PA: GOP Endorses Wannabe Trumper for Governor

The Pennsylvania GOP has given its endorsement to Senator Scott Wagner to carry the GOP banner against incumbent Tom Wolf.

In many ways, this is extraordinary. Wagner is a one-term Senator who was boxed out of his race-- and then won by write-in vote by an al most 2-to-1 margin. He is Tea Party flavored and much in the Trump style, with some ties to Scott Walker, and he shares Walkers love of unions in particular and the whole democratic process in general. The GOP chose him over House Speaker Mike Turzai and a couple of other also-rans. But it says something about the shift of Pennsylvania's GOP that they are backing for Governor-- over an established pol-- a guy they tried to deny any shot at his current job just four years ago.

Wagner's campaign is founded on the same negativity as Trump's-- his campaign website announces that Pennsylvania is broke and broken:

A dysfunctional political system ruled by entrenched special interests and career politicians has saddled us with enormous debt, high taxes, a weak economy, underperforming schools, and embarrassing scandals. That’s why Pennsylvanians in droves have voted with their feet by moving to prosperous, well-run states.

Wagner claimed an "emboldened" moment after spending time on a plane with Steve Bannon, and he has called Trump a "visionary." But the conservative Washington Times questions whether Wagner is Pennsylvania's real answer to Trump, or whether Wagner is just Trump in his own mind.

In his two state Senate years, he has accomplished nothing headline-worthy that is remotely Trumpian. He did go after a fellow Republican in leadership who he said was blocking anything that betrayed a whiff of conservatism.

In fact, Wagner has spent a lot of time taking shots at his own party's leadership (they weren't confrontational enough with Governor Wolf, he says). His website includes the goal of fixing the bloated PA political system (we have one of the biggest, most expensive legislatures in the country). He wants to slash the money available to legislators and end the revolving lobbyist door, which will be great for wealthy businessmen like Scott Wagner, and a bit more challenging for citizen legislators. Mostly it will pit the governor against a legislature controlled by his own party, though I suppose the PA GOP may turn out to be just a spineless and malleable as the national party.

Wagner has been noted for some bold ideas, like the notion that global warming is the product of more body heat and a planet moving closer to the sun. And he has been outspoken about the cause of poverty-- the laziness of poor people.

But for those of us who care about public education, Wagner is a potential disaster. He is all in for backpacks full of cash following the children wherever their families send them. He is savvy enough to couple this with a call for accountability for all schools that receive public funds, but I call bullshit on this because Pennsylvania has been staring straight at a variety of indicators that our thriving cyber-school sector is a money-wasting scam, and yet the legislature has continued to defend cyber-funding.

Wagner is from the "don't throw money at schools" camp, but that's a hard argument to make stick in a state with one of the worst funding systems in the country. With the state kicking in only a small portion of school funding, our school districts depend primarily on local funding, which means poor communities have underfunded schools. Wagner doesn't have a plan for that.

What Wagner has a plan for is getting rid of teacher unions, ending job protections, and making it legal to fire teachers based on how expensive they are. He also likes merit pay, which in education is always equal to paying teachers less. And he keeps talking about unfunded mandates, but he never talks about exactly which ones he'd like to get rid of.

Oh, and get rid of those pensions, too.

Pennsylvania's political landscape is a wonky one. We have a huge spread between wealthy and poor, and what may be an even huger spread between rural and urban. This is a state that includes Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and my own county with just over 50K citizens and Forest County with fewer than 8,000 people. We're loaded with old folks, and we're currently sort of trying to kind of fix the court-condemned gerrymandering that has given us a legislative majority for the GOP even though we have more Democratic voters. And like every other state, we are not exactly overwhelming with voter turnout (Wagner's write-in victory came with 14% of voters showing up).

So it's never easy to predict what will happen come election time. But I can tell you this-- rural Tea Party Republicans hate hate HATE Tom Wolf, and a drain-the-swamp guy like Scott Wagner will motivate that part of the base. If Dems sit back and assume this guy can't possibly win, Pennsylvania public education will be in a world of hurt come 2019.

ICYMI: The No Particular Edition Edition (2/11)

Time for the weekly round up of things to read, absorb and pass along. I always remind you to share what speaks to you, but I want to remind you to share some things with people outside of your usual assortment of public education fans. I never ceased to be amazed at how people outside the bubble have very little idea what's going on. Make it your goal to educate someone this week. Now here we go.

Co-opted Language

Not fresh this week, but I was reminded of this post recently-- a good quick guide to the language that is being appropriated by the fans of the digital privatized ed reformster camp.

This Teacher of the Year Just Showed Me How Important DACA Is

Just in case you needed more convincing.

Timmy's Cell Phone Plan (Adventures in Standardized Testing)

Yet another clear, concrete example of why, exactly, the Big Standardized Test sucks.

Teacher Response to Cheating Scandal

A FOIA request gets us a look at what the cheating scandal at prestigious Watchung Hills Regional High School looks like from the inside. (Spoiler alert: It looks like teachers being hung out to dry by administration)

Families for Excellent Schools Collapse

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider wrote two pieces this week on the occasion of the FES demise. This piece and this piece remind us just how awful they were (the "families" were 40 individuals).

One Year In: Reflections on the DeVos Agenda

The Have You Heard podcast takes a look back the first year of the DeVosian era. I'm not much of a fan of arbitrary anniversary retrospectives, but this is worth our while.

Is No Excuses Narrowing the Curriculum

This fourth entry in Jersey Jazzman's series on Newark schools is, as always, filled with hard data made clear and accessible and a little depressing. Take a look.

Video: Personalized Learning’s Plan to Replace Teachers?

Travel back to a 2011 Tom Vander Ark speech extolling a glorious future when staffs are cut and computers are the school. There's more than a video here-- lots of explanation and sources.

What Is "Quality" Curriculum?

Nancy Flanagan on Bill Gates' latest silver bullet to fix education.

Denver Schools Are a Dystopian Nightmare

Thomas Ultican with a well-sourced explanation of how Denver (and many other) school district went at wrong.

Too Much Learning

Everyone who has taught for more than ten minutes had heard this question-- why are we studying this stuff?

The question has several siblings-- what's the point of this, when am I ever going to use this, or this is stupid.

In fact, the question is implied by many modern ed reformsters who keep trying to reframe education as job training, so that the only acceptable answer to the question is "because someday someone will be willing to pay you for having this skill," which is a tiny, meager, small-brained conception of education.

As a classroom teacher, you should always be able to answer this question in the specific. If you don't know why you're teaching something, or you don't have a better answer than "because someone told me to," you shouldn't be teaching that unit at all. I warn my own students to think twice about asking The Question because if they ask me, I will answer them. So if they really just want to complain, they should just complain.

But behind the specific answers about specific questions about specific content (quadratic equations, Spanish Inquisition, identifying gerund phrases, etc), there are some larger questions and answers that we should also be able to answer, because they are why we are in a classroom teaching at all. These broad answers speak to our fundamental values as educators in a broad yet personal way. Here's how I respond. It may not be your response, and that's cool, but it is mine.

First, nobody has ever been hurt by knowing too much. I've talked to hundreds of former students and thousands of grown humans, and I have never heard anyone say, "Damn, I wish I hadn't learned so much in school, because knowing a bunch of stuff has really messed up my life." Yes, in fifty years, I have used the quadratic equation very close to never. Yet learning it didn't hurt me a bit, and undoubtedly helped.

How? Well, consider this. Our football players spend a lot of time in the off season working out and lifting weights. Yet they will never play a football game in which play action stops while team members have a leg lift competition mid field. So why spend time on a skill that they'll never use in a game? Because, of course, they're developing muscles that they will use during in a game.

Math builds the muscles that see connections and relationships. Physical activities, whether phys ed or shop or home ec, help us better understand our own physical shells. The Arts help build the muscles of expression and understanding. The Sciences help us better understand how the world actually works (and, in the best programs, how to "know" something). History is our most fundamental human activity whether applied to the American Revolution or Pat and Chris's big fight at the dance-- what happened, why did it happen, what caused it to happen, what will it change about what happens next, and how do the people involved fit in? And English builds the muscles used to understand and communicate all our understanding. None of these are a waste of anyone's time.

There are folks who will suggest that some of this is unnecessary. The whole premise of the test-centered education concept launched by No Child Left Behind is that nobody really needs to learn anything except rudimentary reading and math. Sometimes it's about economics-- some folks just don't want to pay for a bunch of unnecessary frills for Those Peoples' Children. In the case of the corporate wing of ed reform, they would prefer that their meat widgets get any "extra" education because it might give them ideas-- just teach them enough to make them vocationally useful and reasonably compliant.

But if our educational mission (indeed, our human mission) is to understand what it means and how best to be fully human in the world, then what could possibly be "extra" or "unnecessary" learning? It's an educational mission that takes a lifetime-- at best we can hope that K-12 helps set the stage and teach the habits of mind necessary for the long haul.

Frederick Douglass tells the story of Mrs. Auld, a slave owner how at first taught him the alphabet and the beginnings of reading, but then had to learn from her husband that too much education for slaves was a dangerous and undesirable thing. His striking insight is not just that this was an attempt to diminish him, but that in denying him this human growth and connection, Mrs. Auld diminished her own humanity.

Treating any learning as "too much" is always diminishing, and while we can all see examples of people whose lives (and the lives of people around them) suffer because of their own ignorance, there is nothing more striking than seeing a man who deliberately cloaks himself in ignorance, who acquires great riches and rises to one of the highest positions in the world, and yet who is clearly miserable, overflowing with toxicity, because he does not understand himself or the world or how to be fully human in it. Yes, he's dangerous, but he's also a giant object lesson.

Yes, our time is finite and therefor to be spent thoughtfully, with an eye on what return we get from the spending. But do not tell me that there is learning which is simply a waste, useless, or too much. Everything is a piece of the world and human experience, and therefor everything is a piece of the puzzle, and every puzzle piece is worth acquiring. Why are we studying this stuff? Because understanding this stuff-- the world, our humanity, the business of making our way through it-- is everything.

Education Savings Accounts for Dummies

Education Savings Accounts are beginning to crop up all across the country as a new policy tool for education (recently news came that Iowa's GOP was pushing them). If they are turning up in a legislature near you, what do you need to know about them? If you are late to this particular party, here's the "for dummies" version of an ESA explainer:

The Basics

ESAs are vouchers on steroids.

In a voucher system, you might register your child Pat at Flat Earth Academy, after which you or FEA notifies the state that Pat is a student there, and the state shoots your voucher allowance to the school.

But with an ESA, the state gives you an stack of money, perhaps in an actual bank account or maybe on a special debit card, and you go spend that on whatever education thing you like. You could spend it like a voucher to help offset the cost of private school tuition (as with vouchers, nobody is proposing ESAs in amounts that would give poor families a free ride to Snooty Upscale Academy). But you could also spend your ESA money on unbundled education-- a math class from an online vendor, a software based reading program, etc. Maybe you'll spend your ESA on books and a computer for homeschooling.

The specifics vary by implementation and proposal. ESAs are being floated in various legislatures with a variety of different features attached. Think of ESAs as a vehicle that can come with lots of options-- and you want to be paying attention to which options your local version includes. The questions to ask.

Who can contribute?

In some versions, the ESA is "funded" by some version of the per pupil cost in the student's district, and it is just the state that does the funding. But in other versions of ESA, private individuals and even corporations can contribute to the ESA kitty. In the most aggressive versions, this is treated as a tax deduction-- folks can fund an ESA instead of paying their taxes to the state-- this version of the ESA is not only a sneaky way to fund vouchers, but it's also a sneaky way to defund public schools.

Who is really helped?

ESAs are often sold like vouchers-- as a means to give poor students the same choices that wealthy students have. And the problem is the same-- giving students a $3000 ESA will not help them get into a private school with $20,000 annual tuition. It will not help them get into a private school that can reject them for any reason from wrong skin color to wrong academic background to wrong religion.

Is it grandfathered in?

This feature can also be devastating to public schools and local taxpayers. In this version of ESAs, everyone gets an ESA even if they were never enrolled in public schools in the first place.

In other words, if ESA became the law on Monday, on Tuesday hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars would immediately leave the public system and move to private and parochial schools. Public school systems could lose millions of dollars in revenue without actually losing a single student. Even for some ESA fans that's a bridge too far, and some ESA proposals include rules that say the student must have been enrolled in public school at some point. But even then, you can end up with silly rules that basically require students to check in with a public school for six months before cashing out with their ESA.

Is there any oversight at all?

ESAs come with some of the same problems as vouchers-- are tax dollars being used to support a school that teaches that the earth is flat, that the Holocaust never happened, and that slavery was good for black people because they're genetically inferior?

But ESAs up the ante. Can I spend my ESA on single courses? Can I hire a tutor with no actual qualifications? How about a youtube subscription so I can watch Kahn Academy videos more easily? Can I take an "educational" trip to Europe? What if I buy an Xbox so I can play "educational" games? How about buying a car so that I can drive myself to the library? A cruise? Nice clothes so I feel smarter? Are there any limits to how I can spend my ESA? Is there any oversight at all?

This, incidentally, should bother conservatives. ESAs generally come with zero-to-no accountability, meaning that taxpayer dollars are simply collected and handed over to families to do nobody-knows-what with. I don't believe that taxation without accountability is a conservative value.

Does the state shed all educational responsibility?

This is not discussed nearly enough. Pat's family takes the ESA and enrolls Pat in some classes at a charter school, sets up some online studies, and hires a tutor. The charter school goes out of business, the online courses turn out to be frauds, and the tutor skips out after being paid. At this point, does the state just shrug and say, "Look, we gave you your ESA. If you blew it and didn't caveat emptor hard enough, then it sucks to be you. When we gave you the ESA, we had done our part. You're on your own now."

ESAs imply a policy shift-- that the state is no longer responsible for making sure that very child gets a decent education. That's a problem.

Trying to stay caught up

In March of 2015, I wrote a piece suggesting that if we were going to take "the money follows the child" we'd have to accept that the money could be spent on trips or play stations or parties or clothes and food. I was making my point with hilarious hyperbole, but now reality is catching up with me. So I'll quote my own conclusion. Maybe we can just let students have to use or waste on whatever, I said.

Unless of course you'd like to suggest that the taxpayers who handed over that money and the community that collected it have an interest in making sure that it's spent well and responsibly in a way that serves the community's greater good. In which case we can go back to discussing how those needs of the stakeholders--ALL the stakeholders-- are best served by an all-inclusive community-based taxpayer-controlled educational system, and stop saying silly things like, "The money belongs to the student."

ESAs are a terrible idea unless your goal is to further cripple public education, to subsidize the wealthy (with tax dollars collected from everyone else), or to dump the taxpayer's dollars into a deep, dark hole. But they are one of the current ed reform legislative policy darlings, so keep your eyes peeled, ask the right questions, and oppose them when they roll into your state capital.

What Test-Driven Schools Won't Do

The Network for Public Education has released the latest of its series of videos in support of public education. This particular video features Jesse Hagopian, a Seattle teacher and activist. 

It's a short but stark reminder that corporate test-driven schools push out the needs of students by silencing the people best positioned to respond to those needs within the school setting-- teachers. He sets the stage with a stark story from early in his career to contrast with a system that requires "teaching to the test rather than teaching to the student" and turn schools into "assembly line production."

It's good to be reminded. There have been so many issues raised in the education debates, and so much of the focus these days is on issues like the growth of charter schools and the increasing reliance on computers to deliver an education-flavored product that this issue can fade into the background. But it has been a problem since the first days of No Child Left Behind-- a devaluing of the teacher role and a focus on "teacher-proof" teaching with just one goal-- to raise scores on a single standardized test.

The result, as Hagopian points out, is schools where "some company somewhere has more say over what's happening in the classroom than the educator standing before the students." But by sacrificing teacher autonomy and the freedom for educators to use their best professional judgment, we ultimately make schools less responsive to the students. Test-centered schools are upside down schools, where the students exist to provide data and test results for some corporate agenda, rather than rightly occupying center stage in the school.

The video is just two minutes long. Watch it. It is worth your time.

CAP Still Plugging Takeovers and Turnarounds

The Center for American Progress was, under John Podesta, a holding tank for Clinton politicians and bureaucrats who were biding their time, cooking up policy advocacy, while waiting for Hillary to take her rightful place in DC. As you may have heard, that didn't quite work out.

CAP often took point for the Democratic support of ed reform policies, and like DFER, they were often indistinguishable from conservative GOP ed reform groups. They were particularly relentless in their love of the Common Core (here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, to name a few). But now that nobody's going to land a government job any time soon, nd CAP is run by Neera Tanden and its board is chaired by....really?-- lobbyist and tax dodger Tom Daschle, they've been a bit more quiet about the Core. Are there other reform items they'd like to plug?

Well, they've joined the cottage industry of ESSA plan backseat drivers, and in a recent post, argued for a particular strategy for fixing schools. Which one? Here's a clue-- it's a strategy that has already been tested and failed.

A previous report by the Center for American Progress identified the ability for districts and states to intervene in low-performing schools as a critical school turnaround policy. States should initially provide flexibility for districts to replace staff, reallocate resources, or make changes to instructional time. If schools continue to struggle, states have the authority to take more rigorous action under ESSA. One approach states are considering is to implement alternative governance structures that change the turnaround agents or systems responsible for school operations and leading the path forward.

That "report " was not any sort of research- or evidence-based paper, but was the result of a "conversation" involving several federal, state , and local leaders "with expertise in school turnaround" gathered to talk about how best to do it. So this belief in state intervention was not a result of evidence, but the premise of a discussion among people who are professionally invested in this approach.

And what example do folks who support takeovers and turnarounds like to cite? Of course, it's New Orleans. Do we really have to get into all the ways that the privatization of the New Orleans school system is less than a resounding success? Or let's discus the Tennessee experiment in a recovery school district, in which the state promised to turn the bottom five percent into the top schools in the state, and they utterly failed. As in, the guy charged with making it happened gave up and admitted that it was way harder than he thought it would be, failed.

The whole premise of a state takeover is that somebody in the state capital somehow knows more about how to make a school work than the people who work there (or, in most cases, can hire some guy who knows because he graduated from an ivy league school and spent two years in a classroom once). The takeover model still holds onto a premise that many reformsters, to their credit, have moved past:  that trained professional educators who have devoted their adult lives to working in schools-- those people are the whole problem. It's insulting, it's stupid, and it's a great way to let some folks off the hook, like, say, the policy makers who consistently underfund some schools.

Most importantly, at this point, there isn't a lick of evidence that it works.

We have the results of the School Improvement Grants used by the Obama administration to "fix" schools, and the results were that SIG didn't accomplish anything (other than, I suppose, keeping a bunch of consultants well-paid). SIG also did damage because it allowed the current administration and their ilk to say, "See? Throwing money at schools doesn't help." But the real lesson of SIG, which came with very specific Fix Your School instructions attached, was that when the state or federal government try to tell a local school district exactly how things should be fixed, instead of listening to the people who live and work there, nothing gets better. That same fundamental flaw is part of the DNA of the takeover/turnaround approach.

But CAP is excited about ESSA because some states have included this model in their plan. So, yay.

They acknowledge limitations to the approach, including pushback from district and community members, noting that Georgia voted down the attempt at a recovery school district (call and "opportunity" district in an attempt to avoid the damage done to the brand). The state just went ahead and created a turnaround chief anyway, and CAP doesn't ask why pushback occurred. CAP's advice is to engage the community and get buy-in from stakeholders, but they don't really suggest how (pro tip: it involves listening).

CAP also says that it is "critical that states set the right parameters for measuring student progress" which would be a great thing to say if it were followed by the observation that the Big Standardized Test results soaked in VAM sauce are a lousy measure of school effectiveness, but they don't. Instead they just mean, "make sure everyone understands what the cut score is," which is actually better than the old favorite "bottom five percent" measure (a boon to charter developers, since there will always be a bottom five percent).

CAP does NOT note the problem with takeover/turnarounds that involve silencing local voice entirely and removing the duly-elected school board from power to be replaced, in some cases, by charter operators who are unaccountable to local stakeholders.

But CAP is happy about this trend because they think this "lever for change" is "promising." I think CAP continues to kid itself. Here's the last sentence of the article:

States that use this authority must do so strategically and with clear guidelines to work with the communities they serve, as well as capitalize on lessons learned from other states doing similar work.

The link is to a lousy new paper from Chiefs for Change, another part of the reform axis, which is unfortunate, because the lessons learned about state takeover of "failing" (aka "schools with low scores on a single poorly-written, narrowly focused standardized test") is that it rarely works, and often does more harm than good. But never let it be said that the folks at CAP let the little people who actually work in education distract them from the big picture of grand reform ideas.

Another Flawed Study Praises Charters

"Study Finds Link Between 'No Excuses' Policies and Success" trumpets the headline at Education Dive, a site that.... well, here's their mission:

Our mission is to provide busy professionals like you with a bird's-eye-view of the education industry in 60 seconds.

So take that for what it's worth. We know that press coverage of research is often faulty, so let's go to the actual paper and see what we have here. Is this the long-dreamed-of proof that No Excuse charters do it better?

"Charter Schools and the Achievement Gap" was published in The Future of Children, a Princeton-Brookings publication. The author is Sarah Cohodes, an assistant professor at Teachers College, Columbia University whose specialty is exactly this sort of achievement gap stuff. Her article was reviewed and critiqued by Lisa Barrow at the Federal reserve Bank of Chicago because when you want an extra set of eyes on an education article, of course you call a banker. Her specialty is apparently education, because economists are all education experts, somehow. But I digress.

Cohodes opens with a quick recap of charter history, then lays out the problem with measuring charter effects-- selection bias because charter students have chosen the charter. But good news-- the selection bias problem is completely solved by charter school lotteries. Except (she acknowledges) not everybody chooses to enter the lottery. And the lottery only applies when schools are over-subscribed. But maybe we can find comparable groups of non-charter students to compare charter students to. Which is hard. Cohodes seems to conclude this kind of research is really hard to design well. So she used some lottery studies and some observational studies in her research. And, having scanned the research, she drops this right in this intro section:

The best estimates find that attending a charter school has no impact compared to attending a traditional public school.

And she spends several pages recapping lots of studies of charter effects. She's a pretty good explainer-- if you ordinarily dread research papery stuff and meta-studies even more so, this is pretty penetrable for the layperson. Her critiques of some of these bits of research are pretty gentle, but I am not going to wade into those case by case here.

Instead, let's go to the headline material. Essentially, she finds that No Excuses charters set up in neighborhood served by very struggling public schools show a big gain in test scores. But here I will get into specifics, because she cites in particular the KIPP schools and the charters of Boston. Yet Boston charters have been found to come up very short in sending students on to complete college.

The No Excuses practices that Cohodes zeros in on are " intensive teacher observation and training, data-driven instruction, increased instructional time, intensive tutoring, and a culture of high expectations." Not being able to narrow the list down is a problem-- if I tell you that my athletic program gets great results by having athletes exercise for two hours daily, drink high protein shakes, breathe air regularly, and sacrifice toads under a full moon, it will be easy to follow my "research" to some unwarranted conclusions. Cohodes' list is likewise a hugely mixed bag.

Longer school day and school year is obvious. More time in school = getting more schooling done. A culture of high expectations is meaningless argle bargle. And the teacher training and "data-driven" instruction boils down to the same old news-- if you spend a lot of time on test prep, your test results get better.

Cohodes also notes that the worse the "fallback" school results, the greater the charter "improvement." In other words, the lower you set the baseline, the more your results will surpass it.

She doubles back to look at how charters relate to the surrounding public schools, again kicking the tires on the research to test reliability.

She notes that there are two ways for lottery charters to cream the best students from the community. One is to manipulate the lottery, which she doesn't think happens (for what it's worth, neither do I, mostly because it's not necessary). The second is to push out the students the school doesn't want. But she is missing two more-- make the lottery system prohibitively challenging, so that only the most motivated families can navigate it. And advertising allows charters to send a clear message about which students are welcome at their school.  And nobody works those creaming tricks like No Excuses schools, with their highly regimented and oppressive treatment of students.

Cohodes acknowledges many of the problems with the research she is using, but ultimately she says things like this:

If we wished to use charter schools to reduce US achievement gaps, one obvious way to spread charter school success would be to replicate the most successful schools.

Um, no. If we wished to use charter schools to reduce US achievement gaps, we might first want to determine whether or not they could actually do that job. And then there's this:

With strong interest in charter schools among policymakers and with school lotteries available to form the basis of high-quality research, charter schools are a relatively well-studied educational reform.

I'm not sure we've yet established that lotteries do, in fact, form the basis of high quality research.

And the criticism that I found myself leveling at very page finally surfaces here:

Given that the overall distribution of charter school effects is very similar to that of traditional public schools, expanding charter schools without regard to their effectiveness at increasing test scores would do little to narrow achievement gaps in the United States. But expanding successful, urban, high-quality charter schools—or using some of their practices in traditional schools—may be a way to do so.

Emphasis mine. If you think that closing the achievement gap is nothing but raising test scores, you are wasting my time. It's almost two decades into this reform swamp, and still I don't believe there's a person anywhere sayin, "I was able to escape poverty because I got a high PARCC score." Using the Big Standardized Test score as a proxy for student achievement is still an unproven slice of baloney, the policy equivalent of the drunk who looks for his car keys under the lights, not because he lost them there, but because it's easier to look there.

It's really not that hard to raise test scores-- just devote every moment of the day to intensive test preparation. What's hard is to raise test scores while pretending that you're really doing something else.

Let’s consider a thought experiment in which further expansion focuses on high-quality charters. What would happen to the achievement gap in the United States if all of those new charter schools were opened in urban areas serving low-income children, had no excuses policies, and had large impacts on test scores like Boston, New York, Denver, and KIPP charters?

Yes, I want to say, and let's consider a thought experiment in which pigs fly out of my butt. However, she continues

Expanding charters in this way certainly could transform the educational trajectories of the students who attend. But if we consider the US achievement gap as a whole, it would have a negligible effect.


What she wants to see is an expansion of charter practices expanded to public schools, and she sees ESSA as a policy tool to do it. But what practices? Expanded school time? That would take too much money for policy makers to support. Relentless test prep at the expense of broader education? No thanks. High expectations in the form of heavy regimentation, speak-only-when-spoken-to, treatment? Pretend that student socio-economic background and the opportunity gap are not really factors? That seems just foolishly wrong. Besides the questionable morality of such an approach, a vast number of parents simply wouldn't stand for it. And how would we replace the mission of public education-- to educate all students-- with the mission of No Excuse charters-- to educate only those students who are a "good fit."

But after more nuanced looks at the research, Cohodes arrives decidedly unnuanced, unsupported conclusions like this

Attending an urban, high-quality charter school can have transformative effects on individual students’ lives. Three years attending one of these high performing charter schools produces test-score gains about the size of the black-white test-score gap. The best evidence we have so far suggests that these test-score gains will translate into beneficial effects on outcomes like college-going, teen pregnancy, and incarceration.

The "transformative effect" is not established. Test scores might be raised, but so what? And "the best evidence we have so far" is a weaselly way of saying "we have no good evidence."

After pages of what appear to be thoughtful considerations of the research, complete with acknowledgement of that research's limitations, Cohodes arrives at a finish that reads like most charter fan PR cheerleading. And it's that part that folks like Education Dive will focus on with headlines that define "success" as "raises test scores some."