Still Pushing the Common Core

Among the living dead that stumble through the graveyard of failed education ideas, we can still find our old friend, the Common Core State [sic] Standards. Like an undead Tinker Bell, as long as someone's willing to clap for the damned thing, it will keep coming back.

This time the applause is coming from Brookings, an institution devoted to the notion that economists can be experts in anything. The actual research they're highlighting was produced by a research grant from the USC Rossier School of Education, and written up by Stephen Aguilar, Morgan Polikoff, and Gale Sinatra, all of the Rossier School. Polikoff is a familiar name in the ed reform world, and he can sometimes be found conducting serious research. This is not one of those times.

The paper purports to be about correcting misperceptions and misunderstandings about public policy, but I think it's better understood as a study of how to better sculpt PR to market your policy idea. And in this case they're looking at how to better manage the PR for Common Core.

Part of their premise is not unreasonable-- the Common Core did suffer from some bad PR based on some serious misperceptions. I'm not a fan, but you won't find me claiming that it will turn your daughters into lesbian socialists, nor will I blame every bad worksheet produced since the dawn of time on the infamous standards. But the "misperceptions" the researchers are working on here require a little more nuance and honesty.

The basic format of the research was to recruit some subjects through Amazon's Mechanical Turk, ask them some questions, give them a piece of "refutation text," and then ask them the questions again. There's a whole discussion to be had here about whether this technique shows people changing their minds or just figuring out what the "correct" answer is supposed to be, but I'm more interested in the marketing questions the researchers asked. Let's all take the quiz and see if we can get it right.

The Common Core State Standards only apply to English and mathematics.

Oh, yeah. These are going to be true-false questions, thereby allowing for minimum nuance.

So this one is supposed to be true, and it would be true if they hadn't used the wording "apply to." But new science standards are crowing loudly about being aligned to the Common Core, and in PA, for example, we've already taken the liberty to stretching ELA CCSS to cover some of history. So while it's true that Common Core standards were only written for math and English.

Common Core requires more testing than previous standards.

This one is supposed to be false. Based on what, I'm not sure. We can quibble about the amount of testing required by previous standards under No Child Left Behind, but "required" skips the meat of this question. CCSS came with tests attached and serious consequences as well for schools and individual  teachers, resulting in the predictable outcome that many states and schools started giving students test prep tests-- tests that were meant to "diagnose" weak spots in a school and otherwise help shape school programs.

In short, Common Core may not have required more actual testing, but it made those tests loom even larger than they had before.

The federal government required states to adopt the Common Core.

This point has become one of my tests of how honestly someone is conducting themselves in the Core debate, because nobody who has honestly examined the issue can say that this statement is either true or false. The feds did not "require" adoption of the core in the same way that an extortionist does not "require" you to pay protection money to keep your business from being burnt down.

States were staring down the barrel of the insanely unachievable mandate to have 100% of their students above average, or else get hit by sanctions by the feds (thanks, NCLB). Race to the Top and Race to the Top Lite (waiver edition) were all about saying, "We'll pretend the law doesn't apply to you as long as you do a few things for us, like adopt standards. And they can be any standards you want to try to sell us, but we'll tell you up front that Common Core Standards are a guaranteed win." In other words, "Nice state education system. It would be a real shame if anything happened to it."

The Common Core State Standards were developed by the Obama administration.

The correct answer is supposed to be "false," which is, again, technically correct. But the Obama administration pushed the standards like crazy, and the Obama administration provided the financial backing for the PARCC and SBA tests, which were the crucial part of making sure that states properly followed the standards (and paid a penalty for not doing so).

States adopting the Common Core are allowed to add content to the standards.

This is supposed to be true, which is again technically correct (you see the pattern developing here). What states couldn't do was delete or move anything, and they were only allowed to add 15% more standards. The state-added standards wouldn't be included on the Big Standardized Tests that were to decide everyone's fate, so that would have been a bit of an exercise in futility. 

The researchers might also have addressed the point that, practically speaking, anybody could do anything to the standards because there was nobody minding the store. If you added 20% or crossed out a bunch of standards, who exactly was going to say you nay? Of course, the only standards that matter are the ones that appear on the test, so in effect, PARCC and SBA had already deleted some standards (collaborative process, long term research, speaking and listening, etc) before any state even had a chance to.

The not quite honest nature of the Q & A is reflected in the refutation text, which is equally not-quite honest on some points. On the assumption some people make that the Obama administration created CCSS:

However, expert analysis of the history of Common Core shows this to be incorrect. In fact, the standards were developed by state education leaders. The creation of the standards began in 2009 and was led by the National Governors Association, and 48 of the nation’s 50 governors initially signed onto the standards. Teachers and experts in mathematics and English language arts wrote the standards, and 45 states then adopted them.

"Expert analysis"?! I'd love to see a citation for that one. And if in 2018 you are still saying that the standards were written by "teachers and experts in mathematics and language arts," I cannot take you seriously-- you either know you're lying, or you've gone out of your way to avoid learning anything about what actually happened.

So ultimately this piece of "research" is the 12,462,339th marketing study on how to push the Common Core with better PR. In this case, the question is, "If we could feed people some of the information we want them to believe about the standards, would it help our cause?"

The answer is "maybe, kind of," but then, that's been the answer for the last decade. I get the frustration that Core-ophiles must feel a being thwarted by the tin hat "Common Core will turn your son into a gay Satanist" crowd, but there's no ethical high ground to be gained with a determination to fight obstructionist misinformation with more favorable misinformation. More than anything, these folks need to just let the poor shambling shadow of the once and future standards to just lie down in its grave and heave one last breath. Common Core was not very attractive when it was fresh and new; years as a rotting zombie have not improved its looks. Just let it go.

AZ: More Charter Shenanigans

Another charter school has A) left its students high and dry and B) turned out to be a money-making scam for some con artist.

Yes, I know this kind of story is beyond repetitious at this point, but as teachers know, repetition is often a critical part of education, and people need to hear about these charter fails until it sinks in that they are the rule, and not the exception.

So.

This time it's the Discovery Creemos Academy (formerly known as the Bradley Academy of Excellence) in Goodyear, Arizona. (just a little bit west of Phoenix). Here's the first part of the message on their website:

We are deeply sorry, and it is with a heavy heart, that we announce classes at our school are suspended indefinitely, effective immediately.  We are terribly pained to find ourselves in this unfortunate situation and, most importantly, the potential negative effect this may have on you, your families and our students.

Yep. Citing an "endless barrage" of financial "adversities," the school is "tragically" closing. Because it's a business, not a school, and so it has to make the business decision of giving up when it's not making enough money.

The school's financial troubles might have been related to financial success of its president and CEO Daniel Hughes. Hughes is the head of the academy, but he also owns and operates Creemos, the educational program contracting outfit that Hughes "hired" to provide various services for the charter school. According to LinkedIn , the Creemos Association "employs a variety of programs to improve the overall educational experience in it's [sic] academies and in the communities that our students call home." Danile Hughes also turns up as the head of Hughes Collaborative, whose only other listed official is Brittany Hughes. The blurb at their website says that "As a determined and successful entrepreneur Mr. Hughes has fostered and cultivated a long line of profitable, sustainable, socially responsible, and environmentally friendly businesses connecting and cultivating relationships in communities throughout the United States." That firm offers a variety of consulting services, and is high on "Gen C'dings" ("seedings-- get it?) though the companies listed are, again, more of his companies, including some of those that appear under the Creemos banner.

Which brings us back to the academy. According to reporter Morgan Loew, the academy paid almost $1 million to Creemos in 2015 alone. So while the charter school was struggling financially, Hughes other businesses are profiting nicely. And now several hundred students are left scrambling to enroll in a new school halfway through the year.  The academy's unsigned letter is effusively weepy ("You are loved and appreciated") as well as letting us know that they are suffering (some staff members have been receiving death threats), but it's not so much an apology as a rationalization ("this decision is the right decision, and in the bigger picture, we know that all will be better served by making this transition now.")

So, Hughes gets rich, the students and their families are abandoned, and a whole bunch of taxpayer money vanishes.

[Update: as noted in a comment below, Hughes carefully waited till the 100th day, thereby insuring that he would collect all the money for the students he enrolled. The schools that pick them up now will get nothing.]

This is not an abnormal story for Arizona, which has aggressively pursued charter school expansion. A three year study by the centrist thinky tank Grand Canyon Institute found that charter administrators are paid more, teachers are paid less, and self-dealing is rampant.

This is why rules against for-profit charter schools are meaningless. I just start my charter, open my charter educational services side business, give myself a no-bid contract to provide services to the charter school, and pay myself whatever I feel like paying myself and voila-- my non-profit charter school produces a big fat profit for my side business, all financed with public tax dollars.

Arizona is full of this sort of baloney (and they, of course, are not alone). Operators, including some like Hughes who specialize in consulting argle bargle but who don't actually know anything about education, get rich, and students and their families and the taxpayers who fork over their hard-earned tax dollars in the expectation that the next generation of citizens will get a decent education-- all of those folks get shafted. Daniel Hughes wasn't the first to pull this hustle, and until Arizona gets smart about how it handles charters, he certainly won't be the last.

The Gasping Goldfish

Everyone knows and loves the analogy of the frog in hot water. According to that time-honored tale, the frog sits in the pot of water, the heat slowly rising. Things just keep getting slowly but surely worse. But because the rise of heat is slow and barely perceptible, the frog never jumps out, and is ultimately cooked to death.

I'd like to offer a replacement story, one that I think better mirrors the kind of escalating situations that we deal with in education. In place of the boiled frog, may I suggest the gasping goldfish?

The goldfish wasn't always gasping. It lived in a bowl with a pretty plastic castle that it enjoyed swimming around, though it could never quite swim up to the top of the castle, because there wasn't quite enough water for that. But the goldfish learned how to work with the water it had.

But then a cat came and slurped up some of the water. And the goldfish's keeper stopped by to say, "Look, I'm just going to take a little bit of the water out to water a plant. You'll be okay, right?" And the water level dropped.

And crack opened in the glass of the fishbowl that let a few drops of water leak out every day. And a thirsty bird flew down and sucked up a few more drops. And someone else stopped by to "borrow" a little water to dampen a rag for cleaning off the counter. And someone else dipped a cup in to take some water for the gerbils in a nearby cage because they were getting thirsty.

On and on it went, day after day. Everyone who stopped by the fishbowl only took a little bit of water, and always for a good purpose. But at the end of the month, the goldfish lay gasping on a damp bed of colored pebbles, no longer surrounded by enough water to keep it alive.

If you have been a teacher for the past decade or so, your experience has been of having resources slowly and inexorably taken away from you. We're going to take a week or two in the spring to take the new state tests. We're going to take a few other weeks during the year to take the test prep tests so we can be ready for the state test. We've cut one of the positions in your department to save money-- you'll just teach more kids now. We're using a new method of record keeping for lesson plans, which must now include records of how you're aligning with the standards. We're cutting your class time back so students can spend more time in test prep remediation. We have some more programs that we want you to implement in your classroom. We need to send you to several days of training for this new software. We need you to cover for an absent colleague because we don't have enough subs. We need you to run your own library units because we've fired all the librarians, and we'll need you to use planning time to make your own copies because we fired all the aides as well. And we had to hire an uncertified warm body to teach next door to you-- could you keep an eye on her and help her out? And you aren't getting a raise in real dollars any time soon-- would you just find a way to make ends meet at home, somehow, on your own?

It goes on and on, and nobody ever says "We want to shorten your teaching year by six weeks"-- it's all taken in small increments. And rarely does anyone ask you to spend time on something that is a total and complete waste of your time-- it mostly seems like reasonable, worthwhile stuff.

And yet somehow, after a few years of this, there you are, gasping for air on a damp bed of cheerfully colored stones, remembering when you could actually swim past the second story windows of the little plastic castle. And like our old friend the boiled frog, by the time you realize that you're in trouble, the rim of the bowl may be too far above you to reach.

For most of my career, I became more efficient and focused every year, and that made it possible for me to accomplish more with every new class. This was my professional growth-- getting better at enough things that I could cam more learning into each new set of 180 days. But nowadays, it's different. I still get more efficient, and I still find newer, better ways to do my job and build my craft. But I no longer approach each year with the question, "What more can we do this year?" Now my annual Big Planning Question is "Do I have to cut something again this year, and if so, how can I manage those cuts for the least possible damage." In terms of the quality and quantity of education I can deliver to my students, I peaked years ago, and as the years have drained away time and support, I've just been trying to minimize the damage to the work I do.

Is the fish growing if it keeps coming up with clever ways to swim in less and less water? I suppose so. But it sure doesn't feel like the kind of growth that makes you feel like the bowl is half, or three-quarters, full.

This is not a whine. You get what you get and you do the best you can with what you've got-- that's the job in a million different work settings. And when all is said and done, teaching is way more rewarding and important than swimming around a plastic castle. But if you want to understand why teaching isn't quite the draw it once was-- well, I'd say check how much water is left in the bowl.

Charters Moving Against the Tide?

Is charter school growth in the US slowing? Ariana Prothero at EdWeek says yes. She says that in the twenty-five years since the first charter law was passed, it has been full speed ahead, but--

But since 2013, that growth rate has dropped sharply and some of the possible culprits are familiar: high real estate costs, teacher shortages, and politics.

She reports that researchers from the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) took a close-up look at the San Franciso Bay area, which is experiencing a negative charter growth rate for the first time (more closed than opened) to see what exactly the issues might be. CRPE is a think tank funded by all the usual reformy suspects, and the report itself was funded by Silicon Schools Fund, another charter advocacy group (EdWeek, sadly, failed to mention any of this.). So the report is a study with a definite agenda-- identifying obstacles and overcoming them (the final section of the report is headed "Solutions"), so nothing in the report is going to challenge the premise that charters are awesome and we should all have more of them. But it is an interesting study in what the charter advocates think their obstacles are.

After some brief charter history, some data substantiating the slowdown, and some details about the Bay Area charter scene, CRPE gets to the Big Obstacles. This list is the result of interviews with charter leaders, so again, we're looking at the perceptions of charter fans.

1) Real Estate Problems

Unsurprising in the Bay Area, because everyone who is not a newly minted tech is having a Bay Area real estate problem. Facilities are a "hard cap" on charter growth, which underlines what we've seen all along-- the charter school movement has been as much a real estate movement as an educational one.

Look across the country and you find guys like Carl Paladino of Buffalo, who got involved in charter schools because they were a great way to make a killing in the real estate business. You also find areas (eg NYC) where the charter movement has been about finding creative ways to steal public-owned buildings (or portions of them) and gift them to private charter school operators. Or as the report says:

For charter leaders, the ideal scenario would be to secure long-term facilities in unused district properties or to colocate in underutilized district buildings.

Well, yes. And if I were opening a new McDonalds in town, it would be ideal for local government to just give me a building to put my business in. There is an irony in the modern charter movement-- we want to apply business models and methods to schools, but not the part where the business has to invest a bunch of capital to get up and running. We would like to skip that part and just be given Free Stuff from the public.

2) Escalating Political Street Fights

Districts facing financial strains often see charters as responsible for their challenges (whether this perception is accurate or not). [Spoiler alert-- it is]  As a result, charter growth becomes an enemy of district financial security in the minds of some school boards

So, not so much street fighting as public education fighting back against the long-running and debilitating attacks of the charter sector. The leaders interviewed said that political resistance to charters is growing, in part because of "the perceived financial impact on districts," a perception that exists because of reality.

The modern charter movement has always depended on one huge central lie-- that multiple schools can be operated for the same cost as a single school. They can't. The solution here is simple. Get a politician to stand up and say, "We believe that having choice and charter schools is so important that we want to raise your taxes so that we can fully fund them." Oddly enough, that has not yet happened.

Meanwhile, the charter "brand" collapses under the weight of its own under-performing reality. Every time a charter closes mid-year, pushes out students, hires unqualified "teachers," turns out to be mediocre or worse,  reminds the taxpayers that they have no say in how the school is run, or gets caught in some sort of shenanigans, more members of the public realize that charters do NOT come with the same commitments and promises as actual public schools. Every time one more teacher leaves a charter school and tells tales of what a shit show it was, it gets just a little harder for charters to find staff.

Charters promise too much and deliver too little, all at too great a cost, and so time is not their friend. The longer the movement goes, and the more people confront the reality of it, the stiffer the resistance becomes;.

3) Start-up Funding Is Hard To Get for Less-Connected Leaders

Don't have friends in rich places? You may not be able to get an investment to start your charter school. And charter investors are not interested in breaking into new areas. Why, it's almost as if a business model deliberately choose NOT to serve all potential "customers," leaving some to just languish. Go figure.

4) Lack of coordination and "survival of the fittest " thinking are self-inflicted wounds that constrain supply.

A consistent theme we heard from Oakland operators in particular was the view that the high concentration of charters in the city causes any new school to spend more time and energy competing with other charter schools for students, teachers, and facilities.

But wait-- that can't be right. I thought competition bred excellence and spurred everyone on to heights of awesomeosity! But no-- the leaders suggest that market competition wastes resources that could be used to educate students, and that fighting for resources leaves deserving schools working without everything they need. Say it ain't so!

5) Mature CMOs are slowing their expansion plans to attend to instruction, talent development, and other internal issues.

Well, sort of. Some are trying to tweak their work because they are discovering that their amateur-hour plans to raise test scores aren't actually working.

And because charters are a business, some charter businesses are deciding to get into another line of work. This is not unusual in an evolving and mature business-- since your main commitment is to making money, and not to whatever method of making money you started out with, evolution is natural and normal. (For example, when was the last time MTV showed music videos?)

And so we have both AltSchool actually getting out of the charter school business, while Summit also shifts more of its energy into its sales arm. Summit and AltSchool both started out as school-running businesses (Summit does charters, while AltSchool was a boutique tech private outfit). Both have decided that they don't want to be just in the school business any more-- they want to be in the school-in-a-box software vending business. More income, less overhead. AltSchool has actually closed several of its schools. It's a natural business evolution, and one more reminder that modern charter schools are businesses first, and schools second (or third or twelfth or, eventually, not at all).

6) Parent demand is generally strong

The report insists that parent demand is strong, and then goes on to make a curious observation:

Gentrification is a more widely reported issue for schools. Charter schools are concerned that the students they seek to serve—usually low-income students, students of color, and English language learners—are being pushed out of the communities that charter schools tend to serve.

Well, yes. Because one of the tools of gentrification is, in fact, charter schools. They are natural partners-- to make a neighborhood "better," you replace the neighbors, and to make a school "better," you replace the students. Can these charter leaders really not know that they are instrumental in the gentrification they bemoan?

7) Talent is an ongoing challenge, sort of

"Teachers are becoming more scarce" is a thing people keep saying. I prefer "school systems are failing to make teaching attractive enough to entice people to pursue it." Charters are feeling the pinch as well, though they are not worried because they are using fun techniques like "grow your own" or "allow charters to hire any warm body" Charters also report having less trouble finding school "leaders" which could be because those jobs have few professional requirements but pay really, really well. "You qualify because you have a pulse, and we'll pay you a buttload of money," turns out to be a good recruiting slogan.

8) Authorizers remain unpredictable.

That damn democracy. California has few restrictions on chartering, but they do make charter operators go through (mostly) local boards, which means if you can't go all LA and just pack the board with charter fans, you might suffer from political pushback. And if you pack a board and then the electorate gets angry about the results, your fortunes could change pretty quickly.

Charter operators like to say that they want authorizers to decide based on what's best for kids, which is a lot easier than making the case that charters would be best for kids.

9) The challenges are regional and specific.

Here, I don't disagree. The rules vary by state and community and the particular charter operator. But some factors-- the failure of charters to deliver, the negative impact on public school finances, the lack of sufficient funding, the theft of public property, the charters' ultimate value of business considerations over educational ones-- these remain pretty constant from place to place.

Solutions?

CRPE wraps up the report with some proposed solutions to the problems listed above. These are.... well, these are solutions only if you decide that the interests of charter operators are the only interests that need to be served.

Facility shortage? Make public districts hand over more publicly owned property to charter schools, change zoning laws, and get the legislature to underwrite the funding charters need to grab real estate. And create a commission to "coordinate" the handover of public facilities to private charter operators.

Bad competition? Create some central planning authority to coordinate the expansion strategies of charters. How that translates into anything other than telling charters where they're allowed to expand, and how THAT translates into anything other than charter operators saying, "No, I don't want to" is not clear. CRPE acknowledges that no charters are saying, "Please give us less autonomy."

Staff? Do some recruiting. From wherever.

Limited choices? Increase a diverse supply of operators. Man. Why is it that people whose whole argument is "Free market! Free Market!" do not understand how the free market works. The free market does not give you what you wish for-- it gives you what it thinks it can make money giving you. It may be cool to think, "Wow! With 500 cable channels, we could have an arts channel and a stand-up comedy channel and a channel with nothing but music videos," but the free market does not care what you think would be cool.  Well, says CRPE, we could invest heavily in the more diverse models. Who would do that, and why?

More data? CRPE thinks more data about the charter market is needed. Who would collect that, and why?

Toxic local politics? Maybe charter operators could negotiate some sort of deal whereby they didn't completely suck the financial life blood out of public schools (and the schools would hand over real estate just to, you know, be cool).. Maybe they could keep trying to pack local school boards. Maybe they could convince district leaders to "think of their jobs as overseeing a broad portfolio of options with various governance models" except of course some of the items in the portfolio they "oversee" would be completely outside of their control and would be hostile and damaging to the parts of their portfolio that they are actually, legally responsible. Honestly, most of these solutions boil down to "let's wish real hard that public school people will just like us more because it's inconvenient for us when they don't."

Bottom line

I'm happy to see the modern charter tide ebbing. And I'm not sad to see that folks like CRPE and the interviewees don't really have a handle on why it's happening. I agree that it doesn't have to be this way, but it will be this way as long as modern charter boosters fail to acknowledge their major systemic issues, insist on inadequate funding in a zero-sum system, disenfranchise the public, underperform in educating students, and behave as businesses rather than schools. As I said above, time is not on their side, and neither is their inability to grasp the problems they create for public education in this country.

The Testing Cloak

Count this among the many bad side effects of test-centered schools. Test results can be a lovely curtain used to cloak a multitude of ills.

A school with decent test scores, either by themselves or translated into whatever sort of rating shenanigans used by your state, can deploy those scores as a shiny curtain. "Don't look behind this at whatever else we're doing to your child's education! Just look at these bee-yoo-tee-ful scores! Proof that we are a great school!"

Cut the arts? Downsize every department? Eat up a third of the year with test prep tests and plain old test prep? Beat down staff morale? Close the library? Fire support staff?

Just wave that beautiful cloak!

Test-centered schools are education reduced to one simple job-- get students to score well on a single narrow Big Standardized Test. And reducing education to that one simple job absolves schools and districts (and states-- looking at you, Florida) from having to do half-decent work on any of the other jobs that we used to associate with education.

For schools run by data-driven administrators, or administrators who are not committed to the full picture, or even administrators who are facing severe financial pressures, the testing cloak is a godsend, a piece of helpful protective cover. "We may be gutting the system, but hey-- look at our test scores!"

That's why the reaction to any school's tale of its lovely test scores has to be the same--

"Very nice scores-- but what did it cost you to get them? "

If the answer is, "Why nothing! We just aligned the curriculum and voila-- test scores!"-- well, this answer is a lie.Keep asking what the lovely cloak cost, because it certainly wasn't free, and it probably wasn't cheap. Make sure you get to see what's behind the curtain.

IN: Of God and Big Bucks

This two-part tale was too important to tuck in with the rest of my regular "In Case You Missed It" post yesterday.

Over the course of two stunning editions of the Washington Post's Answer Sheet column, Carol Burris has laid out the history of privatization in Indiana, a state that has been close on Florida's heels as a leader is dismantling public education. Burris, the president of the Network for Public Education, connects the dots quickly and clearly (and with sources all the way).

Part One takes us all the way back to 1996, when Mitch Daniels and Mike Pence led a private discussion about how to remake public education in a new, more profitable image. Daniels, an executive at Eli Lily, would become governor and lay the groundwork for the destruction of public ed in Indiana. He grabbed control of school funding for the state, while simultaneously crippling local districts' ability to fund, making schools dependent on legislative policy for survival-- and the GOP legislature has no real interest in such survival, particularly when it came to non-wealthy, non-white districts.

It's striking to see how many of the players way back when are names we know so much better today. A future business partner of Mrs. Donald Trump. Tony Bennett, whose shenanigans with the school grading system would cut short his next job with Jeb Bush. And pumping money into the reform agenda, the DeVos family. EdChoice, an organization devoted to keeping the Milton Friedman flame alive, is an Indiana group as well.

Once Daniels stepped aside, Mike Pence moved into the governor's mansion, and the dismantling continued. (The Pence years take us into Part Two.)

What's striking about Pence's tenure is how he radically expanded the work Daniels had done. While Daniels seemed focused primarily on expanding the free market and letting entrepreneurs jockey for education dollars via charters, Pence seems far more interested in making it easy for those dollars to find their way to private religious schools. It's under Pence that charters give way to vouchers, and vouchers allow the unregulated flow of tax dollars to all manner of private religious schools, with deliberate disregard for whom or what those schools are willing to teach.

The story of Indiana is one of how various pretenses ("We need to rescue poor students from a few failing public schools") are simply a foot in the door, a pickax in the foundation, and reformsters just keep chipping away so that there is less and less left of a true public education system. Indiana is also a story of how free market acolytes and hard-right Christians can work as natural allies for the destruction of true public schools.

It's a valuable read, with Part Three yet to come. Check this out. It's a good demonstration of how school reform really works in places like Indiana, as well as a reminder that, no matter what they say, some of the major players have been working toward very clear goals for decades.

Breaking News: It's Easy To Cheat On Line

iReady is one of many test prep businesses that have popped up since No Child Left Behind reared its misbegotten head. They say they're in the "curriculum associates" business, but for you civilians in the audience, here's how these things work:

Shocked! I am shocked!

See, one of the challenges of the Big Standardized Test is that it's only given once a year, so schools have to approach this potentially school-whacking test (in Florida, it results in the school getting a letter grade) armed with no information other than last year's scores. For many schools, that's not enough. "What I need," administrators say, "is a way to spot the students who are going to screw us by getting low scores. And if you could target exactly what we should drill them on, that would be cool. And if you could sell us the drills, that would be most awesome of all."

So many of these tests sprang up, tests that were sold as diagnostic, but which were diagnosing only one thing-- how would this student fare on the BS Test.

There have been plenty of these, and what's most remarkable about them is what a terrible job they do of actually predicting BS Test scores. But they are also excellent at wasting money and time, as well as driving home the notion that school is mostly about  taking lots of tests in order to get ready for other tests. This, incidentally, is why states that make noise about shortening the BS Test aren't really helping anything-- test prep testing remains as obtrusive as ever.

That's the situation in Florida, where iReady has been deployed for several years. As the i suggests, iReady combines test prepping with on-line personalized [sic] algorithm selected mass custom drill. The beauty of the online approach is, of course, that students can be hounded by their cyber-taskmaster at home. That's been a point of contention and non-clarity for a while,

But Boca News Now reports there's another issue.

Parents throughout South Palm Beach County are using iReady on behalf of their children, possibly skewing scores — and usefulness — of the $6-Million diagnostic computer system.

Yup. It turns out that when you give students computer work to do outside of school, well-- sometimes parents cheat. I know! Next someone will be claiming that some projects at the elementary science fair were not completed by students working all on their own.

You may have looked at various work-at-home cyber education models and thought, "Surely they must know it's an issue, so surely they must have sophisticated safeguards in place." Well, not so much. iReady's crack team looks for sudden jumps in score. Apparently iReady's crack team doesn't know much about cheating:

However, BocaNewsNow.com has learned this is apparently not fool proof as parents log in and complete coursework with just enough errors to make the results seem plausible.

Well, yeah. 

iReady also provides little of the information that could be useful to teachers (e.g. showing that third grader Chris logged on at 11 PM last night).

But don't worry. BocaNewsNow reports that the district is looking at yet another test prep service-- this one called TenMarks, from the fine people at Amazon.com. That should be just awesome, in a totally non-cheaty way.