Teachers in the Statehouse

Something extraordinary has happened this month in Pennsylvania. Jerry Oleksiak, one of 2016's scariest people and friend of this blog, has stepped down from his position as head of PSEA, the state teachers union. And he did it for the most unusual of reasons-- Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf selected Oleksiak to serve as his secretary of labor and industry.

Oleksiak was a classroom teacher for 32 years, teaching special education in the Upper Merion school district of PA. He's been a union official for several years. And now he's the Pennsylvania Secretary of Labor and Industry.

We've certainly seen teachers move up into elected office. Oklahoma just elected a retired teacher to fill the scandal-stained spot of a GOP lawmaker, and many other OK teachers are running for office. Oh, no, wait-- that was the special election back in July. The special election that just happened is this one, in which a teacher won with 60% of the vote.

But even I was surprised to see a governor of a state reach down and select a teacher for appointment.

I mean, I shouldn't be. Lord knows we've seen an unending parade of people with no education background appointed to state level positions. But it's true-- even I reflexively assume that when folks want someone to come run  an arm of government, they don't call on teachers. "This part of our state government is a mess. We'd better get a teacher to come in here and fix it," said pretty much nobody ever.

Yet we think nothing of saying let's get an economist or a banker or (God help us) a business person.

The reaction to Oleksiak's appointment, even among teachers, is a measure of the profession's lowered esteem (and self-esteem). Why would teachers be represented in capitols so much less than, say, lawyers and doctors? Why is it that "appointing a teacher" usually means some kind of cute mascot job like the Teacher Ambassadors of the USED which are a nice idea and no, wait, they are not, because it's the education department and teachers should not be invited to come hang out as honorary advisers-- they should be tagged to come run the place. And not just that department, but lots of other departments across government.

Teachers have management training with the most challenging of co-workers. We handle money, work with budgets, find creative ways to fund things (sure, it's all with the decimal point a little further to the left than in government, but still). We collaborate and compromise, and most of all, we have a broad background of knowledge across many fields combined with an intimate knowledge of how policies play out for real people on the ground. There really is no reason for anyone, including teachers, to think of government work as somehow out of our league. Certainly teachers, like other folks, may look at government work and find that it's far less appealing than their regular day job. But that's no reason not to ask, to just automatically rule teachers out.

The teachers of Oklahoma have finally gotten so sick of their legislature that they are mounting a multipronged attempt to simply take it over. God bless them. And God bless Jerry Oleksiak, for reminding us that there's no reason a governor couldn't pick up the phone and say, "I want to come serve in my cabinet."

The Well

The well had always stood in the center of the community, broad at the top and drawing from a deep spring of cool clear water that had nourished the people for generations. Any member of the public could stop by at any time and a steward of the well would draw up a cup of cool, clear water.

It wasn't magical or perfect. Occasionally leaves and branches fell into the wide mouth of the well, and the stonework, though solid and strong, needed to be regularly repaired and improved. The community didn't really want to invest a great deal in the well-- it had always been there and so they assumed it would always be there-- so the well was always in a perilous state, the stewards just barely keeping up with the repairs and improvements needed. There were other problems as well; some members of the community were allowed to draw water up with sharp, clear buckets of the best and newest materials, while other members were forced to draw water up with crusty old wooden buckets, leaky and sometimes caked with dirt and grime. There were ongoing arguments about how to address this injustice, but often those who drank from the new, clean cups often claimed that the wooden buckets were good enough for Those Kinds of People. The well had always suffered from problems of fairness and equity.

Salesmen came to town, with wagons packed full of bottled water. But the market for their wares was not great-- why buy something that's stale and packaged in wasted plastic when the public well is already right there? But the salesmen looked at the water from the well. "This isn't very blue," they said. "All the best water is blue."

So the salesmen became creative. Some offered a special deal-- if you brought them one of the wooden buckets, you could have a "free" case of bottled water. This was actually quite helpful for a few of the families, but when other families went to the well, they discovered that even the lousy buckets they had cursed in the past were gone.

Other salesmen became aggressive, and simply started dumping poison into the well.

Now the well was deep and the water was drawn from a large and powerful wellspring, but many citizens became alarmed when they discovered what was being dumped in there. "This will just give  bring the water up to standards," the salesmen claimed, "And everyone knows the best water is blue, so we are just testing it for blueness, and adding more blue coloring when necessary." But more and more members of the community said the water was starting to taste bad.

So other salesmen sold home filtering systems and other salesmen sold little pills you could drop in the water and other salesmen went to community council meetings and yelled, "Why not just let everyone take the buckets for drawing water and go get whatever they want wherever they want to?" And, of course, the salesmen sold lots of bottled water, even after it was the plastic leaked toxins into the water and even after it was discovered that a lot of the bottled water was taken straight out of the old well. There were those salesmen who got their water from a fancy purification factory and packaged it in a gold wrapper, but it turned out they would only sell their water to a select few.

Meanwhile, the elders who maintained the old well were under attack. Salesmen would strut past the well, waving golden chalices filled with water that they had paid to have carefully scrubbed clean, saying loudly, "Well, why can't the well stewards do this? You should let us manage the well."

And even the people who defended the well had to admit that the longer this dragged on, the more polluted and dirtied the well itself became. New salesman came to town with tricky devices that dispensed a sort of synthetic flavored goop. "Buy one of these," they said. "You can have any flavor you want. It's practically like water." But it wasn't much like water at all, and the salesmen always took the villagers' money first and then told them they were out of all the other flavors.

Some of the stewards were fired because their water didn't come up blue enough, and others finally quit after months of having salesmen drive by throwing stones at them. Some were replaced by strangers from out of town who didn't even know how to hold a cup. Bit by bit, generations of knowledge about how to take care of the well were lost. The people who had suffered under the dirty wooden buckets now had no access to real water at all. And the well was becoming polluted and run down.

I don't have an ending for this story. It's possible that in the end, the salesmen buy the well, fill it with cement, and sell nothing but their various products. Maybe some stewards keep part of the well alive and functioning, or maybe they strike out and build a new well. Maybe the people of the community wake up and throw the salesmen out and take back the well, clean it up, and restore it better than before. I don't honestly know. All I know for sure is that these are hard days to be a thirty citizen.

The Hostile Takeover of Teacher Training

When it comes to bogus reformy crap, it is hard to beat Education Reform Now, a group of self-described progressives which serves as a mirror organization for Democrats for Education Reform, proving that you can throw the words "progressive" and "democrat" around all you want and nobody will stop you.

ERN is not a fan of public education. They want charter schools, and they'd like to eliminate teacher job protections. (With DFER, they also present the annually hilariously horrifying Camp Philos.) So when they release a "report" about how to fix teacher certification, I get that shudder of someone walking over my profession's grave.

"New Colleges of Education-- A Path for Going from Concept To Reality" is sixteen pages of existential teacher terror from David Bergeron and Michael Dannenberg. Bergeron was at the Department of Education from 2009 to 2013 under Arne Duncan, and then he graduated to the Center for American Progress, the thinky tank that was supposed to cough up the working cogs of the Hillary Clinton administration. Sorry, guys. Dannenberg was with the New America Foundation, the USED (also under Duncan), and the Education Trust before joining ERN. So we've met the first requirement for one of these education policy papers in that it involves nobody with actual education experience-- just lots of government/advocacy/lobbying/thinky tank time.

The Cover

Maybe I've had it up on my screen too long, but I love this stock photo so much, and I'm going to waste a moment of all our time to look at it. You can skip ahead if you like-- I won't be offended.

Never mind our blurry teacher who is apparently telling a hilarious joke. It's the three kids behind him. Blond Girl is looking directly into the camera with a smile that says, "I am going to raise my hand like a boss, and then blow this popsicle stand because this whole scene is just ridiculous, amiright? Also, I double dare you to tell anyone what I did just before you snapped this pic" Next to her, another child points into the corner of their eye with an expression that says, "Do you see any speck of give-a-shit in here at all?" And our last child is thoughtfully alarmed. Blond Girl is clearly the star. We will hear more from her some day.

Okay, we can move on now.

The Premise and the Problem

Teachers unions and progressives can agree, the paper says, that schools are underfunded and teacher education sucks, thereby suggesting that progressives and unions are natural enemies, which may come as news to some folks, but there you have it. Starting from those two points, they y go on to suggest that underfunding and crappy prep mean that the most needy students at under-resourced schools will have "a string" of bad teachers. And "teacher quality is the number one in-school influence on student achievement" (and student achievement will now and for the next sixteen pages mean nothing more that "test scores on a single narrow bad Big Standardized Tests") so let's not address anything in the world except teacher quality.

They will even go on to throw in the bogus "a bad teacher will reduce lifetime earnings by a quarter million dollars" baloney. 

All of this is the same old crap, a replay of Reform's Greatest Hits. But here comes a new twist:

Because political leaders have not wanted the U.S. Department of Education to determine which higher education programs, including teacher preparation programs, are of sufficient quality to warrant taxpayer support, the task of teacher preparation program quality control has been outsourced in large part to accrediting agencies. 

The weak link is not (just) crappy teacher prep programs or gummint unwillingness to spank those programs-- it's the accrediting agencies that certify these programs in the first place. They have too many rea$on$ to like the programs they are accrediting. Boo!

The Solution (Part I)

So what do we do about these lousy accreditors like the  Council for the Accreditation of Education Preparation (CAEP), child of NCATE? Or the equally-inadequate TEAC?

In our view, for teacher preparation accreditation to be effective, dependence on schools of education as guardians of teacher preparation quality must end. Because the current teacher education accreditor has shown it cannot and will not reform itself, a new type of accreditor, not dependent on schools of education and their personnel, but instead on the employers of graduates from schools of education and teacher preparation programs, should be created. State and local superintendents of schools and charter school leaders in particular should band together to form an accreditor focused on the learning gains of elementary and secondary school students taught by the graduates of teacher preparation programs seeking accreditation and the assessments of employers of whether the graduates of teacher preparation programs are adequately prepared for classroom service.

And, they add, they're pretty sure this can be done cheaply!

Let's Sneak Up On This Again

The paper backs up for a look at the history of these august organizations that have been "consecrated" (a word that crops up, oddly, more than once) to certify programs that certify teachers. The paper suggests that these agencies have leaders who have serious doubts about how well these agencies work. And they tell the story of CAEP tried to make things better by recommending, that the evaluation of teacher prep programs include a sort of feedback loop that rests on student BS Test results.

Which is what we're really yearning for here-- a system in which college teacher prep programs are judged on how well the students of the graduates of those programs do on the BS Test. In other words, Pat takes the PARCC. Pat's teacher Mrs. Sneezely gets an evaluation based on Pat's PARCC score, and so does Mrs. Sneezely's alma mater.

Education leaders from NEA President Dennis "Wrong About So Many Things" Van Roekel to Teach for America's Wendy "This Should Be Easy To Game" Kopp thought this sounded swell. The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education thought this idea was dumb. CAEP fired the Executive Director who took them down this dumb road and shifted the agency's attention back toward not-dumb things.

But that's not satisfactory. "Since CAEP cannot or will not reform itself," the writers suggest some sort of coup. Administrators and charter operators should form their own accreditation agency that will include test scores in program evaluations (and if that happens to favor charter in house faux techer prep programs that focus strictly on test prep strategies, well, then, so be it).

But how could such a thing be done? Turns out the writers have some ideas.

Three Ways To Take Over

The "report" will offer three approaches to a take over of the accreditation system, only one of which they really mean to propose. Let's take a look.

Method One: Whole New Agency

You'd have to form the agency, staff it, talk to colleges of education, develop your standards, figure out how to measure against them, and then start accrediting places. This would be time consuming and expensive. The writers, based on who-knows-what, estimate 4 years and $12 million.

Method Two: New Agency with Help

Find an agency that already does college accreditation in a general sort of way and convince them to start a teacher prep accreditation division while also convincing them to do it your way (though the writers don't seem to anticipate any problem with that part). The writers throw the dice and come up with 2 years and $5 million to do this one.

Boy, those just seem so long and expensive. Is there an option that would be swifter and cheaper?

Method Three: Hostile Takeover

This is really quite extraordinary.

The writers note that several federally-approved accreditation agencies are in financial trouble. The American Academy for Liberal Education (AALE) has been playing close to the financial edge for several years. The Distance Education Accrediting Commission has been slowly bleeding out funds. The Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges has also been financially stressed. And these guys have collected some figures.

If a group composed of school districts, states, and teachers came together with sufficient resources, perhaps backed by philanthropy, to retire the outstanding debts or otherwise improve the financial health of one of these financially challenged non-profit organizations – likely just a couple of hundred thousand dollars – that operate a U.S. Department of Education approved accrediting commission, it could obtain sufficient seats on the organization’s board to take control.

Once the board was subdued and couped, the bylaws and charter could be rewritten, and the agency could be rebuilt to suit the new owners. Then this repurposed agency could draft the necessary standards-- hell, they could use the ones that ousted CAEP leaders came up with (that shortcut could be applied in all three methods, but the writers only mention it here for their recommended approach).

But really-- what a perfect neo-liberal reformy solution to a problem. If something stands in your way, just buy it, and bend it to your will. 

Enter the Golden Era

Once the New Reformster Accreditation Board was open for business, reformsters could put their stamp of approval on any number of bogus "Schools of Educaytion." In fact, the paper notes happily, ESSA opens wide the door for all manner of "alternative providers of teacher preparation" as long as they can have their results validated by a USED-recognized authority, which-- hey , we just made one of those a few paragraphs ago!! Yes, there's some pesky law from 1965, but the Secretary can waive (aka "ignore") that if she's a mind to.

The writers characterize the old system as the fox guarding the henhouse; they would like to replace the old foix with their own brand new reformy charter-loving test-driven fox. They are also fond of the same language used by choicesters to attack the public ed system-- the current teacher prep system is a "cartel" that needs to be broken up, because these new guys want to cash in, too, and it's not fair that they have to play by rules that they don't like. Let a hundred sad versions of Relay GSE bloom. Let charter operators crank out fake teachers from "fully accreditated" fake teacher factories.

And most of all, let's base the entire structure of BS Test scores, one more terrible idea that refuses to die.

It is the last building block in the grand design for a parallel school system, where schools are staffed by substandard teachers trained in only test prep, and therefor providing a substandard education, cranked out by substandard teacher prep programs set up to prove to a substandard accreditation board that they meet the substandard standards.

Look, I am one of the last people to defend the current system of teacher prep. My solution is simple-- replace every single person in the accrediting agency with a classroom teacher. My solution is certainly not to stage a coup to impose a ridiculous standard by which college programs are judged by second-hand results on a third-rate test.

In the end, I can't decide if these guys are cynical, arrogant, greedy, or dumb. I mean, it takes some balls to say, "The whole foundation of the teaching profession is wrong. We should rip it out and replace with our own unverified untested unproven results-- by force if necessary." It takes some serious greed to say, "If we just gutted and upended the system, we could redirect so many public tax dollars to private corporate pockets." It takes huge cynicism to think either, or both, and just not care about the consequences. At this point, it just takes plain old boneheadedness to think that PARCC and its ilk can be used as a measure of educational success. But then, I'm cranky today. These guys have been around several blocks, have done respectable work in other areas. I'm honestly confused-- how do people end up pushing such terrible ideas?

The only good news I see here is that this is not a plan Betsy DeVos is likely to jump on. It comes from so-called progressives, and it involves more structures and institutions and rules. While I suspect that DeVos sees the same problem ("People have to jump through all these stupid hoops to become a teacher and all these dumb rules to run a teacher prep program"), I suspect her solution is much simpler ("No more rules for anyone! You can call yourself a teacher training program, and you can call yourself a teacher training program, and you can call yourself a teacher training program, and anyone can operate a so-called school and hire anyone they want and we'll shovel money at all of them!")

So call it one more reminder that "progressive" doesn't equal "friend of public ed" as well as a reminder that there are no limits to the huge badness of some reformster ideas.

Betsy DeVos Is Rethinking

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos kicked off her Rethinking Schools tour with some talking at the Woods Learning Center in Casper, Wyoming. It was a lot of talking for DeVos, so we're fortunate that the department wrote it all down. But as far as rethinking goes, it appears that there's no "re" going on here unless it's rehearsing and rehashing.

Here are some of the Most Special Moments from her remarks:

Her Job

That's because my job is to work every day to help make all schools better for all students across the country.

Sigh. Then perhaps stop suggesting that public schools suck and should go curl up and die somewhere, dead ends that they are.

Her Exceptional Bad Analogy Skills

Arne Duncan could say the greatest things that sounded good if you ignored their complete disconnection from reality. He also occasionally said exactly what he meant, which created its own set of problems. DeVos's speaking arsenal seems to include bad analogies. She starts this speech off with a doozy.

The great West has always been a symbol of American courage, strength and potential. When settlers—perhaps some of your ancestors—dared to grow families and build communities here, abundant naysayers warned: The air is too dry. The land is too rocky. The resources are too scarce. It can't be done, they said.

How wrong were they, though?

Those early determined settlers of the west had something the cynics didn't: American grit.
They expanded America because they had the courage and audacity to rethink what America was and reimagine what it could be.

Where to begin? First, DeVos apparently never played that pioneering personalized education game, Oregon Trail, or she would know that what those brave pioneers often did was die (particularly from dysentery, apparently). So how wrong were the naysayers? Not entirely wrong-- and the pioneers who succeeded were the ones who listened to the warnings and planned accordingly. "Never mind the salt pork, Betsy! Just pack the grit!" said no wise pioneer ever. "We'll live on grit" sounds about as good as "We'll live on love."

Plus-- and I feel that this is kind of critical miss for someone whose record on People Who Aren't White is not great-- the West was not exactly empty when those determined settlers showed up. In addition to a lot of dying, westward expansion included a lot of killing. It involved a lot of folks (and their government) saying, "Well, you folks may already be here, and you may have forged a successful relationship with the land over the past 100 years, but we want the land you're using, so we're going to take it from you because we're better than you are and we deserve it."

Okay, so maybe this is a good analogy for charter development.

The Same Old Same Old

One of DeVos's major themes has certainly emerged-- school's haven't changed for a long time.

For far too many kids, this year's first day back to school looks and feels a lot like last year's first day back to school. And the year before that. And the generation before that. And the generation before that!

That means your parent's parent's parents!

Most students are starting a new school year that is all too familiar. Desks lined up in rows. Their teacher standing in front of the room, framed by a blackboard. They dive into a curriculum written for the "average" student. They follow the same schedule, the same routine—just waiting to be saved by the bell.

This is quite an insight for someone who has almost never set foot in a public school.

First of all, it's just dumb wrong. Come to my school. Try to find a chalkboard. They're still mostly there-- behind the Smartboards. To repeat the claim that schools have not changed in a century is just historically illiterate. 100 years ago, hardly anybody graduated, minorities (by which I mean groups like Italians) had to start their own separate schools. The sheer volume of things to be taught were vastly smaller. It is the kind of claim that I can't believe anyone actually believes even as it's coming out of their mouths.

Second of all, yes, there are some superficial, institutional features that have stayed fairly static through history, for the same reason that we still drive on the left and men wear pants with zippers in the front-- because time and wide-scale testing have shown that they work.

Someone Has Hired a Speechwriter

It's a mundane malaise that dampens dreams, dims horizons, and denies futures.

And that speechwriter has their eye on the Spiro Agnew prize.

Wait Just a Damn Second!

And like those western settlers, anyone who dares to suggest schools ought to do better by their students is warned off: It's too hard. It'll take too long. There's not enough money. It can't be done.

Oh, come on! Those are not the words of public education defenders-- that's reformster talk!! It's reformsters who have said we can't wait for public schools to improve, which is impossible anyway and besides, we can't spend any more money on it. Those four lines are classic reformster justification for charters and vouchers and anything except trying to improve public schools! It's like a Nazi rally where a speaker says, "And our opponents have the balls to claim there's some sort of Jewish conspiracy! What's wrong with those people!!"

Institutions Are Bad

Today, there is a whole industry of naysayers who loudly defend something they like to call the education "system."

What's an education "system"?

There is no such thing! Are you a system? No, you're individual students, parents and teachers.

This is a standard DeVosianism-- institutions are terrible and individuals must be the focus. Depending on your level of cynicism, you can read this one of several ways:

1) DeVos has been rich and privileged her whole life and has no idea that some people in this world have neither the power, access or resources to get themselves what they deserve.

2) DeVos believes that government institutions interfere with God's righteous sorting of the deserving and the undeserving, so institutions should get out of the way and let people get what they deserve-- and no more.

3) Institutions generally thwart the will of the rich and powerful, like her, and those institutions must be swept away (particularly the ones that support giant unions that in turn support Democrats).

It also allows her to beat the drum for how no one school can meet the unique needs of all students, assuming as is her wont that schools are kind of like tofu, with no variety or variation within them. No, what they need is something more.... personalized.

Students, your parents know you best, and they are in the best position to select the best learning environment for you.

And if that means they are overmatched against corporate interests that serve investor needs first, well, at least there are no nasty institutions stepping in to say things like "You can't just refuse to meet special needs" or "You aren't allowed to push out all the non-white kids" or "It's not okay to require adherence to a particular religion."

I'm From the Government and I'm Here To Help

It's one of my favorite reform myths-- the myth of the downtrodden teacher. Not, mind you, that there aren't plenty of schools trying to strap teachers into straightjackets, but these days that's primarily because of the doctrine of Test-Centered Education. But reformsters are talking about those schools where the mean teachers union won't "let" teachers work an extra twenty hours a week for free or won't allow teachers the chance to enjoy all the benefits of union advocacy without paying for asnay of it.

But DeVos wants teachers to know that she gets them:

Too many feel like their hands are tied when the "system" tells them when to teach, how to teach and what to teach. I believe teachers should be respected as professionals and that they should have the freedom to innovate and the flexibility to meet their students' needs.

Of course, under ESSA "student needs" are still defined as "whatever the student needs to get a decent score on the Big Standardized Test." I truly don't know how the "respected ad professionals" part got in there.

So Wait-- Who Is Being Discussed

Also confusing:

Your teachers and parents certainly know better than so-called "education professionals," who are often staunch defenders of the status quo.

If teachers aren't educational professionals, then who, exactly, are we talking about? I mean, seriously-- I'm confused.

Reagan Because

Ronald Reagan was President in the 80's, when DeVos and I were fresh out of college and starting our grown up lives. Why anyone would bring him up to these kids is beyond me-- not even their parents remember Reagan. Going for the Grampaw support here?

Channeling Trump

But when I thought more about that, it hit me that you live with an unfortunate and unfair reality. Communities like Casper are often overlooked and dismissed.

But you certainly shouldn't be. Your needs are no different than the needs of kids, parents and teachers anywhere else in America. You need access to the best education possible to open as many doors as possible.

You have been unfairly neglected and mistreated by those fancy-pants big city elites. Says a regular old salt-of-the-earth millionaire heiress.

For the Children

Why are we rethinking schools? We're doing it not because DeVos or anyone said to and we're certainly not, you know, doing it as a way to open a lucrative billion-dollar market while privatizing one more vital part of the public sphere. No, we're "doing it for you."

The Purpose of Education (Apparently Many of Us Have Been Wrong on This)

Education should be a journey, a life-long one that encourages you to harness your curiosity into contributions to your family, our country and the world.

See? It's your way to become a useful tool. It's not for you to become your best self, or learn how to be fully human in the world, or to fulfill your on hopes and dreams. It's to contribute to your fanmily, country, world, and corporate overlords. Get an education and make yourself useful.

Some Swell Examples and, Of Course, Prussia, Plus International Comparisons

DeVos cites Henry Ford, Steve Jobs, and John Deere as folks who didn't give up and always made stuff better, though they were also, in at least two of the three cases, incredible jerks who were awful to other people.

Also, no reformster rant is complete without a reference to Prussia, because Prussia is no longer a country but we are still following their exact model for education. That exact model. No changes at all. And those international tests-- we never win at those and how would we feel if we never got an Olympic gold medal, because the point of education is to win gold medals in international testing competitions.

DeVos now seems to be fighting the clock to squeeze in every remaining refomster cliché. Let's cite some cool schools that are well-funded and control their admissions and talk about them as if they know something new or are replicable models.

Big Finish

Let's empower lots of people, but mostly parents, but let's not talk about what truly empowering a non-wealthy, non-white parent at a rough place in life-- let's not talk about what true empowerment would look like there, because it would probably look a lot harder than declaring, "Here's your school voucher good luck see ya kay!" Children are the future. Schols must change. Rethink education. Don't get dysentery! Yay!

MA: The Charteristas Behind the Curtain Get Spanked

There is so much to unpack from the most recent news in Massachusetts.

First, to recap. Last year, charter boosters took a hard run and cracking open the Massachusetts market with Question 2, which called for opening up the charter cap currently in place. All sorts of dark, rich creatures came crawling out of the woodwork, throwing about large piles of money under the names of various astroturf groups, even going so far as to hire the same ad agency that swift-boated John Kerry (allegiance to paycheck over truth is important in the biz). In the end, they lost hard. But it turns out they weren't done with all the losing.

One of the fake groups, the single largest funder of the Question 2 campaign, was Families for Excellent Schools-Advocacy. This New York based outfit was just spanked hard by Massachusetts courts, and there were several takeaways from the resulting ruling.



Now That's a Fine

FESA paid the Massachusetts general fund $426,466. That is the largest "civil forfeiture" in state history, totally blowing away the previous record-holder was $185,000 in 2016.

These Guys Were Really Loaded

That total actually represents the cash on hand for FESA and their parent fake group, Families for Excellent Schools, as of August 21, 2017. In other words, the commonwealth settled on a fine of "whatever you've got in your pockets right now-- just empty them out."

These Guys Are a Different Kind of Family

Nobody has ever believed that Families for Excellent Schools was an actual group of regular families gathered together to make a difference. But the settlement required FESA to open up its donor list, and, well... the phrase "capital management" crops up a lot.

Bob Atchison of Adage Capital Management kicked in $200K. Andrew Balson is coyly listed as "unemployed," but theformer capital manager at Bain has since landed on his feet by founding a new partnership; in the meantime, he coughed up $300K. Josh Berkenstein from Bain Capital only managed $1.25 million, but luckily his wife Anita, former occupational therapist, now is a "private philanthropist" came up with another $1.25 mill. Joseph Flaniagan, managing director at Highfields Capital Managment came up with half a million, which was peanuts next to fellow MD Jonathan Jacobson, who was in for over two million. Amos Hostetter, investor and cablevision billionaire, ponied up over two million. Howland Capital Management gave over a million. Seth Klauman, investment manager at the Baupost Group, went for over three and a third million dollars. You begin to see why the "civil forfeiture" of half a million will not exactly register as a serious setback for these guys.

Of course, not everyone was an investor or other sort of capital management guy. There's Johnathan Sackler of Purdue Pharma (the guys who brought us the oxycontin problem) as well as New School Ventures and ConnCAN. And there's Paul Sagan and Mark Nunnelly, both part of Massachusetts state government, each kicking in a half mill (Nunnelly teamed up with his wife, while Saga bizarrely broke his into two donations-- one of $495,500 and another of $500). Sagan is particularly galling, as he's the chairman of the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. Oh, and Alice Walton, because of course she did.

Fun side note-- FESA also got a $7,432.80 tax refund.

Look at That List Again

These are not people who have worked in education. These are not people who have worked hard to improve the situation of the poor in this country. And yet the argument for charters in Massachusetts has been that 1) they are awesome and 2) how dare you deny the poor this opportunity. These are almost legit arguments sort of if you squint and if all you care about are test scores, and you're cool with charters that keep their test scores high by suspending huge numbers of students, carefully avoiding any challenging students (like the non-English speaking ones),  and chasing out those who don't get great scores.

But look at that list. These are investors. These are part of the same swarm that have been hovering around charters since the day that Rupert Murdoch declared that education was a "$500 billion dollar opportunity" just waiting to be harvested.

Sometimes, Laws Are Cool 

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts could only pursue all of this because they have laws about dark money organizations set up strictly to influence an election. The Office of Campaign and Political Finance (the government body that tackled this mess) offered three findings:

FESA was actually a ballot question committee and was required to organize and disclose its donors.

FESA did not disclose its campaign finance activity in a timely or accurate manner.

FESA provided funds to the Great Schools Massachusetts Ballot Question Committee in a manner intended to disguise the true source of contributions. 

These findings only matter if those actions are against the law. In Massachusetts they are; in other states, not so much.

FESA's "Aw Shucks."

Jeremiah Kittredge, chief executive of Families for Excellent Schools, said: “Though we believe we complied with all laws and regulations during the campaign, we worked closely with OCPF to resolve this matter so we could move forward with our mission of working alongside families desperate for better schools.”

This statement is one part baloney ("Gosh, Mister, we had no idea we were breaking the rules. Gee whiz!") and one part admission of their bogus nature ("We're going to try to work alongside families who want better schools, because as you can plainly see, none of those families are actually inside our group.")

The Rest of the Good News

FESA has now officially ceased to exist. Which is probably no skin off of FESA's nose, since they only existed to push Question 2 in the first place and that swift boat has now sailed. Slightly better-- FES has been banned from playing in the Massachusetts political sandbox for four years. So that's good news.

However

Let's just remember that the entire purpose of this group is to allow Very Rich People to play in other peoples' sandboxes without getting their own feet dirty. If you think these folks can look at that big, delicious pile of Massachusetts money and NOT start thinking about new and creative ways to get at it-- particularly when officials in the state capitol are totally on the profiteers' side-- then I have a bridge to sell, you, and that bridge has a charter school just on the other side.

Schools Are Not Charities

The U.S. public education system is not a charity. It is a civic institution, the most important, many argue, in the country, and it educates the vast majority of America’s children — the well-off ones and middle-class ones and those who are so poor that they turn up in class with flea collars around their ankles (as one superintendent told me).
                                                                 -- Valerie Strauss, The Answer Sheetr

Strauss was writing about the Laurene Jobs infomercial for her education reform initiative, and in truth, Strauss caught a note that I missed-- the the XQstravaganza was not so much a Bass-o-matic pitch as it was a compressed Jerry Lewis Labor Day telethon. It did portray public education (well, at least education for the poor) as a charity. It smacked a little bit of revival temprance meeting ("Look at this fallen, run-soaked, debased creature! Can no one spare a dollar to save this wretch?" (And, by the way, what in the ever-loving hell was Randi Weingarten doing sitting there giving tacit approval to the portrayal of public school and public school teachers as miserable wretches?)

Strauss is exactly right-- public education is a civic institution, a civic duty, a civic obligation.

Why do some folks so badly want to portray it as a charity?

It's a bit reminiscent of the Tale of the Hero Teacher-- "Look at her folks, slaving away for the love of these children, sacrificing all her own time and money, and with no thought of reward for herself, because Real Hero Teachers don't care how much they get paid or even if they're paid at all! They're totally cheap! No salary too small. Let's have a round of applause (and nothing else) for that hero teacher!"

So why do some like painting education as charity?

Charity is optional for the giver. Only give what you feel you can afford when you feel you can afford it. Charitable giving makes you feel good precisely because you didn't have to do it. And you can give what you feel like giving (pro tip-- for disasters like Harvey and Irma, send money, not shit that volunteers have to that may or may not be any use). You could send money, but you could also volunteer to put on a show or, you know, send thoughts and prayers. If you have better things to spend your money on, well then, the charity will just have to wait. Shouldn't be a problem because...

Charity is optional for the receiver. Sure, the thinking goes, it would be nice if they had a little more money to work with, but if that money doesn't come in, they'll scrape by somehow. You know how resourceful those poor folks are.

Too much charity is bad. Wouldn't want to make people dependent. Besides, this kind of support isn't really sustainable, so we'd better not overdo it.

Charity has to be earned. Of course, we only give charity to people who show they deserve it by displaying proper character or proper goals or proper deference with their betters who have the money. Or they can deserve it by having a really sad story. Undercover Boss is infuriating because in every episode we hear a sad story about someone who can barely support their struggling family/sick child/aging parent on the shitty wages and benefits that the company pays, so in almost every episode, the boss makes things better for that one employee, not asking if perhaps his company's shitty wages and benefits might be hard on Every Other Employee!

Charter schools are frequently pitched as charities, and charteristas like that favorite reformster chorus "Well, we saved that one kid from terrible public schools" while steadfastly refusing to talk about the 600 students still in that "terrible public school" or the obligation, as members of the civic body, to help that public school. Because...

I gave at the office. Charity allows you to pretend that you've fulfilled any obligation you had to deal with the issue. Send the check in, then check out. Cash and dash. Drive-by do-gooding.

Charity is not for rich people. Rich folks don't run their fire departments or local government or police departments on charity because they expect those civic services to be by-god there when they want them. Charities at there worst (and there are some mighty fine charities out there) help reinforce the social order-- "You People will get nice things when we say you can get them."

In fact, charitable giving is hardly for rich people any more. They're doing Philanthropy, which these days looks an awful lot like Pay A Group To Push/Adopt Your Policy Ideas, which is not so much Charitable Giving as it is just plain Hiring People To Work For You.

Treating schools for poor kids (because, really, are we talking about any others) as charities let's people glide by the whole idea that they have any kind of obligation to educate all children, including Those Peoples' Children in That Part of Town. It allows a bunch of people to say, "Well, since I've given some support to a miracle school filled with hero teachers, my work is done. And I feel great about it."

When the critical mass of Americans (or at least a critical mass of people in power) decide to commit to doing something, they do it. There were no bake sales for the Apollo program or car washes to support the war in Afghanistan. We just did it, price tag be damned. When I contemplate the XQ telethon, I come back to the same old depressing conclusion-- one of the fundamental reasons we don't solve the problems of public education is that we don't really want to. We just want to pretend we're kind of trying while making sure the business is not too expensive. Please don't tax me for the real amount of equitable public education for all-- but I will drop a couple of dollars in the collection plate, and my friend here will do a nice song and dance. Now we've done our part-- please go away and don't bother us about this for a year or so.

ICYMI: Post-Labor Day Edition (9/10)

Holy smokes, but I have a lot for you this week. Good Stuff just kept rolling across my screen, and here's some of the best of it. Remember, sharing is empowering.

Michigan Gambled on Charter Schools and Its Children Lost

The New York Times offers a detailed and depressingly thorough picture of how badly Betsy DeVos's home state, often under her direction, has ed reformed itself into a deep hole.

The War on Public Schools

A rundown on how public education has been run down, form the Atlantic.

The Decline of Play in Preschoolers and the Rise in Sensory Issues.

This point keeps getting made, and I'll keep amplifying anyone who makes it until it sinks into school districts' collective heads. Replacing play with academics is damaging to small children.

The Department of Justice Is Overseeing the Resegregation of American Schools

From The Nation-- how the DOJ is involved in allowing white parents to secede from largely black school districts.

The Sad Story of Public Education in St. Louis

St. Louis is one more urban district that has been taken over by privatizers and gutted. It's been going on for a while-- and things aren't getting any better.

Those Who Can't

Spoon Vision with a new take on an old cliche

A Scrappy Parent Takes on Bow Tie Man

Philadelphia public school activist tries to attend a "public" meeting/about further privatizing in Philly. Turns out that "public" is only a figurative term. But boy is this woman feisty.

Fueling the Teacher Shortage

Wendy Lecker looks at how states in general and Connecticut in particular are accelerating the teachers "shortage."

Parents Cite Student Privacy Concerns

Turns out that Mark Zuckerberg's Summit Schools education-in-a-software-box program has some truly nightmarish problems with student privacy

Underachievement School District Superintendent Resigns in Disgrace

Remember the Tennessee Achievement School District, the model for state takeover districts. Remember how it was going to take bottom schools and move them to the top. Remember how its first super, Chris Barbic, left, having realized it couldn't be done? So how have things been going since then? Gary Rubinstein reports on that (spoiler alert: terribly, and yet it's still touted as a model).

Reality Check: Trends in School Finance

This might be the most important post on the list today. Bruce Baker looks at that old reformy refrain "We've spent double the money and test results have stayed flat." Is that actually true. (Spoiler alert: no). With charts and explanations that civilians can understand.

The Real Reason We Can't Fix Our Schools

Short, sweet, and to the point./

Dear Teachers: Don't Be Good Soldiers for the Edtech Industry

Steven Singer with a reminder that sometimes the best soldiers are the ones that defy bad orders.

Seven Times “XQ Super School Live” Denigrated America’s Teachers (And One Time It Praised Them)

And finally, though this makes two appearances in one week for Spoon Vision, this is my favorite of the many excellent pieces written in response to Laurene Jobs' XQ infomercial. I like this because you can use this to explain to your co-worker, family member, or neighbor (or the celebrities who were in the thing-- meet me over on twitter in a few minutes) why, "no, I, was not really excited about that special on Friday night."