DeVos: Boldly Trampling Public Education

Today Secretary of Privatization Education Betsy DeVos delivered some remarks at the annual  Arizona State University + Global Silicon Valley Summit in Salt Lake City, Utah. It's a fun gathering of technocrats with all sorts of profitable forward-thinking solutions to education's challenges (as they put it, a can't miss ,if you're an educator, innovator or an investor.) Whatever else we can say about DeVos, despite the occasional moments when she pretends to sort of support public education, she stays pretty consistently on message. Let's take a look at how she slammed public schools what she had to say today.

She opened with a clear statement of her idea of government's role by pointing out that really, she should be listening to the captains of technocracy gathered there, and she wants them to know her door is always open to them (any similar invitations ever offered to public school teachers?). But since she's at the mike, she has a few thoughts.

Washington has been in the drivers' seat for over fifty years with very little to show for its efforts.

And then she lays out three parts of the problem that we must acknowledge.

1) The system is based on the Prussian model implemented in the early 1800s.

I'm not one to rush to unqualified defense of the system, but I can't help noticing that computers are based on a numbering system from around the 6th or 7th century. For that matter, we have a government based on a model implemented in the late 1700s. Granted, DeVos's boss thinks that model is terrible, but "based on an old model" is only a useful criticism if you are heavily invested in selling a new system.

2. The system assigns your child to a school based solely upon the street on which you live.

Let's say instead that the system promises you a school in your community. Let's say the system promises that you won't have to send your child far from home just to get a decent education.

3. Our students have fallen behind our peers on the global stage

Sigh. PISA scores. She is not going to mention that we have always done poorly. She is not going to mention that nobody has ever shown any connection between a nation's PISA scores and anything at all. She will, of course, mention that we have spent oodles of money on public ed (money that could have ben showered upon you fine entrepreneurs).

DeVos reaches her conclusion:

The facts show our system is antiquated, unjust, and fails to serve students.

Well, no. No they don't. At least not "facts" as we used to understand them, but then, that word is based on an antiquated language and entered English was back in the 16th century, so it's long overdue for modernization. But then, the notion that US public education sucks is not DeVos's conclusion, but her premise.

Next she'll try what is shaping up to be one of her favorite rhetorical devices-- comparing public education to something it doesn't really compare to. See we've spent tons of money on ed reform, and yet while Blockbuster was being clobbered by Netflix, while phones became pocket computers, and yes-- while taxis were replaced by Ubers, public education has not been wiped out by someone with a better business plan.

This is a curious stance for a woman  who has been married for four decades and a devoted follower of Jesus her entire life. Why has she not disrupted her marriage with a better, more modern spouse? And why is she still worshipping in a church established centuries ago, set up to honor and worship a God who is (at least) around for two millennia? Is it really hard for a conservative to grasp the concept that some institutions represent some values, commitments and structures that are worth preserving?

But no--

We can no longer accept this education malaise. The time for simply tinkering around the edges is over.

We already have failed a generation or more of kids, and every year we're failing another graduating class.

Great horny toads, woman! I am not going to claim that we are an awesome tower of pedagogical perfection, but "failed a generation"??!! Exactly what evidence can we see of that? Because I thought we failed them way more when we, say, allowed a bunch of corporate greedheads to tank the economy a decade ago.

But it is already, just five months into 2017, easy to predict the beats of a DeVos speech. How do we fix all this? Well, the solutions above were the product of bold entrepreneurs who acted like jerks, abused customers and workers, and drove their business into the ground who did awesome tech things. So go ahead tech guys, invent the edu-uber!

What does she think is the solution? Parents must have choice. The system must be focused on students and not institutions (because institutions insist on representing the issues of a larger society).

Think of it like your cell phone. AT&T, Verizon or T-Mobile may all have great networks, but if you can't get cell phone service in your living room, then your particular provider is failing you, and you should have the option to find a network that does work.

Because is just a commodity or a service. Of course, lots of folks live in a place where they have none of those networks as a choice because businesses only serve the customers that are profitable enough to get their attention. This may just be an area of ignorance typical to the really rich-- I'm betting that DeVos has never been in a situation where a business told her it wasn't worth their bother to serve her, nor has she found herself in a situation where that service was simply priced out of her reach.

But she has a special message for the ed-flavored entrepreneurs of ASU-GSV:

With this Administration, you'll find a partner that wants to empower you and collaborate with you, not dictate to you from on-high.

No, instead we would like to let you dictate from on-high to customers whose interests, concerns and rights we promise not to protect. We are here to help out businesses, not those lowly citizens. We are here to clear the field so that you can plough it.

It may be worth it to hold your nose and read the whole speech, because it is shaping up to be a good capsule of the DeVos manifesto for education. It's an ugly, anti-democracy, ill-informed, anti-public education song, but I'm afraid we'll be listening to it for a while.

Pearson May Quit US K-12

The world's biggest 800 pound corporate education gorilla, Pearson, has announced that they're considering the sale of their US K-12 digital and print curriculum business (the US Learning Services wing of the British-based giant).

We should have taken a virtual trip instead

The move comes at the end of yet another bad period for the previously unstoppable education-flavored mostrosity. The big feature of their latest meeting was supposed to be a showdown over a hefty raise (or "rise" as the Brits call them) in CEO John Fallon's pay, which seemed a bit out of kilter after what has been called a "disastrous" profit warning and the company's worst year on the stock market in fifty years.

How did they end up in such a mess? Last November the Wall Street Journal reported that Pearson had "bet big" on Common Core as well as failing to deliver on its digital teaching materials, despite Fallon's gushing baloney about Pearson's imminent awesomeness as recently as last May. But in January of this year, the word started going out that Pearson was a lousy investment.

The decision to cut loose the US curriculum business is not a small thing. Despite being a UK based biz, Pearson gets a reported 63% of its sales from the US.

Not that the education behemoth is backing quietly away. Last Friday they also announced "it has made a number of strides in its transition to digital products and services," with a particular emphasis on post-secondary initiatives. Their online degree initiative announced a partnership with Duquesne University on top of their ongoing work with University of Nevada-Reno, Regis College, and Maryville University. Pearson proudly touts 300,000 online course starts.

Watch next year for the "next generation" of digital courseware "in development for full commercial launch" next year, including the IBM Watson cognitive tutor, which sounds... alarming. Plus a few other developments signalling that it's college and university students who can expect to feel the sweet, sweet embrace of the Pearson profit-squeezing edu-machine.

Meanwhile, that US K-12 thing-- that's just a "strategic review" because of the "slow pace of digital adoption." What will be getting Pearson's K-12 attention in the US? Their cyber-school division (Connections Education) which is Pearson's "fastest growing" business; no word in the news release on how Pearson plans to address the general crappiness of cyber-schools. Pearson also hopes to build on its leadership in school assessment, so look for that to drive some regulation as states work out their ESSA plans. And they still think that online learning has promise: "This market is still in its infancy but, in time, it will grow as schools finally realize the full digital potential of personalized learning."

So Pearson's dream of a "digital assessment renaissance" have not died. Of course, a year ago, they were announcing peaches and cream and wine and roses and the ensuing year was more skittle and beer and furballs and empty popsicle sticks. And in case you forgot, their Chief Education Advisor Michael Barber announced last November that he would be leaving the company sometime this year. He may or may not have steered policy a great corporate policy a great deal, but he was a master at stringing together pretty words about Pearson's global digital aspirations.

So don't count the ravenous corporate beats out just yet, and in the mean time, note that this is a signal about where corporate education thinks the next big profit centers will be-- Common Core is out, and personalized digitized learning is in. Of course, they were totally wrong about Common Core before; let's hope they're about to be totally wrong again. 

Raw Materials

Free market education fans like to talk about parents and students as customers. Schools will get better, they say, because schools will compete for those customers. I've talked before about what's wrong with that model, but right now, let me suggest that under current regulations, it's not even the right model.

Transfroobium, as far as you know

In a system where school and teacher performance is based mainly on test scores, with a smattering of other data like attendance figures, the product of a public school is data, and students are not customers at all-- they're the raw material. And the free market is not kind to raw materials.

Let's say my widget factory uses transfroobium to make the widgets. I am not just going to accept any source of transfroobium for my supplies.

There is, for instance, one sort of transfroobium that comes out of mines in the East that comes laced with certain other elements; it's perfectly good for widgets in the end, but first I would have to run it through extra processes. Those extra processes cost me money, so I'm not going to use that form of transfroobium.

Transfroobium from the West tends to be a little less concentrated, so it makes widgets of slightly lower quality. I may decide that it's an economical choice, but if my widget quality drops below a certain point, it may hurt my business and I'll have to stop using western transfroobium.

And northern transfroobium actually produces excellent widgets, but it is so terribly expensive to mine and transport. Can't have that. And there's some transfroobium that comes from other regions that I can work with-- provided the regulators are willing to just kind of look the other way when I employ some not-entirely-ethical methods of processing it.

What I really want is that southern transfroobium-- concentrated and unmixed with baser matter, it makes high quality product without too much investment on my part. I can get the results I want and still maintain a hefty profit margin, which is of course the main factor I have to consider here. I mean, come on-- I'm not making widgets as a public service. I've got a business to run here.

I'm also not going to deal in other companies' cast-off materials, transfroobium that has already been partially processed in another plant. I want to process my raw materials from scratch or not at all-- I'm not trying to work with someone else's half-finished discards.

The one thing I absolutely can't do is work under a government order that says I have to use whatever transfroobium is at hand. That would be like telling Ford they have to make cars out of bananas, or telling US Steel they have to make steel out of whatever they dig up in their CEO's back yard.

The most fundamental right, the most basic principal of any business in a free market, is that we get to decide what raw materials we are going to use to create our product.

I am not arguing that free market businesses are inherently evil. But I am arguing that in a free market education system, particularly one stapled to a test-centered accountability system, the market forces will inexorably push schools to be selective about their raw materials, about the students that they choose to allow through their front door.

Should We Practice What We Teach?

A curious report emerged last month from the Aspen Institute, co-authored by Ross Wiener and Susan Pimental. Wiener is the head of Aspen Institute's Education and Society Program. He worked previously at the Education Trust, a group that has been part of the Core-promoting Gates-funded reform machine. Pimental was a founding partner at Student Achievement Partners and StudentsWork and (though you may have forgotten it because David Coleman never mentions any name but his own) a lead writer of the Common Core ELA standards.

So Wiener and Pimental come right out of the reformster swamp, and that means that this report will include some classic features, like endnotes filled with references to other "reports" from other thinky tank advocacy groups like RAND, Center for American Progress, and the Aspen Institute itself. This paper also lands in a more recent sub-genre of reformy articles and reports in which reformsters actually identify some real problems, but are hobbled by their inability or unwillingness to see their own role in creating the problem in the first place (e.g. the Arne Duncan declaration that schools have become too centered around the standardized test, and how did such a thing ever happen, anyway?) I point this out not to play "Gotcha" or cry "Hypocrite," but because it's hard to solve problems when you can't acknowledge the real cause of the problems in the first place.

Wiener and Pimental get some things right. For instance, the observation that a great deal of professional development for teachers is the intellectual equivalent of empty calories-- twinkies instead of steak. As Robert Pondiscio notes in his article about the report, we have somehow arrived at a point where it's considered a radical notion to suggest that teachers spend development time becoming experts on their curriculum and their content.

Good curriculum and content materials matter-- they matter a great deal. Wiener and Pimental, however, fetishize them a bit much, stopping just a gnat's hair short of calling for the old reformster dream of teacher-proof materials, or the system where you just have one or two Really Good Teachers that you send around to coach and direct all your mediocre ones.

But their exemplar systems are DC schools, New Orleans, and West Virginia, which immediately skews their results because, in New Orleans and DC (West Virginia's teacher-led initiative is a slightly different animal), the conversation is not about how to make schools excellent, but how to make them suck just a little bit less. There's a huge difference between "improving" a terrible system and "improving" one that is already chugging along well, and nothing in this paper really acknowledges that.

So rather than look at their exemplars, I'm going to skip straight to their recommendations.

1) Curriculum quality matters a lot. Which-- yes, the content matters. Hugely.

2) Content-specific inquiry cycles improve practice. In other words, it's more useful to talk about how best to teach the major themes of Great Gatsby as you're doing it than to have a general conversation about "better teaching."

3) Culture eats structure for lunch. Systems mean nothing. It's all about how values are practiced throughout the school. Wiener and Pimental make this sound complicated, but it's not. Most teachers will do what they think is right, regardless of what the system-of-the-week demands.

4) Teachers need time to improve instruction. Everybody knows this is obvious, and yet districts remain largely convinced that every moment a teacher isn't in front of students is district money wasted.

5) Content experts should facilitate professional development.

6) System leaders have vital roles and responsibilities, too.

These all seem like relatively obvious things, so one of the questions being begged here is, "Why aren't we already doing all these things?"

Pondiscio sees that question being skipped over as well, so he offers some answers.

For one, local control. The local power to set curriculum and select materials for teaching. "Witness the Sturm und Drang over Common Core, which isn’t a curriculum at all, but merely curriculum standards." Related to that for Pondiscio is the tendency to "valorize teacher independence to a fault." And I suppose that's not a new issue-- some folks have always believed that the secret to good schools is to hire some Superteachers and turn them loose. But teacher independence is not just a goal; it's also a reality. Teachers develop independence because we work alone, often with a mandate from our bosses along the lines of "Get in there and take care of business and don't bother me because I've already got my hands full." In many school buildings, the teacher who teaches best is the teacher who bothers the front office the least.

Pondiscio also raises another idea about which he and I have always disagreed. Pondiscio thinks that asking a teacher to develop curriculum is like asking fire fighters to bring their own hoses. I think it's part of our job, and part of what we should have been properly trained to do. The classroom teacher should be an expert on the content, an expert on the students in the room, and therefor the world' foremost expert on how to deliver that curriculum to those students. Pondiscio compares a teacher to an actor-- an actor can be great playing Hamlet even if he didn't write the play. But in my classroom, I'm not so much an actor as a director. I need to know the lines, the set, the themes, the capabilities of each actor, the material of the play itself.

But where we agree, and where Wiener and Pimental lodge their biggest, blindest spot, is on the matter of content.

Wiener and Pimental: Professional learning cannot live up to its potential unless it’s rooted in the content teachers teach in their classrooms.Similarly, the resulting professional learning won’t be excellent unless the underlying instructional materials are excellent.

Pondiscio: In less expert hands, the language of standards merely reinforces the content-agnostic, skills-driven vision of schooling drummed into teachers in ed school. “Determine central ideas or themes of a text?” Which text? Which books and works of literature should we use? Doesn’t it matter?

The notion of the content-absent free-floating skills is one of the most pernicious notions to take root in modern education. It has been pounded into us directly and indirectly in schools, and it is chapter and verse in too many education schools. And the responsibility for this notion belongs squarely at the feet of people like Wiener and Pimental. The Common Core Standards are set up squarely around the notion that skills exist independent of content, like surfing without water or breathing without air, and that notion has been built into Core-aligned materials and Core-linked Big Standardized Tests. It lives in new teaching notions, like the idea that one needn't teach full works any more-- just a few excerpts will be sufficient to teach the necessary skills. It lives in the many proposals enshrining the notion that a teacher is only as good as her students' test scores (and the way to raise tests scores is to focus on skills-- content is secondary). It lives in tools like Lexile scores, reading level analysis built on the idea that reading is just the act of decoding strings of words on the page, not interacting in a personal and meaningful way with what those words are actually saying.

And it lives in almost a decade of professional development that is required (in some states by regulation) to be about aligning to standards and prepping for tests and teaching skills in a vacuum.

Reformers did this. The Common Core acolytes, flush with hefty checks from Bill Gates, did this. If they noticed it was happening, well, that's swell. But if you shrug your shoulders and say, "Gee, no idea how this happened," then I have a hard time taking any of your solutions seriously.

And here are Wiener and Pimental still offering "increased student achievement" as proof that some technique works. But of course "increased student achievement" means nothing except higher test scores, and those BS Tests are still supposed to be content-free; in most states, teachers are forbidden to see what the content is, because that would ruin the test (but some test prep companies are stepping in to fill that gap). If the school system is to remained centered on BS Test scores, it will not be centered on teachers having curriculum and content expertise (or rather, the curriculum itself will have little to do with content).

The issues that Wiener and Pimental outline are the predictable result of the reforms that they personally championed, and their paper ultimately seems like a hope that those reforms can somehow lead to different results. I drove west and ended up in Montana; I would like to drive west and end up in Florida.

As usual, I'm running long, so my solution to these issues will be brief. Knowing me, I'll probably get back to it another day. I should lead by saying that I'm not exactly traditionally trained. My teacher required us to major in our content area-- become subject experts-- and then layered teacher training on top of that, with extensive support through student teaching and the first year in the classroom. So you won't necessarily find me defending some of the traditional teacher mill approaches. But here's how I would fix the above issues.

1) Get rid of the Big Standardized Common Core tests entirely. Kill them with fire.

2) Require teachers to get the training to be content experts in their field.

3) Require teachers to get the training to be pedagogical experts.

4) Design professional development around what teachers in the building want to maintain their expertise.

5) Make sure that your experts have what they need to do the job.

6) Then leave them alone to do the job.

I can make it shorter. Yes, we should practice what we teach. And that includes taking time to reflect and consider what we have done right and what we have done wrong. That way we won't be standing there looking at some mess and shrugging our shoulders, clueless about the mess we created. And that's probably good advice for everyone.

ICYMI: May Flowers Edition

Here's some reading from the week. Share what you like. Remember, everyone can be an amplifier.

Why Would School Choice Improve Outcomes

Frederik DeBoer offers a spirited and snappy takedown of choice, including, among other many fine lines, this one: There’s no secret book titled “Actually Good Pedagogy” that only charter schools get to buy.

Education Is an End In Itself, Not a Preparation for the Workplace

If you somehow missed this when it was flying around sparking all sorts of conversations, here it is.

You're Not Going To Believe

Not about education exactly, except it totally is. The Oatmeal, one of the internet's finest internet comics, takes on the Backfire Effect and looks at how we resist certain types of information.

The Broken Promises of New York City Schools

How New York's attempt to use choice to open up top schools for students in poor neighborhoods has just not done the job.

Can We Trust Policymakers To Make Good Decisions for Schools

Nancy Flanagan looks at policymakers' sad track record on delivering on good policy ideas.

Big News From Houston

There were not one, but two big decisions this week in Texas courts. Together they seriously cut support out from under the whole notion of using student test scores to evaluate teachers. Read the above link to Vamboozled first, then read about the second decision.

School Choice-- Addressing Safety

Russ Walsh looks at the newest issue coming to the fore of choice-charter discussions-- safety.

Corporate Education Reform

Jacobin magazine holds up Dwight Evans as one more example of why Democrats are not necessarily any more trustworthy than the GOP when it comes to school reform

Where Have All the Black Teachers Gone

Jennifer Berkshire, Jack Schneider, and guest Terrenda White talk about the answer to this important question in the latest edition of the podcast Have You Heard.

PA: Meet Scott Wagner

If you don't know Scott Wagner yet, you soon will. Wagner has mounted a loud, burly campaign for governor in Pennsylvania. And it is not good news for either educators nor other working folks.

"PSEA-- I intend to kick your ass!"

Wagner's political career started recently and fairly spectacularly. After PA Senator Mike Waugh resigned, Wagner threw his hat in the ring and was boxed out by the GOP establishment in PA. So Wagner went up against the GOP nominee and the Democratic nominee in a special election to fill the seat. And he beat them both, as a write-in. Not just beat them, but clobbered them with very nearly more votes than the two other candidates combined (with only 17% of the electorate voting-- the first lesson of the current political silly season in America is that people really need to get off their asses and vote).

Wagner is 60-ish, a successful businessman who runs both a garbage and a trucking company. He did not get to be a millionaire by being shy or humble; he announces himself not by expressing hope or intention to become governor, but declaring he will be the next governor of Pennsylvania.

Wagner has opinions about many things. He believes, for instance, that one likely cause of global warming is that the earth is getting closer to the sun every year. He also allows for the possibility that all these human bodies on the planet are giving off enough heat to raise the global temperature.

Wagner believes that the government in Harrisburg is disconnected from the real world, and in fact Wagner's frequent invocation of the "real world" is one the recognizable traits of the businessman-turned-legislator. The only real world, of course, is the one he lives in, where strong, rich men should not have to deal with government regulations or workers unions. Here he is explaining why the minimum raise is just fine and what we need are lazy people to pull up their pants and take the jobs they're offered.




Wagner has some thoughts about how to fix schools in Pennsylvania, based on some fairly simple understandings of the situation. Short answer: it's all the union's fault.

Every time your property taxes go up it is not because the cost to educate a student has increased. It is because the cost of health benefits have gone up, pension costs have increased, or union-negotiated salary increases have gone into effect. None of these things benefit students.

It's this kind of pronouncement that suggests that Wagner is either a dope or a liar. Pennsylvania pension costs have in fact ballooned, primarily because our legislature made bad plans and bad investments that were upended by the crash of 2008. And if you don't see the connection between what you pay teachers and what teachers you have in a position to benefit students, well-- you have a problem.

Wagner does see some sort of connection. Sign him up for merit pay:

There are teachers that will exceed expectations while teaching a classroom of 100 of the toughest-to-teach students. There are also teachers that would struggle to teach just one student at a time. I want the first teacher to make a small fortune, and I want the second teacher to find a new career that is better suited for him or her.

Sign him up also for ending tenure and seniority, creating "contract transparency," as well as establishing an Achievement School District (even though the OG ASD had a head start on all the rest and is still failing).

The "Fix Pennsylvania's Education System" portion of his campaign page uses politely coded language.

He is all in for school choice so that parents can have "their hard-earned tax dollars follow their child," which convenient overlooks the fact that school choice also means that their neighbor's hard-earned tax dollars will also follow the child, but nobody gets an accounting of where the tax dollars go. Wagner does anticipate this by calling for an accountability system that will be applied to all schools receiving public tax dollars so that all can be compared, except that no such system exists. I'm also wondering-- if Education Tax Credits are in the mix, does their use of private tax-exempt contributions to third party players mean that all the laundering makes them not-public dollars, thereby exempting all those schools from Wagner's system?

We must ensure that are our teachers are given an environment in which they can thrive. This means ensuring that good teachers are rewarded and given opportunities to grow, and that teachers that fail to meet the high standard that the vocation requires are removed from the system.

That means getting rid of unions and job security and regular pay scales.

And Wagner knows the basic playbook-- cut money for school districts, and then call them bad names for suffering from low funding. Wagner called the Erie schools "disgusting," even though he had helped slash their funding in the first place.

Wagner is, in fact, promising to be a governor in the Scott Walker mold. Wagner actually got to introduce Walker two summers ago at the Northeast Republican Leadership Conference.

"Nobody has been attacked more for defending our fiscal conservative principles than Governor Walker,” he continued. “Public-sector unions and liberal special interests have tried to derail his agenda time-and-time again, and each time Governor Walker has won and delivered for taxpayers.”

This being attacked business is part of the Wagner brand. Like Walker and Trump, Wagner sells himself by the people voters can piss off by voting for him. This creates a bit of a challenge for groups that want to oppose him, because his base is going to eat that stuff up. Democratic Governor Tom Wolf already has a PAC up and running, and it is already taking shots at Wagner. All that does is give Wagner another chance to use the phrase "the governor and his union allies." Wagner's temper tantrum/borderline assault on an opposition photographer earned him a viral video looking tough and some Fox news coverage talking smack at George Soros.

His message is, at this point, a familiar one-- elect me and you will really stick it to Those People. My fear is that we'll get a Walker and Trump rerun. Wagner will do something outrageous, his opponents will holler, "Look! See that! Surely that disqualifies him!" and his supporters will just cheer, both for whatever he did AND for his opposition's freak out.

Wagner is bad news for Pennsylvania and really bad news for public education. The road to the governor's election is still a long one, but defenders of public education in Pennsylvania cannot afford to fall asleep at the wheel.

Charters and the Front Line

Here's one of the things that really bugs me about the charter school industry.

Public schools are on the front lines of multiple battles, and have been for decades, or possibly forever. Public schools work against ignorance and disinterest. They struggle with the issues of disintegrating families and families that appear whole but are dysfunctional. Public schools struggle against the parts of their local culture that don't support education (Who needs all that book learnin' anyway).

And while supporters of public ed are often accused to claiming that public schools are perfect and peachy, we are largely aware that they are no such thing. Institutional inertia, consistent underfunding, bad management, steady resistance from the very people who are supposed to be allies and leaders-- all of these create a myriad of problems in the public system.

Calling it a war zone is an overstatement, but it's my metaphor of the day. Public schools are France in 1916, a struggling, difficult battle that seems almost surreal in its endless confusion and waste.

But if public schools are fighting on the front lines of 1916, then charter schools are comfy barracks set up in Canada, far away from the front.

Now, I totally why parents would want their children stationed in Canada, safe and sound and securely distant from the fighting in Europe. I understand why, as a parent, one would want to see one's child as far away as possible from the worst struggling, the biggest dangers, the worst privations. I don't fault the parents who are able to choose Canada and do so.

Why I do object to is the charter schools, sitting Canada with barracks full of select troops, far away from the fighting, making announcements along the lines of "We have discovered how to end conflict" or "Hooray! We have managed to end the war!"

Neither of those things are true. The war is still grinding on-- you have just managed to move yourself, and some select individuals, away from the trouble. You haven't solved anything, don't know any secrets, have nothing to teach anyone about how to win the battle. You've just left other folks to fill the front lines (and on your way out, you've taken with you crucial supplies that the folks on the front line need). Just because you've dug yourself a comfortable hole and filled it with carefully-selected furnishings, that doesn't mean you're actually fighting in the trenches.