ICYMI: Back in Action Edition (1/7)

Damn, but it's cold outside. Time to catch up on some of the good reads for the week.

Black CPS Student Migration 

In Chicago, it's becoming evident that school closure and privatization can be a way to drive the non-white, non-wealthy citizens out of town. Here's a look at how that has been playing out.

School Choice, Segregation, and Democracy

The January issue of the School Superintendents Association has a thorough look at how stratification is harmful to the common good.

The Hidden Attrition of Success Academy

As the first cohort of SA finishes up, Gary Rubinstein notices that their attrition rate is probably even worse than we thought.

Betsy DeVos in Her Own Words

Valerie Strauss pulls eight quotes from the Secretary of Education's first year to tell her story.

The Mind Trust Attack

One of the prototypes for public-private partnership is circumventing democracy in order to dismantle public education is Indiana's Mind Trust. Here's Thomas Ultican with a breakdown of Mind Trust history.

Is the Smarter Balanced test Broken

Something may be wrong with the most recent results of the test, and SBA doesn't want to talk about the problem.

Flanagan's Best of 2017

There is no better use of your free reads at EdWeek than Nancy Flanagan's blog, and she's listed her top pieces of the year.

When Readers Struggle: Background Knowledge

Russ Walsh with some practical and thoughtful ideas about the value of background knowledge in learning to read.

Only You Can Prevent School Finance Ignorance

Jersey Jazzman once again explains what newspaper coverage can't (or won 't) get right about covering how education tax dollars are spent.

What Could Ever Go Wrong with a Five Start System?

Another explanation of how to game a rating system

How NYS Decided to Lower Teacher Standards for Some Charter Schools

The story of how New York charters won the right to hire unqualified warm bodies to fill teaching spots.

Charter Schools Are Changing America, and Not for the Better

The Nation takes a look at a report on the negative effects of charterization

NM: Another Charter Swindle

Scot Glasrud was a big charter operator. Now he's headed for prison.

The former head of Southwest Learning Centers, a chain of three prominent New Mexico charter schools, has been convicted of stealing $2 million dollars from the charters in the course of a fifteen-year fraud.

Local station KRQE laid out back in 2014 some of the ways that Glasrud was using the charter school biz to make himself a rich man. He was paid a salary of $210K-- more than any superintendent in the state save the head of Albuquerque schools. And he perfected the charter art of self-dealing. The school paid Glasrud's company over $800K to lease two planes for flight instruction. The school also leased property from a Glasrud company.

It should be noted that New Mexico's charter school law allows only non-profit schools. But Glasrud's end run around that law is a typical move in non-profit states. New Mexico has seen plenty of profit-making non-profit carter schools-- often with the encouragement of their state education head. All this despite the fact that New Mexico charter schools actually spend more taxpayer dollars per student than public school, achieving completely unremarkable results.

In other words, Glasrud could have continued to profit hugely from his mediocre non-profit charter schools, and it would have been a completely legal charter school scam. Remember-- a non-profit charter school is just a for-profit with money-laundering in place. But apparently he got greedy.

So he overcharged himself for lease costs. And he set up fake companies to do fake construction and pocketed the tax dollars he received from the state. The business manager hired by the charter company went to company barbecue at Glasrud's house and was reportedly stunned by what he saw--  guest house, a dozen collector automobiles-- and started digging. He found a variety of irregularities-- my personal favorite was that Glasrud paid a high-end Las Vegas restaurant sommelier for work as a "substitute teacher." The business manager went to the FBI and helped them investigate, leading to Glasrud's eventual conviction.

Please note that it took federal investigators to convict this guy. The state of New Mexico was perfectly happy with his work.

This is the charter industry in New Me3xico. It's perfectly okay to operate a profit-making non-profit charter school because that doesn't break any laws. To cross into actual illegal activity requires some really spectacular scammage, and even then, someone has to make the feds notice. It would be nice if this story were unique, or just a New Mexico thing. But it's not, thanks to super-loose regulation and oversight of charter schools all across the nation.

Why Unified Applications Can't Work

I'm shocked, I tell you. Shocked.

Einstein Charter Schools in New Orleans have been reprimanded for violating the terms of the NOLA OneApp.

Also shocked

Unified applications are supposed to be a critical part of a charter-choice system. You know-- where parents get to choose the right school for their children. Instead of tracking down and navigating several different application processes, parents just have to fill out one form. And this is just not for their benefit-- under a multi-app system, a student might be accepted by four different schools, and those schools won't know whether they have an empty seat or not until the first day in the fall.

There's a problem with the uni-app, however-- children  aren't widgets.

Under a charter-choice system, schools do compete for students. But in such a system, all students are not created equal. Not all students are equally desirable to charter schools. Students who don't come with any extra costs to educate (no special needs, no English-as-second-language issues, no behavioral problems) are desirable. Students who make good test numbers for the school are desirable. Students who come from supportive home environments are desirable. Students who cost more, have more issues, have fewer skills, draw lower scores-- these students are not as desirable to charters.

Imagine that the Big Ten college basketball teams went to a new system in which anybody who wanted to play could fill out a single app, and a central authority would assign each student who applied to a team-- regardless of skill. Would the Big Ten shrug and say, "Well, I guess we get what we get. let's make the best of it?"

Maybe. Or maybe they would game the system like crazy.

So Einstein just went ahead and admitted some students on their own-- "outside" the OneApp system. That's after the charters manage to "nudge" students with careful marketing that signals what sort of students are or are not a "good fit" for a particular school.

Look-- the market sorts. That's what it does. That's how it works. Every business in the country sorts potential customers into categories based on desirability, and they compete for the most desirable customers. Charter schools are businesses, and so they will sort students. The most desirable students will be courted by multiple charters while, on the other end of the scale, less desirable students will be warehoused at Hot Potato Public School.

No market will tolerate rules that circumvent their sorting functions. Imagine that the government passed a new restaurant law-- everyone who wants to eat out fills out a single application and local government and "admits" them to a restaurant, which means each restaurant now has a group of customers assigned to them by the government. Chez Fancee Paunts may be assigned a bunch of burger joint fans who can't afford to pay more than $5.00 for a meal. Micky D's may find itself serving customers with complicated food allergies. All of the restaurants in town would fight back, hard, against the rule, and would look for ways to circumvent them, because all customers are not created equal.

For charter school purposes, all students are not created equal, and it only makes sense that charters would do everything in their power to exert control over which students they have to serve. That means marketing, recruiting, pushing out, and, yes, circumventing a unified application system. You can talk all day about how you want to create a system that is "fair" to students and their parents, but charter schools must by their nature be most concerned about what is most "fair" for the business interests of the school.

How To Pass for Human

I love this video

When you’re a teacher about an hour away from vacay and take off the professionalism for a minute pic.twitter.com/6AYlvfDznP

— José Luis Vilson, NBCT (@TheJLV) December 22, 2017

I am not always a fan of dancing teacher videos. The viral ones where a teacher or principal steps out at a student event, stealing focus from the students and turning a bunch of cheerleaders into his or her anonymous backup squad? Not a fan. But this sort of open, human moment done for the students and not for a camera-- I love it. And I was particularly struck by this response to it.

This made me smile. Do we need a hashtag of teachers acting human just to remind people that we are? We've all done a little dance or sang a song or done something "silly" to engage our students.

— Bree BarnettDreyfuss (@BarnettDreyfuss) December 24, 2017

It is true that students don't generally view us as actual human beings. It's unfortunate because viewing us as something other than human has a couple of drawbacks.

One, it adds to the notion that school exists on some plane separate from the Real World that human beings (specifically our students) live in.

Two, it can lessen our impact as role models. I often say that education is about learning to be human in the world-- if our students don't see that we are doing that very thing, they won't see any examples we set about how it can be done.

Three, if they see us as coming from some other planet, they will trust us less when it comes to what we teach.

Those of us who teach in small town settings have an advantage in the Passing for Human arena, though sadly some of my colleagues actively toss that advantage away. But if you'd like to create a convincing illusion that you ate a full-fledged human being, here are some ideas you can act out.

Teachers Eat Food

My students are often astonished to run into me in a restaurant or grocery store. When I taught middle school, they would feel compelled to call me out the next day. "Hey, Mr. Greene. I saw you in the grocery store. It's true. I saw him in the grocery store." It was as if I'd been caught giving unicorn rides to fairies. Never underestimate what it means to your students to know that you perform some of the most basic, simple human functions.

Teachers Believe Things

Lots of my colleagues sing in church choirs, and students sit in those congregations and see those teachers up there. It means something to students to see that we have beliefs (it also means something to students to know that we have those beliefs, but that we don't try to push them in our classrooms).

Teachers Know People and Places Outside of School

I have friends and family who work in not-school settings. I have spent some summers working in such places myself. For my high school students, many of whom are already holding down a job, that's a valuable connection. My lessons about communicating to others and speaking to customers are better lessons because I can connect them to, for example, my time at a catalog call center. Knowing what it's like inside local employers because I have friends or family there is useful for me, but it's useful for my students, too. When they get on the bus at the end of the day, I don't just fold up in a closet until tomorrow.

Teachers Have Personal Lives

This is tricky, because it is possible to go too far. A detailed description of your dating life is probably over-sharing. I once had a teacher who depended on their students for the kind of emotional and personal feedback and support that should come from friends-- that's problematic, too. But to hide your personal life as if it's something shameful is also problematic. You have to know your audience and choose your time carefully and never demand approval or support for your life from them. But if your students don't know whether you are married or single, childless or a parent-- well, you can't be surprised that they think you're a robot.

Teachers Have History

You come from somewhere. You've done things. My eighth grade history teacher told us all these stories about growing up in the Depression and the jobs he worked and at the time we thought, "Ha! We got him to wander off topic again." Only later did it dawn on me that he had taught us some basic history-- things have not always been the way they are now, and they won't stay this way forever, either.

You were not unpacked, fully formed, by a principal who plopped the completed you into a classroom. You grew up. You went places. You saw things and did things.

Teachers Do The Stuff They Teach About

All right. Some don't, and that's unfortunate. I don't know how you teach writing well if you don't write yourself. I've been fortunate to have a weekly column n the local paper for twenty years, so I not only write regularly, so when I talk to my students about writing, they know what I'm saying comes from some place other than the mysterious teacher planet where teachers receive curriculum they just pass along because they're expected to. All of my local choral director friends perform in community theater. Don't you think it makes a huge impression on them when they look up on stage and  see their teacher appearing as Captain Von Trapp or Velma in Chicago.

Teachers Are Passionate about Things

Again, this can be carried to an unhealthy extreme. But one of the great complaints about students is teachers who act as if the students don't have anything else going on in their lives, which leads them to conclude that we don't have anything else going on in our own lives (because we are robots who never leave the school building). Do your students know what you care about? Do you like to make music? Do you like to paint water lilies? Do you collect  ceramic frogs? It doesn't matter-- let your students know that you have a passion in life other than teaching (because live humans have more than two dimensions, so to pass for a live human, you must have at least three dimensions as well).

So put a ceramic frog on your desk or use you paintings as the background image for your website.

Yes, there is an art to all of this. You aren't trying to pass for human so that your classroom can be all about you, and you aren't trying to convince your students to give you a round of applause for being a special snowflake. You can't force it, or drag it our purposefully because it's in the social-motional learning program script for today. It has to come naturally out of your own humanity. You are trying to pass for human because

Four, part of education is learning to recognize the common threads of humanity that bind us all., and we ought to be able to practice that with the adult human in the room with us for 180 days.

So yeah.

Teachers Dance.

Teachers dance and laugh and other impromptu explosions of feeling and heart and care. These at not just silly moments; they're as important as anything else we do, because our students see in them just how they can be human in the world. It's a big deal. That's why they think to record it.

What To Watch in 2018

Every year brings fun new stories in the education world, and I'm sure there are some surprises lurking over the horizon, but as 2018 unfurls, there are several stories I think are worth following. Who knows-- maybe even some legitimate education reporters might cover some of these.

What does ESSA really mean? 

So states are sending in their plans and Betsy DeVos is happy tom sign off on most of them, and we could talk about the policy implications and thinky tanks can do all manner of reviews and white papers, but the more important question is "Will ESSA have any realm effect on real teachers in real classrooms?"

One of the most influential pieces of reformster policy has been the elevation of the standardized test; real teachers in real classrooms now get to experience near-constant pressure to get those test scores up. ESSA kept testing front and center, so in that respect, it will make no difference on the classroom teacher level. Will some states create policies that actually affect the classroom beyond another batch of bureaucratic hoopjumping and paperwork schnozzlin?

Will Competency Based Personalized Outcome Focused Learning AI Education Mass Customized Learning Build Market Share?

Call it what you like-- the movement to create Summit-style program-in-a-software-box computer driven data-gathering education-flavored program products continues to gather steam, in no small part due to its attractiveness to investors. Its appeal is multipronged. First, it's an actual product you can move to market. Second, by its very nature, it reduces the education biz to nice near numbers. None of this wiffle-waffle teacher drivel-- push a button, and your screen shows you good hard data, the kind that can be used to delineate clear-cut success or failure (which h in turn is helpful for social impact investors).

It also has the advantage of marketability-- people ;love the idea of personalized learning programs sculpted to student needs, and while that's not what anyone is actually truly selling at this point, it makes a great pitch.

Education professionals aren't generally excited, but since when did that matter. Will this edufad continue to spread and delight corporate privatizers, or will it finally collapse under the weight of its own unfulfillable promises?

Will the standards movement continue to survive under ground?

Common Core is the policy that dare not speak its name, and as a set of national standards, it's dead, and good riddance. But on the state and local level, that standards movement is alive and well and undermining good teachers across the country (while also emboldening bad ones).

What new crap will the ed tech industry try to foist on schools?

This has been a story every year for decades now, but it's still one of the more entertaining questions to cover every year. 2018 should be no different.

Have we seen the worst of the teacher pipeline problem?

We've been hollering about the problem of being able to hire enough teachers (not really a teacher shortage, but a shortage of states and districts making the job attractive enough to draw applicants). College teacher programs are drying up and people are leaving the profession by the busload. Has the problem reached its worst yet? Will some states actually do something about it, or will some legislatures continue to use this issue as an opportunity to lower the bar on what it takes to fill a teaching job (and in so doing, make the pipeline problem even worse)? And will anyone implement some actually useful policies for addressing the huge problem with the shortage of teachers of color?

Segregation?

We've talked a lot about the issue of school segregation this year. Will we keep talking next year, or will somebody actually try to do something about it? Because some days, I have to say, it seems a little like the gun issue-- some folks would much rather talk than act, and some other folks really rather like things the way they are.

Will anyone elevate teacher voice?

In 2018, will we finally see journalist who get a quote from a teacher before they call Mike Petrilli?  Will thinky tank panels about Some Issue or Other in Education include actual teachers? Hell, I'd settle for retired actual teachers, just because they have more free hours for this crap. Will education journalists make a real effort to give teachers the same kind of amplification they provide for policy wonks and bureaucrats?

And as always, will anyone address the fundamental issues involved in the ed debates?

So much of the debating misses the underlying points. For instance, the debates about public schools versus corporate, privatized education are not about which methods are best for meeting the country's educational goals-- they are about what the country's education al goals should be. And the focus on "college and career readiness" has not been about how to best fulfill education's promise, but about changing-- lessening-- what that promise should be. And much of the ed reform movement is inextricably bound up in a belief that democracy sucks and we should get rid of it.

But coverage never looks at those foundational issues. Or as I often put it when I am waggling my fist at the computer screen where someone has suggested, vis-à-vis the ed debates, "Aren't we all after the same thing?"-- no, no we're not. But we never talk about that.

Building bridges?

Conversely, can we identify areas where we do agree? I believe such conversations are possible with some folks, and I believe they're worth having. I will continue to look for those in 2018.

Will cyber charters finally die?

Man, this is the story I would most lie to see this year. Charter schools will continue to be a point of discussion, particularly as individual charters continue to find ways to embarrass the brand. But there's really nothing less debatable than the fact that cyber charters have proven to be an utterly failed experiment. Unregulated, unaccountable, and unsuccessful, cyber charters are all the worst features of charter schools wrapped up into one giant money-sucking mess. I would like to see the ugly truth hammered at with such regularity that the uselessness of the cybers is common knowledge and so many parents vote with their feet that all their millions of lobbying dollars in state capitols will not save them.

Hey, a boy can dream.

Is Betsy DeVos a Nothingburger?

While I was poking through the big list of articles I hung onto from last year, I noticed several things that I hadn't really caught as they were happening. But as I scanned backward, it seems that interest in and concern about Betsy DeVos slowly decreased.

When her selection was first announced and her hearing was held, plenty of folks were somewhere between Hugely Alarmed and Panic Stricken.  She would enshrine national vouchers in policy. She would dismantle the education department. She would destroy the teachers unions and gut public education. She would install a theocratic regime laced with monumental stupid. She was so bad that even people who could not name another education secretary can name, and decry, her. As she had in Michigan, she would take a Godly chain saw to public education while raising up corporate privatization in its place. And at this stage, I don't think there's much doubt that all those goals are her dream.

Yet other signs were there from Day One as well-- the signs of a total lack of qualifications that would thwart her in the office.

She is used to dealing with legislators with bluster and a checkbook. She does not know how to deal with Congress.

She has never run a large organization before, never held a regular job. She's almost never dealt with people who are not paid to agree with her. Now she is trapped in a big tangly organizational web based on the sorts of workplace and bureaucratic interactions she doesn't know how to do.

She has no experience with public education, and that ignorance runs from top to bottom. She doesn't have experience with the dailiness of working in a school, and she doesn't have experience looking at the ways policies affect the operation of schools. She's like a woman whose only experience with music is in listening to live symphony concerts, and no she has to run a high-end stereo system with nothing but directions written in Sanskrit, and just literally does not know what any of the knobs and buttons and wires do.

Hers is not the ignorance of someone who doesn't know what he doesn't know. DeVos reminds me of a student from years ago. A colleague teaching the gifted class started a unit on comparative religion, looking at the world's many faiths, and this student (we'll call her Pat) refused to study the unit. My colleague asked why and Pat, a hard-right conservative Christian explained-- "I don't need to know anything about the other religions, because they are all wrong." I suspect that DeVos never thought she needed to study up for her job or education regulations or how things get done in DC because all of that stuff is just wrong anyway, and in her righteous rightness, she would just plough through and above it all.

And so, as we look back at 2017, we don't see that she's accomplished much. She has been great at sitting on her hands and avowing the department's commitment to doing nothing, protecting nothing and nobody except the interests of corporate private interests. And that's not nothing-- it allows folks like predatory lenders and predatory private school operators to prey with impunity. But she couldn't get Congress to even pretend to work with her to implement any of her policy wish list, and as a member of a do-nothing administration, she has done more nothing than almost anyone.

Betsy DeVos looked like she was going to be Dolores Umbridge, tearing through beloved institutions and programs with destructive simper. Instead, she has turned out to be the teacher who sits at her desk, giving free days for half the semester and barely getting up to lead the class the other half, until the students come to understand that she can be ignored.

Secretaries like Arne Duncan and John King could really get in there and actively tear things up. Duncan wanted to impose Common Core on states and he by-God rewrote and circumvented laws to do it. But the DeVos era is increasingly defined by what she doesn't do, what she doesn't enforce, what she doesn't continue, what she doesn't refuse to stand up for.

Granted, that is undoubtedly part of her set of goals-- to reduce the Department of Education to an inert blob that doesn't get in the way. This is destructive in its own way-- I expect that as the DeVosian era continues, we will continue to see Bad Actors emboldened by her inaction, like the student who tests the rules with greater and greater misdeeds as they realize that nobody is going to impose consequences on them. Racist policies? Ripping off students and taxpayers? Deliberate flouting of regulations? Well, that's just a state matter, and the feds won't say boo.

There are many important conversations about education going on in this country, but increasingly it's clear that DeVos is not and will not be part of them, partly because nobody feels the need to include her, partly because she doesn't feel any need to join in, and partly because she really doesn't understand most of what's being said.

We get the occasional prediction that DeVos will resign (here's NPR saying it again today), and maybe she will decide she wants to go back to working as a well-heeled lobbyist who can buy the kind of cooperation she needs. But I also wonder-- why bother to resign from a job that you're not actually doing (or taking pay for)? DeVos has not so much occupied the office as filled it with a DeVos-shaped void. Claudio Sanchez calls DeVos "irrelevant and isolated" and that seems about right. But that may be just how she likes it.

At the end of a year, DeVos's priorities-- or at least preferences-- remain clear. What is not clear is her path to actually accomplishing any of them. She has no allies in Congress. Her boss is unlikely to care much about what a sixty-year-old woman has to say about anything. And she can try talking to the rest of us, but is there anyone, really, who takes her seriously on the subject of national education policy? She certainly represents may of the existential threats to public education, but as Secretary of Education, I'm beginning to believe that she 's just a big nothingburger.

The Postal Service, the Free Market, and Education

President Trump took a shot at both Amazon and the USPS, providing the opportunity for another lesson in free markets and privatization.

First, Trump' suggestion-- that the postal service charge Amazon extra just for being Amazon-- is a great analogy for why the loss of net neutrality is such a bad idea. USPS essentially functions with "mail neutrality"-- if you pay the going rate for a particular service, the USPS doesn't care whether you're shipping lima beans or coffee beans or beanie babies.

Second, the USPS is a great reminder that there is no such thing as a free market. All markets are created and maintained by governments, and all we're ever really arguing about is which way the government will tilt the field. "Free market" just means "market  maintained by the government to favor certain interests that I like." The USPS is an unusual example in that the government has established a set of rules that are hugely tilted against the postal service-- in their budgeting and accounting, they are responsible for retirement benefit costs for the next seventy-five years. They are supposed to be, right now, funding the retirement costs of people who don't even work for them yet. This is bonkers-- no other business or government agency functions this way. Not surprisingly, ever since the rule was passed by Congress, the USPS has been in "debt."

Third. But wait-- isn't the USPS failing to compete with private businesses that are also in the package delivery service?

No-- because UPS and FedEx and the rest are not competing in the same business. The USPS is in the business of providing mail delivery for every single resident of this country. FedEx, UPS and the rest are in the business of delivery mail and packages only where it is profitable to do so. But wait, you say-- the other carriers don't advertise that they'll only deliver to certain areas, and I know I FedExed a package to my Cousin Norbert in East Bumhack, Idaho. And it's true-- the other carriers will sell you delivery to every address in America. But what we residents of East Bumhack know is that other carriers will not deliver packages off the beaten (profitable) track themselves. They will hand those packages off, to be delivered by the United States Postal Service.

In other words, once again we see that the Free 9sic) Market does not want to serve every single customer-- just the profitable ones. Only those evil socialist government organizations will provide service to all US citizens.

This is the same deal offered by charter-choice-free market educators. They have no intention in serving every single customer out there. Just the profitable ones. Which means we can't talk about private or charter schools "competing" with public schools-- because they are not proposing to do the same thing.

It's only a competition if you're playing the same game. If your idea of "competition" is to change the game to something different that you feel you can win, that's not competition at all. Now, some other time, we can talk about how the "retail apocalypse" is not happening because cyberstores are chopping up the market, but because retailers like Sears and Toys R Us are having their assets stripped by bad managers who value grabbing profits over doing a good job. In the meantime, just remember that the free (sic) market is poorly equipped to deliver either the mail or quality public education.;