PA: Charter Fraud Finally Headed to Jail

Nick Trombetta is finally going to be sentenced.

This guy

Trombetta is the founder-operator of PA Cyber Charter School (until 2013, just as the fertilizer met the fan) and also the founder of Lincoln Performing Arts Center School and some other charter-related businesses. PA Auditor General Eugene DePasquale (the guy who called PA charter laws the worst in the nation) found a number of issues, including hiring family members for big-money jobs, and funneling giant gouts of money to a no-oversight management company. All shady and costing the taxpayers millions of dollars, but also, as DePasquale notes, perfectly legal under Pennsylvania charter law. The state of Pennsylvania was never going to so much as bother him because, by PA charter law, he was perfectly within his rights to hire a computer company that was co-owned by a trustee (board member).

The feds, however, were another matter. They caught Trombetta stuffing his own pockets with $8 million of taxpayer money. Trombetta fought the charges, but in 2016 finally fessed up. Since then, his sentencing has been repeatedly postponed, but is now scheduled for his sentencing for tax fraud and conspiracy in July. The conspiracy part is because Trombetta had some partners in this web of fraud who helped him cook the books.

PA Cyber would like everyone to know that they are among the wronged parties here, and that they are like a whole new land of upright swellness ever since Trombetta et al were ousted.

Of course, like all PA cyber charters, they have failed to meet the standard for Big Standardized Test scoring, and the state of Pennsylvania is no more ready to ferret out charter misbehavior than they were back when the feds had to step in and stop Trombetta.


Or as former state legislator and thorn in PA Cyber's side Karen Beyer said back in 2013:

I figured that justice would ultimately be served, that they would be found out — how he had defrauded the taxpayers of Pennsylvania. We still have cybercharter schools that are unregulated. This plea should stand as a warning to the Legislature that they have got to do something about regulating these schools.

Spoiler alert: they still haven't. Will things get any better in PA? Who knows. But Nick Trombetta will have up to five years to figure out his next business enterprise.

KY: Making Teaching a Dead End Profession

The first thing Kentucky teachers need us to understand is that they do not get Social Security benefits.

This is true of teachers in fourteen other states. And it means that those teachers depend entirely on their state pension system. If your state is flush with cash (hey, California), that's not a problem. But if you are in Kentucky, yet another state that has screwed up its pension fund big time and earning the title of most poorly-funded pension in the country, then you are in a bad place.

Kentucky set up a retirement fund for its teachers back in 1938 and converted it to the current system in 1940. But nowadays, the legislature is eying pension cuts as a way to save a buck or two.

It's not popular to consider, say, cutting cost of living increases for pensioners. Without increases, inflation slowly but surely reduces the buying power of the pension dollar. And with opposition strong, the proposal to cut pensions was declared "dead" just over a week ago.

But then the Kentucky GOP decided to break out some tools from the Legislator's Bag of Weasel Tricks.

Thursday afternoon, the legislators took a bill about sewage and gave it a 291-page amendment that imposed a variety of changes to teacher pensions. That bill went up for a vote hours later after little discussion and non realistic time in which to examine it. It also went up for a vote without the legally-required study of financial impact. The GOP hailed it as a "compromise" and the governor praised them for not kicking the pension can down the road, which I guess is technically true, as they had instead kicked it into a sewage ditch.

Under the bill, new teachers will be forced into a cash-balance plan, which is less risky than a 401K hybrid plan, but also less likely to yield a great deal of security. The bill also appears to give the legislature the power to change some aspects of the pension unilaterally. Retirement age for Kentucky teachers is now 65, but then, if they want to retire with anything at all like financial security, retirement age for Kentucky teachers is closer to Whenever They Finally Die.

The cost-of-living cut was removed from the bill, but that was supposed to be the source of the big savings. Without the financial impact study, it's not really clear if this bill will even help Kentucky's pension problem. But at least legislators can brag, "We passed something!" And  two-tiered system is always good for weakening the union.

But as we have been learning across the country in the past few weeks, there is a limit to how far you can push teachers.

Kentucky teachers suddenly experienced a massive wave of illness on Friday morning, forcing many school districts to close for the day. And across the country, old hands in the union world are getting to explain to the youngsters what a Wildcat Strike is.

And I get to keep making the same point-- when you back teachers into a corner, show them no respect, indicate that you have no intention of pursuing good-faith negotiations, and threaten the future of their profession, you get a strike.

So add Kentucky teachers to the list of teachers who need our support in the days ahead. And stay tuned for the next state that finally pushes its teachers too far.

Ad Hominemming It Up

To say that the Parkland teens have been experiencing some pushback would be putting it mildly. They've been subject to slurs and lies that I will not dignify by repeating here. But the reaction to teenagers who have speaking up ever since seventeen of their classmates and teachers were gunned down in their school-- well, why are conservatives so triggered by these students?

Paul Waldman has a good answer in the Washington Post this week. In "Why conservatives are so mad about the Parkland students," Waldman looks at the complaints of Rich Lowry at the National Review (Lowry is the guy who used to dream about gutting the social safety net over college kegs with Paul Ryan). Lowry complains that "it is practically forbidden in the media to dissent from anything they say," but Waldman calls baloney on that argument-- dissent on matters of policy and gun control has been constant and unrelenting and has not drawn cries of "how dare you disagree with these young men and women." Laura Ingraham is not in trouble because she dared to say that teachers should armed or that background checks are an unreasonable restraint of second amendment rights. Conservatives have not been stymied in their pro-gun arguments.

Here’s the real difficulty the Parkland students present. It’s not that they’re passionate and surprisingly articulate for their age, though they are. It’s not that they’ve widened the conversation on guns by refusing to accept things the adults have taken as given for years, such as the idea that the NRA is simply too powerful to bother opposing, though they have. It’s that they’re too sympathetic. And when a spokesperson is sympathetic, when you attack them personally, you look like a jerk.

Despite what conservatives say, no one is going to criticize them when they disagree with the Parkland students on any substantive matter. If Rich Lowry argues that the students are wrong and goes on to explain why the minimum age to buy a rifle should remain at 18, no one will respond, “How dare you disagree with those lovely teenagers?”

No, what conservatives are really mad about is that the tactic of demonizing those they disagree with — which is so common in contemporary political rhetoric (on both the right and left) — has, in this case, been taken away from them.

Yup.

We've reached the point where ad hominem is the first tool we reach for.

It's certainly not a new weapon in the political arsenal. Politicians have been saying horrible personal things about each other since the days of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. The public has enjoyed personal attacks as a sort of entertainment for almost as long. But things seem worse somehow now. The last Presidential election was fought not over who had the worst policies, but who was the worst person, and the resulting widened rift in our society seems bad because it's not a rift about the best ways to govern the republic, but about the best way to be a decent human being in the world, and about the degree to which those perceived values should be ascendant over facts and truth and reality itself.

And it's not like hominem-based arguments are completely pointless. Trump's Presidential failings are directly related to his personal failings; he's an awful President for all the reasons that he's an awful person.

Likewise, Betsy DeVos is unqualified to serve as Secretary of Education for reasons that have to do with who she is as a person; her lack of relevant experience, both in education and in having any sort of regular job, have predictably led to problems functioning in the job. And as with many reformsters, her values and long-term objectives are worth talking about because they shape her policy choices. So it's not irrelevant to say that she's a wealthy fundamentalist Christian heiress with no experience in the workplace or in public schools.

All of this resonates with one of the big questions of our era-- how do we balance consideration of someone's personal failings with valuation of their work? Can a person who has done horrible things also do great things? Can a terrible human being create wonderful art?

Those are hard questions, but ultimately, I think, there's a difference between ad hominemming the art we consume and ad hominemming the leaders we choose (or don't choose). I'm not going to try to address the former here, but I have my own measure for the latter.

First, ad hominem is never acceptable as the beginning and end of an argument. I think this is why I continue to be uncomfortable with the whole "Betsy DeVos is a big dope" thing that keeps floating around. First, I don't believe it's true, but second, I don't think it's helpful. When we argue about personalities instead of policies, we lose the track. You can see that playing out for alleged Progressives in the reformster movement, who must reject DeVos and Trump because they are Bad People on the Wrong Team, but who must also continue to support DeVos's policies, most of which they absolutely agree with. They are having a really hard time dragging that pretzel through the eye of a needle.

But (second) ad hominemming is useful when we're trying to understand where the policies come from, or what their real aim is. Character does matter, and it does reveal what informs the policies and ideas that people push on us. It's important to know, for instance, that a charter school is being pushed by someone who makes his living running hedge funds or dealing in real estate, because if a school has been created to turn a profit rather than educate students, that goal will inform all the choices made by the school.

But the personal has to inform the discussion of policy. If we simply make the personal argument as if that settles the whole matter, we won't talk about the bad policy that we need to talk about. And at worst, we end up like the conservative wing nuts who have descended to making up ad hominem attacks about teenagers rather than having an actual conversation about gun laws in this country.

It is easy in the heat of any tough debate to decide that the end justifies the means, but at the risk of stating what should be obvious, lying is bad. Attacking people as if they aren't actual human beings is bad. Folks who are at long last discovering that they have (or should have) shame at making personal attacks on teenage shooting victims-- well, it shouldn't take young victims of a savage gun attack to help you realize that you're behaving badly. As conservatives used to believe, wrong is wrong, regardless of the circumstances.

Where was I headed with all this? I suppose this is one of those pieces that I have written primarily for myself, as a reminder to keep my eye the ball and not to get sucked into personal attacks, not to fall into the trap of treating those with whom I disagree as less than human, even as I recognize that some folks have ill intent and mean harm to things I hold dear. It's not an easy tightrope to walk, but that's why some folks would rather just live by following their team-- it's easy to excuse everything your team does and condemn everything that the other team does. It's just not a very principled way to be in the world.

OK: Fed Up

Other states may be more hostile to the idea of public education (looking at you, Florida), but when it comes to the Cheap Bastards approach to school management, it's hard to beat Oklahoma.

Oklahoma has occasionally take small steps away from the reformster program. They axed the Common Core (sort of) and actually did away with VAM evaluation for teachers. The former was a feature of Oklahoma's conservative voters (after all, Common Core is totally Obama's plan to turn your children into lesbian socialists who steal your guns), and the latter-- well, in retrospect, it looks like maybe they were just trying to save a buck. Oklahoma's legislature has been mighty creative when it comes to saving a buck; the GOP caucus at one point suggested that all non-English speaking students be turned over to ICE for possible deportation (because it might save them $60 million).

I've been in two teacher strikes, once as a local president. Teachers really don't like to strike, but there comes a point where you're just out of options. Oklahoma's teachers have gone years and years without a raise, and that stagnant wage situation has positioned Oklahoma at the very bottom of the heap when it comes to teacher pay-- a point OK teachers have driven home by sharing their pay stubs. $31,000 -- before taxes-- is not much money to start a life or a family with, and the state legislature has not shown any serious interest in addressing the issue. Instead, they have chopped away at the money spent on schools in general, so that Oklahoma schools are seriously underfunded. You'll be unsurprised to hear that Oklahoma is having trouble filling teaching positions-- last year they issued 1,800 emergency certificates (aka teacher papers for people who aren't actually qualified to be teachers).

Oklahoma teachers face some unusual hurdles. Like several other states (including West Virginia), local school districts don't set the pay scale for their teachers (because competition is bad if it means teachers get paid more, I guess), and the state legislature a few decades back passed a rule saying that taxes can only be raised with a 75% majority.

All of that may explain why local school districts and boards and administrators are actually supporting the statewide strike. The Tulsa superintendent, board president, and PTA chief passed a resolution this week in support of “any steps necessary to improve conditions for our teachers — including a districtwide suspension of classes.”

As is virtually always the case when teachers finally strike, this is not simply about money. It's about respect and the future of education in Oklahoma. You don't recruit teachers with a slogan of "Get paid less than in any nearby state, and work in a school that lacks resources and support for your work." OK is not just bottom of the barrel for teacher pay, but for per-pupil funding as well.

Oklahoma teachers are standing up for the future of public education in Oklahoma.

The legislature is feeling the heat. They managed to raise taxes for the first time in twenty-eight years, despite the worries among legislators that the proposed taxes (including gas, cigarettes, and hotel taxes) would hurt the state's businesses. I guess they were not so worried about what the effect would be of not being able to maintain a functioning public education (new proposed motto-- "Oklahoma- uneducated and we like it that way"?).

But the strike is still on.

Teachers asked for a $10K raise over three years. They got a one-time raise of $6,100. They asked for raises for support staff. They got nothing. They asked for the replacement of millions of dollars lost from school funding. They got nothing.

Teachers strike when they are out of options. Teachers strike when they are facing people who aren't negotiating in good faith. Teachers strike when they believe the future of their schools are in danger. Oklahoma teachers have almost nothing to lose-- they could find better conditions under which to pursue their career in literally any other state. This has to be one of the most frustrating places to be in a teacher strike-- where you are telling the People In Charge "You are killing our schools, killing our communities, killing the future that depends on an educated citizenry. How do you not get that?"

So Monday, spare a thought and a few words of support for Oklahoma teachers, who are walking out, making their own lives more complicated and bothersome than they may want to, because their legislature is determined to strangle education in the Sooner State. Hang in there, Oklahoma teachers. Don't let the cheap bastards grind you down.

Privatization: It's Not Just for Schools!

You may have missed this story amidst the great flurry of Trumpian firings, but it's worth noting because it's a reminder that the corporate assault on public education is, in fact, part of a larger problem.

Hasta la vista, our David

David J. Shulkin, secretary of veteran affairs, was a holdover from the Obama administration (in which he had served as an undersecretary). He was up against a tangled web of bureaucratic challenges, but was managing to make headway while also scoring points with his boss by handing Trump some wins. He looked safe; even Trump noted that "our David" was in no danger of being fired. So what happened?

But in recent months, a group of conservative Trump administration appointees at the White House and the department began to break with the secretary and plot his ouster. At issue was how far and how fast to privatize health care for veterans, a long-sought goal for conservatives like the Koch brothers.

Shulkin handed his opponents ammunition with some ethics screw-ups on a trip to Europe, the kind of grifting that is not exactly unheard of in this administration. But some folks in the administration wanted Shulkin gone. And this week, he was gone-- replaced by a physician who had won Trump's loyalty (for the moment) and who has zero experience in running a huge, complex bureaucracy like the VA.

Yesterday, Shulkin turned up in the pages of the New York Times with an explanation that will seem familiar to followers of the education debates:

I believe differences in philosophy deserve robust debate, and solutions should be determined based on the merits of the arguments. The advocates within the administration for privatizing V.A. health services, however, reject this approach. They saw me as an obstacle to privatization who had to be removed. That is because I am convinced that privatization is a political issue aimed at rewarding select people and companies with profits, even if it undermines care for veterans.

That's one of the big issues in privatizing any government function-- somebody is going to make a bunch of money, and somebody in government will get to decide who the money-maker will be. That doesn't have to involve corruption, but it certainly makes crony capitalism simple to implement.

Shulkin recognizes issues other than neglecting the primary mission of the institution in favor of rewarding one's buddies. There's also the matter of the private sector's ability to get the job done:

Unfortunately, the department has become entangled in a brutal power struggle, with some political appointees choosing to promote their agendas instead of what’s best for veterans. These individuals, who seek to privatize veteran health care as an alternative to government-run V.A. care, unfortunately fail to engage in realistic plans regarding who will care for the more than 9 million veterans who rely on the department for life-sustaining care.

The private sector, already struggling to provide adequate access to care in many communities, is ill-prepared to handle the number and complexity of patients that would come from closing or downsizing V.A. hospitals and clinics, particularly when it involves the mental health needs of people scarred by the horrors of war. Working with community providers to adequately ensure that veterans’ needs are met is a good practice. But privatization leading to the dismantling of the department’s extensive health care system is a terrible idea. The department’s understanding of service-related health problems, its groundbreaking research and its special ability to work with military veterans cannot be easily replicated in the private sector.

What Shulkin misses here is that a privatized system is not interested in taking care of all the patients. The first step in making privatized veteran care profitable is to figure out which of those 9 million veterans you don't want to serve. It would be impossible for the private sector to replicate the VA system (which, in fairness, has not always worked super-well itself), but the private sector won't even try-- it will simply try to grab the parts of the system that can be handled profitably and dump everything else. That's how profitability in the free market works-- by serving only those "customers" who can be served profitably.

All of this is, of course, another version of the push for privatization in education. The biggest difference here is that there's somebody at the federal level who's wiling to call out the privatization scam, instead of a series of cabinet level officials trying to enable the privatization agenda.

NY: Test Prep Vacation

It's that time of year. No, not Easter, and no, not spring break. It's time for the Big Standardized Test.

Schools find many ways to celebrate this special time of year, from testing pep rallies to cute videos to threats and bribes. But nothing is as important as test prep-- constant, relentless, test prep. The challenge, of course, is that testing season is sometimes interrupted by actual holidays, during which students are allowed to escape the long arm of test prep instruction.

What's a school district to do? Well, if the school district is Buffalo Public Schools, the answer is, "Give test prep homework." Here's the letter that the Chief Academic Officer at the Office of Instruction sent home with third through eighth graders:

Yup. That's a thing that happened (h/t Chris Cerrone).

The usual soft-soaping of the BS Test is pretty standard operating procedure-- "opportunity to demonstrate their scholarship" my Aunt Fanny. Let's just flip that around for a second- if we were sitting in a room trying to come up with a great way for students to demonstrate their scholarship, would we agree that taking a standardized multiple choice test would be the best way to do that? Of course not, but propagandists for the BS Testing program aren't really trying any more. But this is SOP, just like the invocation of magical expectations.

What's special here is the next part:

Please support your child at home to complete the sample writing tasks in this packet. You will also find samples to show how each question could possibly be answered.

Or, to summarize, here are some sample answers your child can practice imitating for homework over vacation. Because test prep never sleeps. (Also, why does the first sentence read like a bad translation from Russian?)

We also encourage you to take advantage of this opportunity and return the completed booklet to school following the vacation.

It's not enough that students must sacrifice some of their education at school in order to drill and prep so that they can better serve the school by getting scores that will help the school look good. Now this time-wasting educational malpractice is going to follow the children home, like an ugly flea-bitten mutt. Are some schools offering bribery to get students to spend time with this mangy cur over break? Any school that is should be ashamed of itself.

So Happy Easter and a Joyous Spring Break, and a reminder that this is also the season (especially in New York) for opting out of BS Testing. It's your right as a parent, and it's one of the few possible ways that state governments will finally stop wasting school, teacher, parent and student time on testing and test prepping.

The Testing Thermostat

Here's another analogy to help understand why test-centered accountability doesn't work well.

All the heat in my house is run by a single thermostat. My house has three stories and a basement. The thermostat is on the first floor. The furnace runs into two out of four rooms on the second floor. There are no furnace runs to the third floor (a converted attic space).

The thermostat is supposed to turn the furnace off and on based on the temperature in the house. But it only measures the temperature in one room. In a second-floor bedroom, the temperature may be uncomfortably cold, but the thermostat doesn't measure that. In the attic room, a space heater4 may have the room super-warm, but the thermometer doesn't know that. The thermostat is by the front door-- if that door opens and cold air comes pouring in, the thermostat thinks the whole house is cold.

In short, the thermostat is an inaccurate measure of the temperature in my home because it only measures the temp in one place.

It's true that the thermostat is crudely accurate-ish. If the thermostat thinks the house is at 30 degrees, it's probably safe to conclude that the whole house is cold-- although, it could also mean that the front door has blown open. If the thermostat says the house temperature is 90, it's probably safe to assume that the furnace doesn't need to kick on (and the odds are that the house isn't on fire).

The temperature at that single location isn't a completely useless proxy for the temperature at other locations in the house, if we do a lot of correcting and seat-of-pants compensation for the ways in which the system is built to fail. If we start insisting that the temperature reported by the thermostat is the exact same temperature in every other part of the house, we're in trouble.

We're in even more trouble is we start using the thermostat read-out as a proxy for other things entirely, like how comfortable a room is, or how bright the light is in a room, or how nice the room smells, or how loud the room is. It takes a Grand Canyon sized leap to figure that the reported temperature in one location can be used to determine other factors in other parts of the house.

Likewise, we will fail if we try to use the thermostat read-out to evaluate the efficiency of the power generating and delivery capabilities of our electric company, or evaluate the contractor who built the house (in my case, almost a hundred years ago), or evaluate the health and well-being of the people who live in the house-- or to jump from there to judging the effectiveness of the doctor who treats the people who live in the house, or the medical school that trained that doctor.

At the end of the day, the thermostat really only measures one thing-- the temperature right there, in the place where the thermostat is mounted. To use it to measure any other part of the house, or any other aspect of any other part of the house, or any aspect of the people who live in the other parts of the house-- well, that just means we're moving further and further out on a shaky limb of the Huge Inaccuracy Tree.

In this way, the thermostat is much like the Big Standardized Test-- really only good at measuring one small thing, and not a reliable proxy for anything else. Try this analogy the next time someone asks you why it doesn't make sense to use a single BS Test to measure students, schools, teachers, and the full range of educational activity.

It's not a perfect analogy. It doesn't, for instance, address the example of a thermostat that sets off a bomb instead of starting the furnace. Nor does it address the superstitious belief that the more often you look at a thermostat, the warmer your house becomes. But it's hard to come up with an analogy that captures all the ways in which test-centered accountability is a mess. This will do for a starter.