanks in no small part to lax antitrust enforcement by President Reagan and his successors, deregulation ultimately turned a public quasi-monopoly into a private one. Or, as Phillip Longman and Lina Khan put it in a 2012 essay for Washington Monthly, Carter’s reforms shifted “control of the airline industry from experts answerable to the public to corporate boardrooms and Wall Street.” [my emphasis]


Now, I don't accept for a second that our public school system is a monopoly, and the trajectory from public good to private corporate interest is different, but the end result is the same-- a corporate concern that must put corporate interests ahead of individual human interests.

Airlines desert unprofitable cities. Charter schools ignore unprofitable communities. Airlines push out customers who get in their way. Charter schools do the same. And neither feel a mandate to make sure that every citizen is well-served. Both ultimately are more concerned about keeping the corporate machine running smoothly than about what must be done to the cogs and wheels to keep that smoothness gliding on without interruption.

Also important to note-- the rise of airline "unregulated competition" has resulted in a business that is dominated by four (very mutually supportive) companies. The Free Market does not like competition, and it never has. It likes sorting out winners and losers, and it likes giving winners the kind of market control that Free Market acolytes abhor in governments.

Is it possible that corporations can avoid being soulless and human-hostile? Sure, it's possible. But a corporation must by its very nature put its own financial success and corporate control high on the list of priorities. Is it possible that a government-run institution can become stiff and dry and soul-crushing in its own special way? Sure. But public schools are built around a simple goal, a promise to every single student in the country, and to every citizen of the country itself, to do right by every single student. But as Derek Thompson wrote in the Atlantic:

Companies in concentrated industries, like the airlines, have legal cover to break the most basic promise to consumers without legally breaking their contracts.

Corporate privatization has in its very dna the strands that lead us to some poor, bloodied man being carried off a plane on a stretcher. Privatizing schools leads us toward that path, demanding compliance and dealing only with those whom it deems worthy of being allowed to serve the corporation. There are places for the corporate approach in our society, but the schoolhouse is not one of them.

Trump Education Sad Argle Bargle

So, Donald Trump held a town hall, if your idea of a town is a place where only CEOs live. It included some Presidential word chunks on the subject of education, and happened all the way back on last Tuesday and yet somehow I missed it (almost as if I'm not actually a CEO) but Valerie Strauss was right on top of things for the Washington Post.

As one might expect, the entire conversation was a fact-free zone. It included some fact-free questioning from Catherine Engelbert, the head honcho at Deloitte, a consulting/accounting company you're probably not important enough to know about. But to be clear, this is a consulting firm that does not actually do anything, but describes itself with language like this:

Clients count on Deloitte to help them transform uncertainty into possibility and rapid change into lasting progress. Our people know how to anticipate, collaborate, and innovate, and create opportunity from even the unforeseen obstacle.

Englebert walked straight out of Lehigh University with her BS in Accounting and into a partnership at the multinational company. So when she talks about the “disconnect between what employers need and what are our students coming into the workforce are prepared to deliver,” you know that she backs that up with all the first-hand knowledge of a multinational bean counting consultant. Englebert throws in some statistics-- NYC schools graduate 70%, and only 37% are assessed as college and career ready. The first number may have some basis in reality, but the second has none. That's okay-- it fits in with the Trump narrative that public schools are a festering black pit of carnage and fail. His response--

Why are the numbers so horrific in terms of education and what happens when somebody goes through school and then they can’t read?

Well, sometimes they become famous and get tv shows and even become President. Even Englebert didn't allege that we are graduating a bunch of illiterate folks, and she tries to add that NYC has done some great things and couldn't we throw some more money at public-private partnerships, but Trump plays her off and notes that public education in cities is "rough," because all cities are hell-holes of despair and non-whiteness.

Other highlights from our Commander in Chief?

Charter schools are another thing people are talking about, a lot, and some of the charter schools in New York have been amazing. They’ve done incredibly well. People can’t get in, you can’t get in. It’s been, I don’t call it an experiment any more. It’s far beyond an experiment. If you look at so many elements of education and it is so sad to see what is coming, what’s happening in the country. … The cities. It’s a very rough situation.

Yes, people are talking about charters, just like they've been buzzing about that Frederick Douglass fella. I will agree that charters are no longer merely experimental-- we've established pretty clearly that under most of the operating circumstances in this country, they are failing to produce any kind of real success.

But education? Sad. Many elements are sad. I would be impressed if Trump could name a single element of education, but not holding my breath.

Also, he's going to do something about Common Core. Or he's already doing it. That part is unclear, although given the current laws on education, I think it's safe to say that he is doing everything he can about Common Core, which is nothing. He seems to think that Common Core is about school districts being controlled from DC, where there are bureaucrats, he says, who may be very nice but are making lots of money and don't give a hoot about your local community. It is unclear whether he is describing how things used to be or how they are currently operating under Trump; one more indication that he still thinks he's a candidate and that government's problems are not actually his responsibility. It is also unclear whether he knows that he has stacked his education department with a heaping helping of Jeb Bush-issue, Common Core lovers.

Betsy DeVos is doing a "terrific" job and has one of the "toughest jobs of any of our secretaries," which would explain why taxpayers are paying millions of dollars for DeVos body guards. She's also got a "tremendous track record," a statement for which I have supplied the subject and the verb because Trump begins just dropping out nouns with superlatives stapled to them, rather than actual sentences, but anyway-- doing what? As USED Secretary? Previously? I mean, we've all been looking over her track record pretty closely and I'm not sure where the word "tremendous" applies, though she does have tremendous amount of money, so maybe that's it.

Oh, and in other tremendous news, Trump reports that Ivanka and some other administration officials are "totally in love" with education issues and what the hell does that even mean? What does it mean to be in love with an issue? "Oh, I just feel so warm and fuzzy when I think about income inequality, but when I look at systemic racism, I want to take it home and cuddle it all night long." It's almost as if he sees issues not as problems to be solved that affect the real lives of real people, but as a sort reality show challenge, a game that gives you the opportunity to show how awesome you are. "Oh, yeah-- I am in love with the rope climb because I always have the fastest time."

As an education commenting guy, I have read many, many, many extrusions of education argle bargle. Arne Duncan could spout sentence-ish gibberish like nobody's business. But Trump, who has only a couple of main education themes to hit -- schools are awful, charters are wonderful, and Common Core, whatever it is, must go, somehow-- can fracture partially-formed empty sentence husks with a special kind of flair and wild carelessness, like a driver who pushes a car past the edge of a cliff because the law of gravity won't be enforced for him.

Trump also says "I think we are going to have a great four years," and I'm not sure what great is supposed to mean, but I am pretty sure that "we" does not include those of us working in public education.