Jacksonian Opportunity

So here's what much of our vacation looks like from my vantage point:

You can't see the tiny human sleeping on my chest, but he's there. The book is Take the Cannoli, previously the only Sarah Vowell book I hadn't read. I've corrected that now.

The book is a collection of short Vowell pieces, including one in which Vowell and her twin sister (who are part Cherokee), take a journey tracing the path and history of the Trail of Tears.

That, of course, involves confronting the figure of Andrew Jackson himself, who is both the guy who ended the idea of the President as a job belonging to only a Certain Class of American aristocrat, and also the guy who may be one of the most racist, genocidal asshats to ever occupy the office.

As they contemplate Jackson's grave, Vowell pulls out a letter he wrote about the "relocation" of the Native Americans, giving a glimpse of how he sell such an awful thing to both his people and to himself:

Doubtless it will be painful to leave the graves of their fathers, but what do they more than our ancestors did nor than our children are doing? To better their condition in an unknown land our forefathers left all that was dear in earthly objects. Our children by thousands yearly leave the lands of their birth to seek new homes in distant regions... Can it be cruel in the government, when, by events which it cannot control, the Indian is made discontent in his ancient home to purchase his lands, to pay the expense of his removal, and support him a year in his new abode. How many thousands of our own people would gladly embrace the opportunity of removing to the West on such conditions?

The Trail of Tears was, of course, a forced march over thousands of miles to a harsh land not of their choosing, with uncounted dead left along the way (including, Vowell points out, chiefs who had previously been Jackson's allies in battle).

But Jackson (and others) sold it as falsely equivalent to the voluntary immigration to American from foreign lands. He sold it as something that, you know, the Native Americans really wanted. And he sold it as an opportunity.

Through human history, this has always been the way when one group of people wants to profit by taking something away from another group. It's really just the samed as this other good thing. Besides, these folks really want us to do it, really want the benefits of this. And in the end, this is a great opportunity for them-- golly, I bet any one of Our People would give his eyeteeth to have this same opportunity (and yet nobody ever does).

It remains the same today. When someone wants to offer this kind of Jacksonian opportunity, watch your back and keep your hands on your valuables.

ICYMI: Vacation Edition (88)

My family's vacation, that is.

But here are some of the worthy reads from last week. Read and share

The Death of Recess

People keep writing excellent pieces about why the shift away from r4ecess for littles is a huge mistakes. As the father of two fresh new littles, I'm going to keep passing along those pieces until the message sinks in to the numbskulls who want to stamp out recess to make room for academics.

What's Wrong with Donald Trump's School Choice Ideas?

What those critics really mean by "government schools."

Close Reading Is Child Abuse

Mind you, what we're calling close reading these days isn't, really. But here's an argument against it.

KIPP- More Rhetoric in the Absence of Evidence 

Paul Thomas dismantles some charter claims

ALEC's Attack on Public Education: A Report From the Front Lines

From a man who's been to all those ALEC meetings. It's as bad as you think.

Screens in School a Massive Hoax\

A fairly brutal attack on the use of computers in school

Forming the Curriculum

Food for thought about curriculum and content

Why Journalists Shouldn't Write about Education

Paul Thomas again, responding to Dana Goldstein's off-the-mark piece about writing.

Three Myths About Reading Levels

Psychology Today takes a shot at those damned reading levels.

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.