Blog Update

My wife, the twins and I will be heading up into Maine for the week to just sit and chil (while my mother-in-law watches the dog and the house)l. Internet will be spotty, and there may be little or nothing going on here in this space until I get back.

In the meantime, feel free to search through the library of posts or better stil, work your way through the blogs listed in the right-hand column. I will see you all when we get back.

Guest Lyricist: Sympathy

Regular reader NY Teacher offered this set of lyrics in response to the recent post about Arne Duncan's latest shenanigans. I thought it was too much fun to let languish in the comments, so here it is, with their permission:



Sympathy For The Duncan

Please allow me to introduce myself
I’m a man long since disgraced
I've been around for a long, long year
Stole many a child’s soul and faith
And I was 'round when Barack O’
Had his moment of doubt and pain
Made damn sure Billy Gates
Washed his hands and sealed his fate
Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name
But what's puzzling you
Is the nature of my game
I stuck around Chicago-land
When I saw it was a time for a change
Killed the schools and the CTU
Parents all screamed in vain
I stacked and yanked
Held a point guard’s rank
Helped the charters rage
Teachers walked the plank
Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name, oh yeah
Ah, what's puzzling you
Is the nature of my game, oh yeah
I watched with glee
While young Miss Hell Rhee
Taught for just ten days
Using masking tape
I shouted out,
"Who’s killin’ Public Schools?"
When after all
It is Bill and me
Let me please introduce myself
I'm a man long since disgraced
And I laid traps for Pre-K kids
Taking tests until they screeched No way
Pleased to meet you
Hope you guessed my name, oh yeah
But what's puzzling you
Is the nature of my game, oh yeah, get down, baby
Pleased to meet you
Hope you guessed my name, oh yeah
But what's confusing you
Is just the nature of my game
And every kid is just a data point
And all us reformers saints
As heads is tails
Just call me Arne-D
Cause I'm in need of some restraint
So if you meet me
Have some courtesy
Have some sympathy, and some taste
Be sure to use my Common Core
Or I'll lay your schools to waste
Pleased to meet you
Hope you guessed my name, um yeah
But what's puzzling you
Is the nature of my game,

Charter Real Estate

This week Pennsylvania Auditor General Eugene DePasquale raised questions about more than $2.5 million dollars in lease reimbursements to nine different PA charter schools ( the Propel Charter School System in Allegheny County, the Chester Community Charter School in Delaware County and School Lane Charter School in Bucks County).

What we found in some of our audits is that the same people who own and operate charter schools, they themselves create separate legal entities to own the buildings and lease them to charter schools.

Folks advocating for public education often miss this aspect of the charter industry because it's not really education related. It is, however, big money related. It's why some critics of charters characterize them as more of a real estate scheme than an educational one. In Pennsylvania, what DePasquale found works like this-- Pat McGotbux starts a PM Charter School, a non-profit entity ( so you know it's not one of those evil for profits that everyone condemns). Pat then gets a building and forms PM Realty to lease the building from himself and ka-ching-- a whole lot of taxpayer money goes to make Pat rich with his "non-profit" school.

In Pennsylvania, part of the problem with these self-profiting arrangements is the same problem with all the other charter misbehavior in the state. DePasquale explains:

The problem is that we find zero evidence that the Pennsylvania Department of Education makes any effort to verify ownership of the buildings or look for conflicts of interest between the school and related parties. They simply write a check for whatever amount the charter school submits.

That's how we roll in PA. When charter operators get in trouble, it's likely to be because the feds caught him, not because the state was paying any attention.

The real estate side of charters is one of several loopholes that make non-profit charters highly profitable. A couple of years ago, the Wall Street Journal noted that the real estate side was attracting many players for a highly profitable bit of business. And states are helping:

Some states are beginning to make financing tools available to charter schools that had been limited to traditional public schools. For example, the states of Texas, Colorado and Utah now backstop tax exempt bond issues for some charter schools, reducing their capital costs when acquiring facilities, according to Scott Rolfs, managing director of B.C. Ziegler & Co., a niche investment-banking firm that has underwritten more than $600 million in charter school bonds.

But the growing role of for-profit real-estate developers has added a new dimension to the debate over charters, which are taxpayer funded and independently operated schools that are largely free of union rules. Critics say charter schools are in danger of cutting costly deals with developers who are more concerned with investment return than educating children. The result can lead to failed schools.

Carl Paladino, the notorious bad boy of the Buffalo school board, has made a mint in charter-related real estate deals. Not only does Paladino build the charters and lease them, but he builds the new apartment buildings near the shiny new school-- a one-man gentrification operation. And he sits on the public school board, where he can vote to approve and support the growth of charters.

That's not even the most astonishing sort of charter real estate scam. A 2015 report from the National Education Policy Center outlined what might be the worst. Take a public school building, built and paid for with public tax dollars. That building is purchased by a charter school, which is using public tax dollars. At the end of this, you've got a building that the public has paid for twice-- but does not now own.

In February of this year, researchers Preston Green, Bruce Baker and Joseph Oluwole dropped the provocative notion that charter schools may be the new Enron. It's a lot to take in, but Steven Rosenfeld pulled out five takeaways for Alternet, if you'd like a quicker look. But just some little factoids give you a taste. For instance, Imagine Schools take 40% of the money they collect from taxpayers and put that right back into lease agreements. In Los Angeles, owners of a private school leased room on their campus for a charter school that they were also involved in running-- then jacked that rent up astronomically.

Certainly not every charter school is involved in some sort of real estate scam. But the examples of such scams aren't all that rare either. A charter in Arizona built nine buildings and then sold them to itself; in the end, only 37% of the charters revenue was spent on students. In Chicago, public schools have been closed and then essentially given away to developers. The charter that Betsy DeVos visited in Florida was part of a cozy lease-to-itself deal. Deion Sanders' ill-fated charter almost ran afoul of real estate self-dealing. And the infamous Gulen chain allegedly uses real estate dealings to help keep the money flowing to its leader.

In too many cases, a charter school is really just an education-flavored business, a means of driving some real estate profits for the owners of the building, and what goes on inside the building is unimportant and immaterial to the major players in the transaction. In other words, while we may sometimes get preoccupied with the education implications of a charter school, Auditor General Pasquale is right to remind us that sometimes it's not about the education at all.

Duncan's Blood Money

Matt Barnum this week reported on an extraordinary private meeting of many of the Big Guns of reformsterdom.It happened back in March; only just now are people talking about it.

Arne Duncan, John King, TFA, DFER, Uncommon Schools, Achievement First, KIPP-- the twenty-five gathered folks included all these and more. Barnum reported that Shavar Jeffries (DFER) organized "in part" the meet, which says a bit about his ability to gather folks. DFER apparently still has juice.

The headline from the meeting was Arne Duncan's call for charter operators to refuse funding from the Trump/DeVos department, calling it "blood money."

Which is an odd choice. Blood money is money you get because someone has died, and the funding system for charters beloved by Arne Duncan absolutely depended on getting money by taking it from public schools, even if it killed them. Duncan's USED was, if anything, more pro-charter than DeVos, who much prefers vouchers. And when it comes to public education, the major difference between Duncan and DeVos was that Duncan at least pretended to say the right thing, while DeVos wears her disdain on her sleeve. But Duncan is not suggesting the moratorium because of any loyalty to public education. In fact, now that I think of it, maybe the somebody who has died, the murdered party that Duncan wants to avenge, is the federal education bureaucracy.

Not, says Barnum, that any charters are considering Duncan's idea [Update: at least two of the chains did not take a position at all]. So it's Arne doing what he has often done-- telling other people how they should conduct their business, even though he has no skin in their game.

But what was really intriguing about the account of the meeting was its purpose.

The overarching question at the March discussion, organized in part by Jeffries, was how education reformers should respond to the Trump and DeVos administration, including on issues beyond education.

And that's because...

The left-of-center charter school advocates who held sway in the Obama administration have a complicated relationship with DeVos, who backs charter schools but also private-school vouchers and, as a member of the Trump administration, is viewed skeptically by many. 

In other words, they were wrestling with the problem that some reformsters have struggled with since it Trump won the election-- how to distance themselves from people who are politically linked to the wrong party and the wrong end of the left-right continuum, but whose policies are completely in alignment. As long as these nominal Democrats were led by nominal Democrats in a nominally Democratic administration, they could go ahead and pursue fundamentally conservative education policies. But now DC is occupied by something kind of like conservative Republicans-- and when it comes to education they want all the same things.

This should not be a surprise. Let's go back the DFER founder Whitney Tilson quote about why it's Democrats for Education Reform:  

“The real problem, politically, was not the Republican party, it was the Democratic party. So it dawned on us, over the course of six months or a year, that it had to be an inside job. The main obstacle to education reform was moving the Democratic party, and it had to be Democrats who did it, it had to be an inside job. So that was the thesis behind the organization. And the name – and the name was critical – we get a lot of flack for the name. You know, “Why are you Democrats for education reform? That’s very exclusionary. I mean, certainly there are Republicans in favor of education reform.” And we said, “We agree.” In fact, our natural allies, in many cases, are Republicans on this crusade, but the problem is not Republicans. We don’t need to convert the Republican party to our point of view…”

This meeting circled around the distinction we seem to be going with "progressive Democrat" reformsters are doing it for the social justice, but "conservative GOP" reformsters are doing it because they love the free market. I suppose on some level the distinction matters, but the actions they want to pursue-- eroding public education and the teaching profession in order to privatize the entire system-- are identical, and ultimately, if you and another person insist on punching me in the face, I'm not sure I care a whole lot about the difference in your rationales. Particularly when, as I believe is the case in ed reform, behind both punchers is another guy who doesn't care about either rationale-- he's just bet on the fight and he wants to make a buck. 

So it's just swell that Arne Duncan is so outraged at what's going on in his old department, but if he is imagining that there's some sort of huge disconnect and difference between the policies of his department and the policies of DeVos. In my punching analogy, Duncan is the guy who beats you up relentlessly for seven years, and then when some new kid comes in and kicks you, says, "Can you believe what she did! That's outrageous. Are you going to take that?!"

As Diane Ravitch has pointed out, DeVos rode to Washington on a thoroughfare leveled and paved by Democrats. For them to have their little private meetings where they clutch pearls about DeVosian awfulness is either monumental cynicism or stunning delusion. Either way, Duncan better take a look at all those checks he's cashing as a sought-after consultant based on his time in DC dismantling public education, and he'd think a little harder before he starts bemoaning blood money again.
 

Confirmative Action

Here are some hypothetical new college admissions for next fall's freshman class at Wassamatta U::

Jared, George, and Don, who all have lackluster grades and general subpar academic HS performance

Chris, who would never get into WU except for prodigious skills in a sport

Pat, a minority student who is a couple points low on their SAT scores

Which of these students, do you think, represents a problem to be solved?

Apparently according to the Trump administration, it's Pat. The New York Times reports today that the administration is ready to crack down on discrimination-- against white kids. (Here's a link to Slate's coverage of the coverage in case you've used up your free NYT reads.)

This bananas initiative is the natural outcome of the meeting of historical amnesia and that aggrieved  base always alert to the possibility of some excellent non-white person actually getting something that some mediocre white person felt entitled to. I mean, seriously-- we all remember what color a snowflake really is, right?

We've been down this road a variety of times. Remember Becky with the Bad Grades and her lawsuit against affirmative action? And Daniel Golden wrote an entire book about how the Very Rich buy their underachieving children spots in top colleges (Jared Kushner and the Trump children are not anomalies in this regard). To pretend that college admission is some sort of meritocratic system of stack ranking where the top of the stack gets in-- well, that requires us to jump a chasm of disbelief wider than Niagara Falls.

This is (to digress) one more reason it's absurd to talk about students being "on track" for college based on standardized test scores, as if those actually had something to do with being on track for college. It would be more realistic to check students' on trackiness for college by periodically checking their parents' bank accounts and income statements.

What we have now is a system that is riddled with confirmative action-- confirming that if you're rich or white or rich and white or athletic or maybe even brilliant, then you can have a spot. We have a long list of reasons that people can cut to the head of the line.

And that's fine. Colleges are mostly trying to put together a student body that makes the school look good, and many colleges embrace the idea of education as an engine of upward mobility and to do that, you have to include some people who are trying to be upwardly mobile and THAT means accepting people who don't necessarily have the kinds of navigating-the-system tools that let them stroll right in.

I tell my drama students that an audition for a role is not simply a competition to find the "best" actor. Directors have ideas about what they want, both for individual roles and for the ensemble as a whole. You may think you're great for the part, but you are never entitled to it.

But affirmative action is more than just a college casting a well-balanced ensemble for their production of This Year's Freshmen. It's an attempt to restore some justice. If you are organizing a marathon, and after the race has started you realize that some bad actors went onto the track and tied some of the runners' legs together, you don't just say, "Oh, well. Just run harder to catch up." You do something to restore fairness to the contest. That does not include saying, "Well, the marathon has been going on for a long time, so that little tied-up thing at the beginning shouldn't matter any more."

From the days of slavery, up through Jim Crow and our own modern era of systemic racism, a whole sector of American citizens have been systematically denied the tools of success. Some of that is hard to fix for a variety of reasons-- simply making poor people rich through an act of Congress is not doable for a number of reasons.

But affirmative action college admissions are the simplest thing in the world, a chance to help equalize opportunity with a simple acceptance letter (in fact, it's too simple, and colleges should be paying more attention to helping folks succeed once they get to campus). It costs pretty much nothing-- and that includes the opportunity for some mediocre white person to take a seat. If we're going to suspend the idea of meritocratic selection for all these other reasons, why not suspend it for a bit of justice as well.

On Track

The reformsters at The74 are providing a platform for the reformsters at Learning Heroes to pitch the same old dreck (I provide the link not because I think you should follow it, but to keep myself honest and allow anyone to check my work who wants to).

Learning Heroes is one more Gates-linked group (via funding and founder Bibb Hubbard, who's a  Gatesian herself). They are particularly devoted to the Cult of the Test, and in fact we did pretty much this exact same song and dance about a year ago.

This time around writer Kate Springer frames the issue as On Track-- 90% of parents say their children are on track in math and reading, but "The real number? Just 1 in 3"

On track? On track??

On track to what? As determined by whom? Based on what evidence?

And really, "track" is problematic as a metaphor, because a track runs from one place to another. The people who assemble these slabs of data-like numbers never look at where the students are coming from, yet that's a piece of information with which parents are intimately familiar. And this "track" data is not a track at all, but a point, a single slice of data from one day of one year. So in a real sense, the conversation between reformy tracking groups and parents is something like this:

Reformsters: Your child is not on track because he's only 5' 4" at age 15 and he is supposed to be 6' when he's 18.

Parents: But he was 4' 10" just last year. He's growing like a weed!

Reformsters: Nonsense. He's stagnant and doomed to failure.

The underlying reformster assumptions here are all false. They assume that there is one single track that all students must travel on, and therefor one track on which their position can be measured. One track for everyone, a track that starts at the same place and ends at the same place. They also assume that they know where that track and they know what the endpoint should be. They talk as if we can know with great certainty that if you are in the Cleveland train station today then you ar right on track to arrive in Boston, even as they assume that they know you should WANT to be in Boston tomorrow. And who gets to do that? Who can best decide when a child is "doing fine" and who has the right to decide what "fine" means? Who are these people so wise that they know the one destination that all students should pursue, and the one track that leads there?

In fact, every single student-- every single live human being-- is on an individual track, a track that starts from where they began their journey, and which ends at the destination of their choosing (including, as well, the many times that they will change their minds about the destination).

Finally, above all the rest of this, this kind of language is an attempt to obscure and give undeserved weight to what we're really talking about-- the student score on a single narrow standardized test.

"Student achievement," "on track," even, as in Springer's piece "how they are doing in school" are all rhetorical smokescreens for "score on a standardized test."

Why can't we talk about what we're really talking about? Because then this conversation would be transparently foolish. "90% of parents thought their children will score above the arbitrary cut score on a single narrow standardized test, but they turned out to be wrong" is not much of a grabber. Because so what? Test scores are a reliable proxy for what, exactly? There's no reason to believe that the answer is anything except "nothing." And if you don't believe me, consider the writing by Jay Greene, an unrelated much more reformy Greene, who has written repeatedly about the disconnect between test scores and life outcomes.

But this misuse of tests as proxy is everywhere in reformdom. Here's DC claiming that their teacher evaluation system weeds out bad apples, when all they've done is prove that if you focus on keeping teachers who are good at test prep, your students will get better test scores.

If reformsters want to talk about test scores, then let's talk about test scores and stop pretending we're talking about bigger, loftier matters of actual substance. But pretending test scores are really indicators of a student's future or measures of student aspirations or the fur depth on an average yeti-- well, that kind of pretending will not help get anyone on track.

Teacher Awarded Medal of Honor

James McCloughlan was drafted in August of 1968, right after college graduation, and because of his background in athletics and sports medicine, received advanced medical specialist training. He began his combat tour in Vietnam in March of 1969.

On May 13, his company was sent into a three-sided box, and the enemy proceeded to tear them to shreds. Things rapidly deteriorated to the point that McCloughan's superior ordered medical personnel out. McCloughan refused. In the course of the three day engagement, McCloughan ran across an open field to retrieve a wounded soldier. He took shrapnel while rescuing two other wounded soldiers. When supplies ran low, he sat in an exposed position with a blinking light so that supplies could be dropped to the troops.

In the end, McCloughan was credited with saving ten soldiers. Ten men whose lives would have been cut short. McCloughan was twenty-three years old.

There is, of course, plenty to object to in the Vietnam war, and McCloughan never should have been there in the first place. But once there, at great personal risk, he saved the lives of ten other young men.

And this week he was awarded the Medal of Honor.

But McCloughan did something else with his life. In 1970 he returned from the war, and stepped back into a deferred job that had been waiting for him-- teacher and coach at South Haven High School in his home town of South Haven, Michigan. There he taught through a four-decade career, including coaching wrestling for 22 years and coaching football and baseball for 38 years.

And for his medal ceremony, Donald Trump delivered a speech that didn't suck.

Read the whole story. It's not often we think of teachers as Medal of Honor material.