OH: Another Charter Closes Midyear

One of the things that you get with a pubic school that you do not get with a charter schools is a promise, a long term commitment to stay in place and keep your doors open. Folks in the Mahoning Valley (near Youngstown, Ohio and Sharon, Pennsylvania) were reminded of that as yet another charter school closed its doors with the year well under way.

Mahoning Valley Opportunity Center always faced a challenge. It was started as a school for students who were in academic distress, and just a year ago it was in the news because of a student assault on a teacher. The school is sponsored by the Youngstown School District, a sponsor which earned a "poor" rating and became part of the list of Ohio naughty sponsors that faced a possible closing this fall.

The high school handled just 84 students. 71 of those students were non-white and reportedly 0% were free or reduced lunch students. And while these students were at risk, boy, was MVOC unsuccessful with them. The school was academically ranked 694th in the state; its graduation rate ranked 702nd.So, not doing great.

Staff and faculty, speaking without disclosing identities, told local news that they had felt something was up since the beginning of the year, that the school had been long mismanaged, and that Superintendent David Macali had other plans for the school.

So two nights ago, the operators of the school voted to shut it down, and yesterday morning, at least one student was at the front door, wondering what she was supposed to do now. Of course, part of "empowering" families is that the state and the charter school get to wash their hands of any responsibilities for these students. Did your charter school close? Well, the state of Ohio has empowered you to go solve the problem yourself. Congratulations.

The stated reason was money. It no longer made business sense to keep MVOC open, and since charter schools are ultimately businesses, it is business-based decisions that rule the day. Not student based, not community based, and not education based. Charter schools are businesses, and businesses close when it suits them. Food trucks do not factor in how badly the community needs a place to eat-- only whether they can profit by serving that community. One more reason that modern charters are a bad fit for education.

PA: Teacher Tenure, Seniority on Chopping Block

Here we go again.

Reformsters and their PA GOP friends have been trying to do away with teacher job protections in Pennsylvania for years now, but this year, they took a new approach-- burying the attacks on teacher seniority and tenure in a big bill strapped onto PA's ever-disastrous budget shenanigans.

The budget appears to be just about settled, albeit quietly, so as not to draw attention to how long it had been unsettled (long story short-- this year, for variety's sake, instead of failing to pass a budget, the legislature passed a budget and then a group of House GOP representatives blocked any attempts to fund it). The omnibus education bill has been detached from the budget, but it is still sitting on Governor Wolf's desk, a Frankensteinian heap, a clinking clanking clattering collection of caliginous junk.

I thought that sounded familiar

House Bill 178 featuress a whole bunch o'stuff, including but not limited to:

* A bunch of procedural rules for how ESSA plan review shall be handled, mostly aimed at making sure that the legislature has ample opportunity to get their grubby amateur hands on the plan. So that'll be a big help.

* A requirement for all new school board members to get a training from the Ed department

* Training programs for charter school trustees, too

* Districts under financial watch will have a state overseer to serve as their czar

* Districts may now claim "economic reasons" as a cause for cutting staff (this is added to a list of causes that includes cutting programs, reduced enrollment, or school consolidation). Such cuts may NOT be based on how much a particular teacher is paid, and if a superintendent gets caught violating that rule, he'll get a letter in his permanent file. So, you know, really heavy consequences for that one.

* Districts must suspend an equal percentage of administrators. This seems... tricky. If a district has 100 teachers and 5 administrators and they cut 5 teachers, does that mean they must chop off one principal's arms? Fortunately, the Secretary of Education can waive this requirement if the district's operations are "already sufficiently streamlined" aka "any time he feels like it."

* Some noise about reporting the economic factors and also making sure that staff cuts won't hurt academics, mostly providing the legislature plausible deniability ("We told them not to cut important stuff! Just, you know, teachers.")

* Staff cut for financial reasons MUST BE cut in descending order of recent evaluations. So anyone with two consecutive "unsatisfactory" ratings goes first. This will not help much, as the number of unsatisfactory teachers in PA tends to hover around 200. After that, the district works its way up the evaluation scale. For the time being, teachers are clumped by rating and not precisely ranked by their actual rating. I presume that will come later.

* Presuming they won't get jobs elsewhere, they will be called back in reverse of the order they were laid off.

* No contract can negotiate anything that contradicts these rules.

* I'm not positive, but I think section 1216 would now say that a teacher candidate can't be denied a diploma if they flunk the PRAXIS or similar test.

* No lunch shaming.

* Opioid abuse instruction.

* A bunch of measures to beef up agricultural education.

* The ability for charter schools to manage themselves as chains rather than a series of independent schools owned and operated by the same company.

* And once again kicks the can down the road on using the Keystone exam as a graduation requirement. This keeps happening (the requirement was supposed to kick in last year) because legislators keep being alarmed by how many students would be denied diplomas they have otherwise earned because of this Big Standardized Test. They don't seem to understand that this will never change; somebody needs to go to Harrisburg and explain norm-based assessment to them.

Somebody also needs to read the legislature in on the recent Houston court decision about EVAAS, the OG of VAM systems and the identical twin to the VAM system used in PA (PVAAS). In that decision, the court ruled that using the VAM system as a means of terminating teachers was nuts and indefensible. The system for suspending teachers in this bill are not quite as severe as Houston's, but if this bill becomes law, I expect we'll be in court soon enough.

If you are in Pennsylvania, please join me in tweeting, emailing and calling the governor to encourage him not to sign this thick slice of baloney. This is not what education in Pennsylvania needs. It remains to be seen exactly which internal organs the legislature lacks.

Competence vs. Content

From No Child Left Behind to Common Core to Race to the Top (both Original and Waiver-lite, ed reform has had a terrible problem with content.

By defining reading as nothing more than a set of decoding skills that exist in some content-free vacuum, these reforms have devalued the content and knowledge aspects of reading and writing. This has led to absurdities like suggesting that Of Mice and Men is a novel for elementary students and David Coleman's terrible teaching instructions. But knowledge of content-- and the role that content knowledge plays in reading-- have been banished from the English classroom.

Some defenders have tried hard to argue that rich content is written into the Core et al, but I think they are like folks looking at a car with no wheels saying, "Well, clearly we are meant to add wheels, because otherwise this obviously won't work." But while they think they see content at the heart of the standards, I think they just see a content-shaped hole.

What I know is this-- if I were willing to sacrifice students' education, I could prepare them for the Big Standardized Test by using no text except the daily newspaper and single pages ripped out of random books.

Now that competency-based pseudo-personalized algorithm-driven computer-based education is tomorrow's flavor du jour, we need to recognize that its content problems are even worse.

In PLCBE, everything needs to be reduced to "skills" that can be :measured" by "assessments" on the computer. You have probably encountered some rudimentary CBE in your workplace-- the HR department sends out an e-mail with a link to a "training" that involves letting some training slideshow play on your computer screen, followed by some multiple choice questions that you would have to be seriously cognitively impaired to screw up ("When a co-worker is injured and bleeding you should A) run away screaming, B) taste the blood to see if it tastes diseased, C) post pictures on Instagram or D) put on rubber gloves and call the company nurse"). Miss too many questions, and you're redirected to re-watch sections of the slides before you re-take the test. Get at least nine out of ten and congratulations-- you're a certified bloodborne pathogens expert.

PLCBE requires us to reduce everything to standardized test questions, preferably multiple choice. That means only the most superficial of items can be assessed. Imagine trying to assess a student's grasp of Hamlet with nothing but multiple choice questions, including questions that reduce complex long-debated issues. "Just how mad is Hamlet, really?" is reduced from a complicated and detail-rich debate strung out across hundreds of years and hundreds of actor interpretations is reduced to a true-false question-- with only one "correct" answer.

Reading a text is a complex activity that exists at the intersection of the text, the author's history, the author's intent, the reader's interest, the reader's background knowledge, and the reader's own questions about how to be fully human in the world. PLCBE, like the last twenty years of reading "advances", reduces all of that to one issue-- how skilled is the reader at decoding words, as if that were the sum total of reading.

This completely omits any considerations of creative or critical thinking and expression, and it is the very opposite of "personal." PLCBE fans will claim that computer software exists that can evaluate open-ended essay answers-- they are either kidding themselves or lying. No such software exists. Just as Grammarly will not help you write better-- it will just help you proofread for spelling, punctuation and typing mistakes-- essay-grading software still has no idea whether you are spouting gibberish or not, only if you are spouting gibberish that fits the pattern of written standard English. (For more definitive demonstrations, track down the work of my hero Les Perelman.)

No computerized algorithm-driven competency-based program is going to assign full texts. You won't actually read Hamlet at all-- just a single screen's worth, so maybe you will make sense out of the "too, too solid flesh" soliloquy without any idea of what came before or after. Don't worry-- just decode the words.

The rise of Big Standardized Testing was an attempt to replace the teacher's final exams with one created by the standards-and-skills champions. PLCBE is an attempt to replace the teacher as well. We've been having some spirited debates in English classrooms about the Canon and what belongs in it and how students should understand it and interpret it, but the new computer-driven teacher doesn't care about the canon at all because it has no tools for measuring things like "knowledge" or 'insight" or "understanding" or "ability to wrestle with literature's many paths to understanding society, culture and the human condition."

This is not a liberal vs. conservative thing. I'm not even sure it's a reformer vs. traditional public school thing, because I know plenty of reformers who do not subscribe to the reduce-education-to-a-technical-software-problem school of thought. This is about the dangerously reductive notion that all education can be processed through tiny, limiting, and ultimately inadequate tools, like trying to squeeze a Thanksgiving turkey out of a toothpaste tube.

PLCBE is a bad idea for many reasons-- I just don't want us to forget that one reason is that PLCBE is inadequate to either present or assess the higher order skills involved in reading and writing, and that by its very nature, it is the enemy of rich content in education, and that being the enemy of rich content in education is like being the enemy of protein, vitamins and nutrients in food.

What's the Fuss about Data Mining

If you have trouble getting folks to grasp what Big Data is all about, start them off with this clip:

Yes, every time you take a survey on Facebook, you open up access to your data. The range of reaction emojis help facebook more accurately track your mood and emotional reactions, making their data more detailed. Use gmail? Google reads your emails to better target you.

Now, imagine this same stuff applied to school. Imagine that school is redesigned so that every skill is developed and measured via computer, and so every data point is stored and added to a massive digital dossier on each child. Imagine that the school expands its curriculum to include social and emotional education, also managed by computer, so that the dossier stores information about what sort of person the student is.

The implications go beyond advertising. What would corporations pay to be able to say, "We need to hire ten left-handed white men who are good with simple computations, good reading comprehension skills, and who are very emotionally stable without any tendencies to challenge authority. Oh, and if they could be without any markers for possible major illness, that would be great. Send us a list." And, of course, the government could find ways to use this stuff as well. More efficient education ("Pat, your data so far indicates that you will be entering Sixth Grade for Plumbers next year") and advanced safety for communities ("Station a cop by Pat's apartment every day-- his data shows he's likely to blow up soon").

Over the past decade, we have adjusted to a new normal when it comes to privacy. The trade is not without appeal-- for a little less privacy, we get better service. Facebook doesn't show me ads for feminine hygiene products or recommend news stories from the Far Right. We give up some privacy to get more ready access to things we want. And we give it up in ways that are not obvious, so that we can remain pleasantly unaware of just how much privacy we are sacrificing. Big Brother, it turns out, is pretty warm and fuzzy and comforting.

But there are still places where we expect privacy to remain unbroken. If we logged on to Facebook and found our child's reading and behavior problems being discussed by our child's teacher, or if we found our doctor publicly laying out our health issues, we would be outraged-- and rightly so. I have my students write one-draft essays about personal topics-- not, as I tell them, because I want to know about their personal lives, but because it's a topic on which they are already experts. But because the topics are personal, I promise them that I will never show them to anyone.

But if I were requiring them to write those personal essays as, say, a Google doc, I don't think I could make or keep that promise.

Aren't there rules and laws that protect student privacy? Well, there used to be. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act was passed in 1974, but in 2008 and 2011, it was re-written by the USED to broaden the lists of people with whom school data could be shared. And they aren't done-- right now, the Data Quality Campaign and a laundry list of reformy researchers is calling for a further expansion of the holes in the FERPA privacy shield. The call, as is often the case, is in the name of research-- which is hugely broad term. "Can I use this data to figure out which students will make the best targets for advertising with a bandwagon approach?" is a research question. This list of four specific areas includes using data across the education and workforce pipeline, a concerning approach indeed. A call for looking at better capacity and security makes a certain amount of sense, now that school districts are recognized by hackers as soft targets. But it takes only a little bit of cynicism and paranoia to see it as a call for more foxes to perform tests on henhouse security.

These are not issues with simple solutions. Well, "nobody ever use any computers for anything ever again" or "take down the internet" are simple solutions-- just not plausible ones. We live in an age of technological miracles, and there is no going back. Nor would I necessarily want to. But I'm not ready to jump heedlessly into the Surveillance Society, either.

We need to make thoughtful choices. I teach at a 1-to-1 school; all of my students have school-issued computers, and I would never go back-- but I also don't make those computers the center of my classroom or instruction. And you're reading my blog that is housed on a Google-owned platform and which I promote over Facebook and Twitter. I'm guessing my digital dossier knows a thing or two about me.

I use technology, and I pay a price for it, and as with any ongoing shopping spree, I work to pay attention to how large the bill is getting. I use tech tools myself, and I use them with my students, and I make sure that they don't use us. (The correct approach is "Here's what I want to teach. Are there any tech tools that would help accomplish that" and never, ever, "Here's a cool tech tool-- how can I build a whole lesson around it.")

But there are levels beyond my control, and when I see things like another FERPA-weakening attack, I am beyond concerned. And if my school district were to jump onto the computer-centered competency-based personalized-learning bandwagon, I would take a vocal stand against it.

This is yet another area of education where you have to pay attention, do your homework, and pay attention some more. The new FERPA push is coming because Congress will be re-introducing the Student Privacy Protection Act, an oxymoronic title for an act that is about reducing privacy protections under FERPA. This peacekeeper missile of privacy is aimed at our children, but it's just arcane and obscure enough that most Americans will sleep right through this whole business. Now would be a good time to renew the effort to wake them up and explain the fuss.

ICYMI: Almost Halloween Edition (10/29)

It's almost that time again. In the meantime, here's some reading to do.

Betsy DeVos Just Gave 12.6 Million Grant to Rocketship Charters 

Why this goes on the list of bad DeVosian ideas

Professsion For America 

A hilarious, and slickly professional-looking website.

How Betsy DeVos Becaeme the Most Hated Cabinet Secretary

Amanda Terkel takes a look at how badly things have gone so far

We Libertarians Really Were Wrong about School Vouchers

Well, here's a perspective that's different in many ways

More Delusional-- White People or  Charter Advocates

Paul Thomas with an interesting take on race and charters

Deep in the Heart of Whiteness

Daniel Katz takes on a similar subject.

How School Closings Undermine Democracy

When Chicago closed 50 schools, it had side-effects for the election process. Another can't-miss podcast from Have You Heard

NH: Public Education under Voucher Attack

Public education is under attack in New Hampshire.

As is the case in many states (almost as if, some larger group or network is coordinating these legislative attacks in multiple states), New Hampshire is looking at the possibility of a new sort of voucher law-- the education savings account (in New Hampshire, they're now called "education freedom savings accounts") This battle is not exactly new for the Granite State, where educational tax credits, a back-door voucher approach, cropped up at the beginning of the decade without becoming a rousing success.

The bill is SB-193, and it has already passed the NH Senate and the House education committee will be considering it shortly. If you are a New Hampshire resident, here are some reasons you should care.

Scaling the Wall

Why ESAs? Because a straight up voucher system tends to violate the separation of church and state.
Your tax dollars go to support Super Conservative Evangelical Christian School or the local Catholic School (lots of church folks will say that sounds fine, but I'm waiting for the day their tax dollars are routed toward Sharia Law High School).

But the ESAs will handled by a "scholarship organization," a third party that will hold the child's voucher (and get a 5% fee, so here's a whole new lucrative business to launch). It's a pretty transparent dodger-- I can't give Pat money, so I'll just give it to Chris and Chris can give it to Pat-- but if you're only worried about looking legal and not actually being legal, it may be good enough.

But the record on vouchers is pretty clear-- look at Indiana or Wisconsin or DC and you'll see that vouchers mostly steer public tax dollars to private religious schools.

Unaccountable Tax Dollars

ESAs may be spent on private school tuition. Or educational equipment like computers. Or books. Or tutors. Or online education programs. Or pay for your SAT and AP exams.

Granted, whatever they do, they won't do much. The bill's sponsor said back in April that the voucher would be for about $4,400, and more recently published reports put it around $3,500-- neither an amount which is not going to get you into Phillips Exeter Academy (annual tuition about $47K). But whatever they do, the taxpayers aren't going to know much about it. The bill includes requirements that the number fo students be reported, and that parents be surveyed to find out how happy they are with the program, but there's no requirement that anybody make sure that taxpayer dollars aren't being spent on tutors from the Flat Earth Society or otherwise wasted.

This remains one of my puzzlements about voucher programs. Since when were conservatives the ones who wanted zero accountability for how their tax dollars were spent. And yet, that's what SB-193 calls for. Once you tax dollars disappear into an ESA, you'll never know how they were spent. You could call it magic, or money laundering.

At last April's hearing, bill sponsor Sen. John Regan's response to this point was that they have no idea how public schools are spending money now. Regan is the head of the Senate education committee, and this astonishingly ignorant comment was greeted with the sound of school chiefs' jaws hitting the floor (really? the Senate education committee has no access to detailed reports on school spending?).

Unusable Vouchers

Once again, parents will dream of being able to enroll their child in whatever school they choose. And once again, parents will be surprised to discover that they don't actually have a choice. Have a child with special disability? Want to send your child to a particular private school even though your child might not be the right race or religion? Tough. It's a private school. They don't have to accept your child if they don't want to. Thus highlighting one of the worst features of a voucher system-- taxpayers get to send their tax dollars to support a school that would refuse to educate their own child.

These vouchers will provide a nice bonus for families that can already afford private school. It will provide little or no help to the poorest and most vulnerable students in New Hampshire.

Not-very-hidden Costs

Every voucher represents money stripped from a public school system. While money may travel with the students, huge costs stay in the school district of origin, leaving that district with one of two choices-- cut programs or raise taxes.

The bill itself says it has no idea what the financial impact of the bill will be. In fact, it hilarious extends this not knowing in a chart that covers the next four years.

More Red Flags

The bill is supported by New Hampshire's Commissioner of the Department of Education, Frank Edelblut, a homeschooler businessman-turned-politician. He challenged Chris Sununu for the GOP gubernatorial nomination last year, and then threw his support behind Sununu. In return, when Sununu became governor, he handed Edelblut the education job. Edelblut has no particular background or qualifications in education, and he has been hard to pin down on issues like "should schools teach creationism?" Edelblut has been honored by one of the Koch Brothers astroturf groups, and has expressed his desire to emulate Florida, a state that ranks near the bottom the barel in educating children, but is front of the pack when it comes to letting all manner of entrepreneurs, shysters and scam artists make money in the education biz.

Edelblut thinks SB 193 is super.

On a personal note

My grandmother graduated from the University of New Hampshire in 1927 and began teaching, before she married my grandfather. She intended to settle down quietly with my grandfather, but she ended up running for local school board, and then slowly worked her way up politically until she joined the NH House of Representatives in 1961 and served for over thirty years. While she spent most of her career chairing the House Environment and Agriculture committee, she also headed up the Education Committee for a time.

She was a staunch Republican of the old school. When Chris Sununu's father John was Governor, my grandmother didn't have many nice things to say about him. Later in her career, she began to feel that the GOP was deserting her. I don't think SB 193 would have appealed to her much at all.

For many people, New Hampshire is that tiny little state you hear about every four years, but it's where I was born. I lived there until I was nine, and returned regularly because that's where all of my family's family lived. It has always been a practical, solid place to me, and it hurts to see it collapse into this sort of anti-public school privatization frenzy.

The next House Education Committee meeting is November 8th. If I were still a New Hampshire resident, I would be on the phone to my representative, particularly if he's on the education committee (and this site also gives you email links). The continued gutting of public education should be resisted vigorously>

Full Range of Reformsters Unite for Video Contest

Education Post, you may recall, is a site nominally on the progressive-flavored wing of the reformster movement and headed up by Peter Cunningham. Cunningham is an old Chicago hand who worked assistant secretary for communications and outreach in the U.S. Department of Education in the Arne Duncan Department of Education. EdPost is backed by some big money, like Eli Broad and Laurene Jobs' Emerson Collective (which has given Duncan a job). Because for a while, a bunch of billionaires were really concerned that they were overmatched in the media by a bunch of bloggers writing for free on their lunch hours. I guess the world looks different when you're a billionaire.

Given that pedigree, it is not surprising when EdPost promotes charters and choice. What's a teensy bit surprising is whom they've teamed up with this time to do it. This contest runs the full gamut of reformsters from A to B.

So maybe we actually are kind of similar

Yesterday they happily announced a sort of contest to crowd-source some school choice PR, because, you know, "better conversations." (Yes, I linked to EdPost-- it's no fair to talk about someone without letting readers see for themselves if they're so inclined.)

The Choices in Education contest has its very own website, and the premise looks similar to Jeanne Allen's "Let's Show John Oliver He's  big Doodyhead" contest from last year. Just make a video with your phone about how choice changed or your life (or why you desperately need it in your state) all in order to "elevate the story" of people's choices. Three top winners get $15K, three more get $5K, and there's a pair of people's choice awards for $5K each-- so a cool $70K. The contest encourages you to shoot the video with your phone, perhaps because they want that "real people support us" look and in part because a slick looking ad would just draw attention to the fact that reformsters have tons of money to throw around on PR stunts. I can't even imagine a world in which public schools could wave a giant wad of money around and holler, "This stack of cash goes to the people who do the best job of saying nice things about u."

But a closer look makes this contest even more interesting. First of all, instead of focusing only on charter schools, this contest is to promote a broader agenda:

There is no “one size fits all” school or educational model that works for everyone. That is why it is important for students and families to have the freedom to choose the pathway that best meets their needs, whether that is a different public school, charter, magnet, private school, virtual/blended, or homeschool.

That  moves us away from the strictly-charter advocacy and into something more closely aligned with, well, the agenda of Betsy DeVos. Plenty of charter advocates have cast a leery eye on voucher systems-- but this contest loves it all. And EdPost is promoting it.

Whose contest is this, exactly?

Well, the main address on the site is that of the Foundation for Excellence in Education, the Florida-based group that, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, was going to provide a platform to help launch Jeb Bush to the White House. FEE has actually changed its name, at least in some places, to ExcelInEd, a group that includes all the same players and still calls itself the Foundation for Excellence in Education in the fine print on its site. I bring ExcelInEd up only because they are nominally the launchers of this contest. Mostly I am just dying for them to open an Ohio branch so that we can call them EiEiO. FEE/EiE is one of the older, more well-entrenched reformy groups with a Who's Who of deep-pocketed donaters including Gates, Walton, Broad, Kellogg, Bloomberg, Schwab, News Corporation and Dick and Besy DeVos. 

Also sponsoring the contest? American Federation for Children, Betsy DeVos's advocacy group. AFC is a dark money group that has been working hard to push privatization of education in this country (for the children).  

Also? EdChoice, the advocacy group previously known as the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, the group launched by Milton Friedman. 

National School Choice Week, the Foundation for Blended and Online Learning, Agudath Israel of America, and Classical Conversations (that last group provides content materials for homeschooling parents focusing on the three C's-- classical, Christian, and community). 

So while this contest does represent more of the same old, same old, it has certainly drawn together an assortment of bedfellows. And as was the case with Jeanne Allen who used to think Trump and his administration was awful, but then she got over it, more and more reformsters, even the supposedly progressive ones, are more and more willing to align themselves with the DeVosian agenda after all. While folks in the reform movement may try to put some distance between themselves and other elements, it seems they can still bridge the tiny gaps tat sort of separate them.

In the meantime, your entry should only include you and your family members, and it has to be under two minutes. Grab your smart phone and record what you think about school choice today! Maybe you'll win $15,00o. In the meantime it's heartwarming to know that voucher vs. charter, free market vs. social justice, GOP vs. Democrats, reformsters don't have all that much trouble putting their differences aside in order to pursue the privatization of American education.