IA: Arguing Against Diversity

Last week, the Des Moines Register presented an op-ed by homeschooler, conservative-libertarian writer and millennial political activist Joel Kurtinitis. He's also a co-founder of the U.S.Federalist Party, a contributor to various hard-right publications, and a voice in the liberty movement-- so he was backing Ted Cruz in the last election cycle.

Kurtinitis has some thoughts about public education.

As a dedicated advocate of homeschooling, I tend to stay away from public education issues in general. There’s not much nice to say about an education system that has produced — and graduated — 32 million functionally illiterate adults, and has presided over an overall literacy decline for the last 25 years.

This guy

First, the 32 million number comes from the US Department of Education, but it is the number of illiterate adults-- there's no indication that they are all public school graduates. That number could include flunk outs, drop outs, or even some home schooled persons. Second, the literacy decline is hard to pin down because everyone who writes about literacy likes to define it their own way (functional, proficiency, able to read great books).

But his point-- that public schools suck-- is just meant to set up his main complaint. Currently in Iowa there is a bill on the table that is mostly the same old choicer boilerplate-- let's let students at "failing" schools escape their terrible fate. But this one adds a little extra-- under the bill, districts would be free to drop diversity requirements. See, Iowa had previously passed some diversity rules that counted diversity in choice systems, designed to keep five large districts from being re-segregated as white families fled to private schools. What? You thought segregation academies were only a Southern thing?

The plans had to be re-jiggered so that they were based on income rather than race, giving some Iowa schools a mandate to keep diverse student populations. Kurtinitis is not a fan.

It turns out that impoverished school districts around Iowa have shackled their students to an administrative ball and chain that doesn’t allow students to transfer away for — get this — diversity reasons.

As a long-time practitioner of written snark, I salute Kurtinitis's repeated use of the verbal derisive snort. Unfortunately, he can't back that snort up with any sort of solid argument. (Yes, that kind of snark.)

He claims two problems with the diversity requirements. First, "it creates a financial self-interest for the school district that doesn't take the individual needs of the student into consideration at all." His big gotcha proof is an administrator who "confessed" that allowing "financially stable" families (my favorite new euphemism for "wealthy") to head off to private schools (he uses the word "better," which is a whole other set of unfounded assumptions) would be "absolutely devastating."

Aha! shouts Kurtinitis-- schools dare to want money and be upset when they lose money. What he doesn't consider is why. Do schools want money in order to make their administrators and teachers rich? Nope. Do they want money in order to pass on a profit to their operators and backers? No (because they are public schools). Do the want the money to buy every teacher a Lexus? Nope.

Or could it be that schools need the money to meet the individual needs of the students who can't afford to head to a private school? Maybe they need the money to educate those students with decent resources in a well-maintained building.

Kurtinitis ignores that, and waves the old "We spend X dollars on education and that's a lot." In Iowa's case that's $3 billion, a big chunk of the state budget that Iowa is "shoveling" into education while keeping wealthier families 'hostage." Kurtinitis is using a crude version of Betsy DeVos's argument-- education is just a service provided for individual families, and there is no social value in education as a public good, which means I shouldn't have to spend my money to educate Those Peoples' Children. If they wanted a good education (and health care and food and homes), they shouldn't have decided to be poor.

But Kurtinitis doesn't just object to spending money on public education. He doesn't like diversity, either.

I’m not sure when “diversity” became a religious term, but it certainly is now.  That’s why phrases like “diversity is our strength” can be tacked on to the end of interviews as shown above, just like “God be praised.” It’s a moral, worldview-specific term, not one of objective or mathematical truth. And due to its religious nature, challenging the presuppositions of the term results in insult and derision, not in legitimate debate — as I’m sure this article’s comments will bear out.

Having dismissed the term itself, Kurtinitis will now proceed to prove his own point about the lack of substantial debate about the topic:

Let’s assume for a moment that the notion of “white flight” is real (unjust assumptions at best) and every family moving their kids out of an impoverished and struggling school do so for racial reasons (they don’t). Barring transfer still doesn’t do anything to advance diversity. It just forces a largely minority school to hang out with real, honest-to-God racists.

See, he's just worried about those poor black kids being trapped in a school with racists. That don't exist, because white flight isn't real, and they aren't really racists. (Here's a fun article about how racists see Iowa as "fertile ground"). If Kurtinitis had been around in the sixties, I guess he would have told the Little Rock Nine to just stay home because people were going to say man things to them. "Ma'm" says 1955 Kurtinitis to Rosa Parks, "Don't you just want to move to the back of the bus and stay out of trouble."

Beside the point, 2018 Kurtinitis says. Parents  don't care about all that race stuff, anyway. They just care about "the letters on their report cards." And he wants to unload a pithy truth on us:

Scream about diversity all you want, diversity won’t teach you calculus. It won’t help you with reading comprehension.

As it turns out, Kurtinitis is wrong on this count, too. The research is piling up to indicate that there are social and cognitive benefits to both socioeconomic and racial diversity in schools (you can start here or here). His further claim that diversity won't help you get a job is also specious-- as the US becomes more and more of a mix of many sorts of folks and white folks become a minority majority, the ability to work with folks of many different backgrounds will absolutely become more and more valuable in the job market. Only if your chosen career is Rich Guy Who Sits in Office and Lives in Gated Community will you be able to avoid the need for familiarity and comfort with diversity.

But Kurtinitis is doubling down

An irreligious look at diversity dogma would insist that sitting in a room with people of different races and ethnicities isn’t a valuable or rare skill,

It may insist, but it would be better served to make an actual argument in favor of its view. I recommend that Kurtinitis not employ any of the following:

* Everyone is much happier when they just stay with their own kind

* Society works better when everyone understands their place and stays in it

* No good can come of mixing the races

* I've got mine, Jack, and I don't care what happens to the rest of you

* European culture created everything that matters, so every other culture should shut up and take notes

Except that, absent the various racist and selfish arguments, I don't know what Kurtinitis has left to argue that there is no value in having folks from different backgrounds in a room together. I'd argue that diversity has value to our society as a whole, as witnessed by America's entire history, which is the story of strength growing out of a diverse and rich stew of many peoples. I'd argue that it has  value to individuals who are able to develop a richer and fuller version of what it means to be human in the world, as well as developing a flexibility and background of experience that enables them to move through the world rather than huddling in their own stagnant corner. I'd argue that education has value not just to individuals, but to society as a whole, a public good that we all have a stake in and therefor should all support.

That's what I'd argue. I have no idea what Kurtinitis could muster in response.

Kochs Build an Edu-monster (or "When Rich People Home School")

The son and daughter-in-law of Super Rich Industrialist Charles Koch have decided to get into the private school business. In Wichita. With a model that seems.... well, both confused and familiar.

You can read about it here in the Miami Herald (for some reason). The school is going to be called "Wonder" and while it is aimed only at 3-11 year olds, it still dreams big-- the motto on its website is "Find a calling. Change the world."

“I’m mostly just a mom that’s passionate about education for her kids,” said Annie Koch, 33, a mother of three children, ages 5, 3 and 3 months.

Well, a really wealthy mom. Who had this thought:

You start to realize, ‘Actually, my kids spend more time at school than they spend with me.’

She's partnering with Zach Lahn, whose star began to rise when he was just a college student, and who ended up working for the Koch-backed astro-turf advocacy group Americans for Prosperity, then moving to the Koch's Youth Entrepreneurs program. How did he end up qualified to run a school? He and his wife have kids (ages 4 and 3). Anyway, he says, "We're not inventors. We're just parent catalysts."

So we're talking about one more school launched by amateurs. And like most edu-amateurs, they will borrow from other amateurs, some professionals, and throw in some re-inventing of the wheel. It will be built out of a whole wheelbarrow full of spare parts. The school will include mastery learning (an approach somehow credited to Sal Kahn), some Montessori pre-school, and eventually middle and high school, though they won't have traditional grade levels, either. The floorplan will have flexible seating, with glass walls and open spaces. No traditional grades or report cards or homework- just four to six week theme-based projects culminating in presentations to family and community members. According to their blog, each day will start with a Socratic discussion, followed by setting learning goals for the day. And there's this:

There won’t be any teachers at Wonder, but rather “guides” and “coaches,” Lahn said. The school plans to allow students more say in what, how and at what pace they learn.

And they mean it-- they want graduate students from MIT, not actual teachers.

If some of this sounds vaguely familiar, it may be because you are old enough to remember the Open Schools movement. It emerged in the sixties, and died by the seventies, and I probably wouldn't remember it except that my aunt started one in Connecticut.

Like the Kochs, she had young children whose education she was concerned about. Unlike the Kochs, she had an education background and not a great deal of wealth (her husband, my uncle, was a history teacher in Connecticut and my professional idol-- he stayed in the classroom for fifty years). And like many other pioneers in the open school movement, she gave it up within a decade.

The idea was that children would learn through discovery and exploration, following their own learning impulses without having their freedom hampered by the strictures of a traditional school system. It's an approach that involves a great amount of idealization of children, and my aunt soon reluctantly concluded that it didn't really work. If you give a small child the freedom to just follow their bliss, their bliss isn't very interested in studying stuff or learning new things.

Open schools mostly died out for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that this is a system that best suits children of privilege. Children who have few of their basic needs met are not primarily thinking, "I wonder what I could learn today."

Of course, Wonder will have one thing my aunt didn't-- and you knew this was coming. When it's time to create those learning mastery skills goals thingies at the start of the day...

This is done using both traditional and proven tech-based learning platforms which utilize artificial intelligence, machine learning, as well as virtual and augmented reality to personalize and focus each child’s learning journey.

Bad news, guys-- there are no proven tech-based learning platforms.

“We think that children are not challenged to the fullest extent that they could be right now,” Lahn said. “We want to challenge them to take on new tasks and greater ownership over what they’re doing.”

One of the ongoing and kind of fascinating discussions in education is about the issue of challenge. There's general agreement that students could be challenged more; there's general disagreement on how to make that happen. But history suggests that the best way to address the issue is not to just count on the children to challenge themselves, particularly when we're dealing with young humans whose challenge plate is already heavily loaded. Now, some of the writing about Wonder suggests that it's the computer software that will challenge and engage the students. So maybe instead of an open school, Wonder is just the latest iteration of algorithm-selected mass-produced custom learning, aka the serving of worksheets by computer software.

Koch acknowledges that their model of school might not be for everyone ("People who are really passionate about having a college-prep academy might not be passionate about what we're doing") and she and Lahn both insist this will not be political at all (which may be one more indicator of what they don't understand about education), but Koch also genuflects at the altar of competition --"We want other people doing this. We want competition...because we feel like that would make us better." And the Not Political At All clashes with ideas like starting the day with questions like "Why do civilizations rise and fall? Does the past determine the future?" or the description of the afternoon project work which will be dedicated to "the solving of complex problems, and building innovative market-oriented solutions."

So 3-11 year olds will push themselves in a system withy no accountability measures and a teacher-free environment, and maker spaces and project based learning (but without teachers), and actually they won't push themselves but will be pushed by computer software. The article doesn't mention tech, but I'm struck by Koch's desire to have competition that will make the school better, because it's not clear what exactly the school is going to do. This is not what happens when folks decide to pioneer a new educational model; this is what happens when rich people decide to home school-- they hire some people to do it for them, sort of, based on what they imagine would be cool for their littles.

Challenging, yet students are free to set the agenda. Self-pacing, but all units will take place in a 4-6 week time span. No actual teachers, and yet somebody is going to have to design all these projects. Not political, but based on a free market ideology. It's possible that "Wonder" is short for "I wonder what the heck we're going to do here," but it feels more like a way for privileged parents to get their children out of public school, as envisioned by folks who don't know how school works (and whose children aren't old enough to have much of an opinion themselves.) Koch says she feels that the school-ish thingy she's launching "could have a big impact."

I'm betting not. This sounds like a Frankenstein's monster built out of parts of all the failed education ideas of the last fifty years, from open schools to learning machines, to the removal of teachers entirely, to indoctrination of children with right wing political notions. Maybe the school has a better plan than the write-ups suggest. The one thing we can be sure of is that this privileged home schooling project will not run out of money any time soon.

Battling the NFL Shortage

Well, that, of course, was clickbaity, because there is no NFL shortage, no lack of players to put their bodies on the line to play football. And yet we continue to see pieces about how the teacher pipeline is drying up. So, since I'll be ignoring the Super Bowl today, I thought maybe I could be a little sporty in this space and ask the question-- what difference between these two endeavors could explain the differences in staffing issues?

It's not like NFL play is all glamorous. It's physically demanding, often with consequences for the rest of the player's life. There's a ton of travel, and an entire industry devoted to second-guessing your every choice. So it's not like there's no downside.

Still, the pay is pretty good. Fabulously good if you are a top player. Nobody running an NFL tam says, "Look, we're just going to pay this salary, and if the players don't want to stick around, we'll just fill the spots with someone else. If we have to, we'll just drop all the usual requirements and hire some skinny small guys who think they might like to try it even though they never played in college or high school. They probably won't last long, but we can just replace them with some other warm body. I mean, who cares if we are turning over half the team every year."

Nobody in the NFL says that because nobody imagines you can just player-proof a team by coming up with a system so foolproof (developed by guys who never played the game) that you can just plug any warm body into any position and it won't make any difference. No, the NFL recognizes that it takes players with particular gifts, skills, and experience, and if you want them, you'll have to make them an offer they're willing to accept. Professional football teams are not composed of easily-replaced, highly-interchangeable widgets.

Nor can we underestimate the amount of esteem that comes with the job. Sure, there are folks who are unimpressed by professional athletes, and it is definitely concerning that you can be kind of rapey and still be a well-regarded hero. With that much money and attention on the line, there are a host of abuses that can become a problem. But just look at all the support they get-- a massive staff, spare-no-expense facilities, an entire infrastructure devoted to helping them be their very best.

I live in football country. One of my former students became an NFL pro, I work with a guy (substitute teacher and coach) who had a good career in the seventies, and one of our great home town heroes was a successful NFL coach. I always have students who aspire to a sports career, and very little seems to affect that front end interest in the Football Player Pipeline.

The bottom line is that the NFL doesn't have a player shortage because they work hard to make sure they don't. They don't try to devalue the job and players, and they don't lower their standards so that they can get by on the cheap. Yes, the comparison isn't perfect-- the NFL has fewer total slots of to fill, and their treatment of linemen is somewhat crappier than their treatment of a star quarterback. But when I hear someone else bemoaning the teacher shortage [sic], I'm always reminded of enterprises like the NFL where management doesn't try to pretend they want the best, but does whatever they need to do to get the best. This is markedly different from education, where our words indicate we want the best and the brightest, and we want to get them the best possible tools and support to do their job-- but our words say that we really don't care about any of that. Get in your room, settle for the salary we want to give you, stop asking for supplies we won't get you, if you're nice to the office secretary she might do you a single favor some day, and, yeah, maybe we'll get you a complete class set of current textbooks, someday.

When you really want champions, you find a way to attract and support them. Otherwise, you just have to hope that they love the game well enough to devote themselves on their own.

And because I know you've been thinking about it as you read this post, let me leave you with this classic Key and Peele sketch.

ICYMI: Millionairs Chasing a Bag of Air Edition (2/4)

Yeah, I'm not bitter. Actually, we haven't had cable here in this house for about a decade, so I'll just watch recaps later so that I can hold a conversation later, though I understand that "Did you see how those Patriots cheated again" is always a safe bet.

In the meanwhile, here's some education reading from then week. Be sure to share the pieces you respond to.

That 1984 study that Zuckerberg et al keep citing, and why it might be irrelevant to the discussion

Personalized learning fans keep citing a study about individual tutors. Matt Barnum looks at the study and why it might be irrelevant to the conversation.

Virtual Schools in Maine

Poor old Maine has ended up as Ground Zero in the attempt to computerize education. Not everyone is delighted.

Books Cooked at DC Schools
What's Shocking about the DC Schools Scandal

Two good pieces about the implosion of the DC schools miracle. The first helps you grab some of the details, and the second explains why this local schools meltdown matters nationally.

Pedal Desks for Elementary Schools

The Scary Mommy blog has some thoughts about pedal desks for the littles. Warning: obscenities are involved. And if you like that, follow it up with this piece about modern kindergartens.

Teacher Supply and Demand

At Bellwether thinky tank, a look at some of the different ways to look at state teacher shortages [sic].

Did New Evaluations and Weaker Tenure Chase People Away from Teaching? New Study Says Yes.

Also, sun expected to rise in East today. Still, it's an interesting piece of scholarship.

Zuckerberg and Parent Pushback Vs. Summit Schools-- InBloom Reprised

When it comes to the problems of cyberizing education and data collection, nobody knows their stuff like Leonie Haimson. Here's a great piece about the problems with Summit, and why this should all seem familiar.

Don't Know Much About History

A new study suggests that we are doing a spectacularly lousy job of teaching about slavery.

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.