IL: Another Voucher Program Launched

This fall, Illinois is launching a hot new neo-voucher program. The Invest in Kids program is a tax credit shell game that allows the state to funnel public tax dollars to private religious schools. This was Governor Bruce Rauner's idea of how to fix Illinois's school funding, which is a little like fixing your house by moving into an apartment. Rauner is not a friend of public education.

The program is somewhere between the standard voucher set-up and the upper-voucher system of an Education Savings Account. In Illinois, people can contribute money toward a school "scholarship," which counts as a 75% tax credit for the donor. If I owe the state $1,236 dollars in taxes and I give $1,200 to a "scholarship" fund, I now owe the state $336 in taxes. Under this system, the money is never in the state's hands, so the program is safe from that whole church-state separation thing. The state, however, does end up with less money, so public schools still come up with the fuzzy end of the lollipop on this deal.

The whole business has been controversial (it took three roll call votes to pass the measure). But while voucher schemes have been regularly struck down, tax credit systems (Illinois actually already has one for school supplies) have held up well in court under multiple challenges. Studies so far show that voucher systems (whatever they're called) actually provide poorer results, but as usual that's using test scores as the measure, so honestly, we don't really know, and many Reformsters have shifted from "vouchers will get better results" to "freedom is the most important thing." And controversial or not, at $75 million it appears to be the biggest launch of such a program (Florida's tax credit voucher dodge is now huge, but it started at a modest $50 million.)

Last week WBEZ took a look at the private school scholarships and discovered "12 Things We Should Have Known..." as a way to see exactly where Illinois has now landed. Some of these are "should have knowns" in the sense that, yes, if you had been paying attention, you would have known this before now. For instance, there's really no excuse for only now realizing that tax credits are a way to get around the law against state-funded religious schools. The law has also been pretty clear that these "scholarships" are not just for poor kids-- a family of four at 300% of the poverty level ($75,300) are eligible for up to $12,973 (that's a very hefty sum compared to most voucher and neo-voucher programs. But some of these details show how Illinois is growing this beast.

For one thing, the cap on how big a credit taxpayers can take is huge. Huge! Illinois taxpayers can get up to a cool million in tax credits.

As has been the case elsewhere, some number of voucher-- I mean, "scholarship" recipients were enrolled in private school anyway. In other words, some of the money drained from public schools had absolutely no corresponding reduction in enrollment or expenses. But it's hard to know exactly how many because...

The organizations granting these scholarships are allowed to operate with zero transparency. There's some basic info they must report (which is good-- the last time an expansion of this sort of thing was proposed in Pennsylvania, nobody had any oversight over any part of the whole business), but donors remain secret, and even basic information about students like where they live is also hidden. In Illinois, even charter schools are subject to FOIA-- but scholarship organizations are not.

24% of the money in the program came from eight donors. 73% of the money will be funneled through a single organization (Empower Illinois). It's only fair that Empower Illinois has the majority of the business, because they wrote the law in the first place, having gathered up some clout partnering with the Catholic Church, which, of course, gets a huge windfall out of this whole system. What does Empower Illinois get out of this? Well, they get to keep 5% of all donations. WBEZ says the group has taken in $30.8 million on contributions, which means a $1.5 million payday for them.  Ka-ching.

Interesting detail-- the donor can designate the school for the "scholarship." That means that a family might have their eye on one particular school, but there may be limited scholarship money for that particular school. That also means that as the owner/operator of a particular private school, you could use this system to pump up your own school's finances while giving yourself a tasty tax break. Or, if you were a staunch Catholic, you could pump up your favorite parochial school (while tax breaking yourself). At any rate, Catholic schools are enjoying a big windfall thanks to these "scholarships." But I'm wondering which rich people would earmark their scholarship money for schools serving the kind of poor neighborhoods they would never set foot in.

Finally, no state that instituted a tax credit program like this has ever ended it-- but education could be an election issue in Illinois, where Democratic candidate for governor J. B. Pritzker has said he would put an end to the program. Which means that Pritzker has made an enemy of the Catholic Church, and Chicago Cardinal Blasé Cupich, who backed this program big time.

Time will tell just how much damage this program will do to public schools and the students who need to get an education there. Or maybe it will just drain enough resources from the public system that developers can get their hands on more upscale apartment real estate conversion material in Chicago.

The City Fund Plans To Conquer The Market

What happens when a bunch of Reformsters decide to get the band back together to see if they can't privatize public ed more successfully this time around? You get The City Fund, a group that has just inadvertently leaked its plans for a hostile takeover of 5% of the US education system.

For a thorough back-ground on this hot new reform group, check out this piece by Thomas Ultican. I'll hit the highlights, and then we'll talk about the big scoop that Matt Barnum tossed out into a giant shitstorm of a new cycle this afternoon.

The City Fund is collecting a giant pot of money to help launch more "educational opportunity for all children." Specifically, they want to boost the portfolio model of ed reform on several cities. It's a bold choice, because not everybody thinks the portfolio model is a great idea, and that includes plenty of people in the reform camp. The portfolio model is basically an approach that throws together public, charter, and even private schools that want to play. All these schools get tossed into one super-district that is under the watchful eye of a centralized quality control system. Periodically the portfolio managers dump the losers and beef up the winners and let some more join the gamer. That's right- "portfolio" here is not borrowed from the world of art so much as the world of investment management.

Reformsters like the model because it replaces the locally elected school board with a Portfolio Manager, and it essentially puts the public schools on equal footing with charter schools. Free market fans think this is a great way to put everyone under the thumb of the invisible hand. But other Reformsters see the portfolio as working pretty much like a school district, which they already don't like. And centralizing all that oversight in a PM runs the risk of getting someone in that job who is not a big charter and choice fan. And, of course, the whole structure depends on the same old crappy test score system to identify good schools and bad schools.

Nevertheless, The City Fund is banking on that model. Who are the players making this bold choice? There are lots of familiar names here.

There's Neerav Kingsland, the Yale Law School grad who oversaw the conversion of New Orleans into a charter district (as you may have heard, there's some debate over just how successful that really was). Since then, he's become an education investment guru for various big money funds.

Kevin Huffman, who went straight from Teach For America to running the school system of Tennessee.

Chris Barbic (also TFA) was brought into Tennessee by Huffman to run the Achievement School District. The promise was that the bottom 5% of schools would become part of the top 25% in just five years. They did not even come close, and Barbic left the job having concluded that "achieving results in neighborhood schools is harder than in a choice environment."

David Harris previously led the Mind Trust in Indiana, a charter school incubator. And Ethan  Gray is the head of Education Cities, another choice promoter with affection for the portfolio model.

Kicking in some big bucks are one of Kingsland's current employers, the Arnold Fund. Reed Hastings has also kicked in. The Netflix mogul, like Kingsland, has argued that elected school boards need to be eliminated so that schools can be run more like a business. The Hastings Fund and the omnipresent Gates Foundation have also kicked in. All the sources have not yet been revealed, but City Fund has raised a whopping 200 million. And as of yesterday afternoon, we have a clearer picture of what they have in mind.

While the rest of the country was watching the latest episode of "That Darn President," Matt Barnum was revealing that he'd gotten his hands on a City Fund presentation for investors. You should read the whole thing, but here are the broad strokes.

They want to spread the Denver, DC and New Orleans model. This is problematic; DC and New Orleans are not exactly synonymous with unqualified reformster success.

They reject many reformy standard ideas. "Very little work in education reform," Barnum says is the first line of the presentation.

But most extraordinary is their goal. Remember when Eli Broad announced he was going to take over half the LA school system? City Fund wants to move its charterized system into forty cities over the next ten years, grabbing 30-50% of the students in each city. "Our goal," Barnum quotes the presentation, "is to make the model normal."

Barnum lays out their ambitious timeline:

Between 2018 and 2021, it hopes to have success in at least 20 cities, affecting around one million students. Specifically, their goal is for 10 cities to have fully adopted the model, and 10 more to be making progress.

From 2022 on, the group hopes to influence “every major city in America,” growing by a couple of cities each year, the presentation says. (“If I had to rewrite that slide I would say, ‘if evidence and demand follows,’” Kingsland said in an interview. “We really aren’t going to expand if the evidence isn’t there.”) 

How to do it? The City Fund plans to use speakers, blog posts, "partnering" with groups, and lots and lots of money-- as much as $15 to $20 million over the first three years.

The City Fund is a new organization (still without a web site) but they have the players and the money to become a major factor in ed erform in the forty targeted cities. Do you want your city's ed system remade in the image of New Orleans or DC?  Keep your eyes peeled.

Still More Testing for Littles

If you don't spend time in the world of elementary education, you may not be familiar with DIBELS. DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Literacy Skills) were created and marketed as a test of early literacy skills. They were tied to the Reading First initiative, a federal program that was mandated under No Child Left Behind.

To grossly over-simplify, reading instruction is the scene of an eternal war between two schools of thought. On one side, we have the content folks (how well you can read depends on your prior knowledge-- what you know) and on the other side, the mechanics folks (how well you can read depends on how well you can decode the marks on the page, a content-independent skill set). DIBELS, like most of the initiatives from NCLB forward, leans toward the skills side. Its most famous contribution to the skills side is the nonsense word fluency portion of the test, in which small children children are asked to "read" nonsense syllables (e.g. zek, vad, nuf). There has been a great deal of controversy surrounding DIBELS, not the least of which surrounds the notion of giving formal testing to Kindergarten and First Grade students.

Do we need to teach 5- and 6-year-olds that school is a place you go to take tests? Do we need to start subjecting little ones to test anxiety? Do we need to teach small children that reading is something you do in order to pass tests rather than something that can be done for personal enjoyment and enrichment?

But if you've only just caught on to the debate about whether or not kindergarten should be the new first grade (or second grade), you should know that's old news. Because education reformers and test manufacturers have their sights set on pre-school students.

Dynamic Measurement Group, the folks who brought us DIBELS, are rolling out PELI, a pre-school literacy assessment for 3- to 5-year-olds. It will be available this coming year.

DMG notes that PELI "has been specifically designed to be used within an Outcomes-Driven Model of decision-making and is appropriate for use within a Response to Intervention service delivery model." Translated from corporate edspeak, that means basically, "We can use your child's score to decide that they need to get remedial classwork." Did I mention that this is for 3- to 5-year-olds?

DMG notes that PELI assessments are "efficient, engaging, cost-effective, standardized" on a list of descriptors that does not include "proven to be good for children."

DMG is not out there by themselves on this. The pressure to ramp up pre-school academics is building steadily (Do you need a practice test for your child's pre-school admission exam? Here its is.) This despite the lack of any research to suggest that such an emphasis actually works.

What evidence we have says that academic focus for littles is not just damaging, but counterproductive, leading to the opposite of what its proponents want to see. What we see over and over is that free play, not direct instruction, is what helps small children grow healthy, strong, smart, and with their curiosity still intact.

Continued calls for "high quality pre-school" keep leading us to the same issue-- how will we know they are high quality? The answer for far too many policy makers is "Well, give 'em a test!" This stimulates the manufacturers to create such tests, which in turn leads to the marketing of the tests.

The real danger is that young parents (remember, we're talking 3 to 5-year-olds here) will feel they need to take the word of "experts," asking teachers questions like "How was her test score" instead of asking the child "Did you have fun today? Are you happy?"

No shred of evidence suggests that the human race has evolved to the point that small children reach developmental milestones any faster or sooner than they did ten or fifty or a hundred years ago. There's no good reason to let tests like PELI occupy an important spot in the lives of littles.

Originally posted at Forbes   

OK: Some Bad Solutions To Real Problems

Oklahoma is loaded with all sorts of educational problems, or maybe just one problem (their legislature doesn't want to spend any money one education) that creates a hundred symptoms.

But last week, Don Parker, retired chief information officer, public ed volunteer, and student of social science and government at Harvard-- he neglected to mention that he's a big private investor and a twelve-year director of KIPP charter schools in Tulsa, which ,maybe is what he counts as his volunteer work-- had a few thoughts to offer in the Tulsa World.

This guy.

He opens strong-- "Our schools are not working..."-- and it's all downhill from there.

... continuing to call for change that does not address the problem condemns children to disproportionate levels of poverty, incarceration, dependence on public assistance, drug use, teen pregnancy and all kinds of things that are not good for anyone.

Yup. Schools are causing all the problems of society. We need, says Parker, a new direction.

Parker admits that teachers do need to be paid more fairly. But Oklahoma doesn't need more teachers, because technology. You may be able to guess where he's going, but let me walk you through his swell argument.

First, we don't score well on international tests. You probably heard something about this, quite likely because we have never, ever scored well on international test comparisons, in all our years of economic and national success in other areas. It's almost as if international test comparisons don't tell us anything useful about a nation's trajectory. Parker also wants us to know that Oklahoma is at the bottom  of the nation's barrel, and Tulsa is at the bottom of that barrel.

Teaching is heroic. And Oklahoma schools still suck. For some reason those two thoughts share a paragraph. But (next paragraph) Oklahoma can fix everything with tools already at hand.

See, there's "no debate in this country about whether the quality of the teacher matters. It is inarguably the No. 1 determinant of student learning."

Except-- oops-- it's inarguably NOT the No. 1 determinant. Even reform types admit that it is the No. 1 factor in school, but that out-of-school factors are even larger. But Parker is going to pretend he doesn't know that. Instead, he wants to make Oklahoma the national leader in public school performance by being the leader in attracting, retaining, developing and empowering the best teachers."

Can you guess why?

Well, there's another problem. You attract teachers, says Parker, by paying them better than anyone else (not, apparently, by empowering them or listening to them or treating them with respect-- nope, just throw money at them). But "how do we do that in a state with one of the lowest levels of education funding in the country?"

If you thought the answer was "by increasing the funding level since that factor is completely within legislative control," go to the back of the class. The answer is much simpler:

The only way to pay teachers twice what we pay them today with the same level of per-pupil state funding is to have them teach twice as many students. We don’t want more 10th-grade math teachers, for example, we want the best 10th-grade math teacher in the district to teach math to all 10th-grade students.

See, Parker just took a college class via "a robust live streaming infrastructure," so we just do the same with schools. I once ate a steak in a restaurant, so I think I know how my son could cook spaghetti for 100 people at a convention.

Can the best 10th-grade math teacher in all of Tulsa Public Schools be teaching math in three or four different classrooms at the same time? Yes, with the help of some assistants and enabled by technology.

If only I had a robust live streaming infrastructure here on my desktop so that you could all hear the sound of my palm smacking my forehead. Parker, it turns out, is one more guy who doesn't really understand what happens in a school. Parker is one more amateur kibbitzer who doesn't, for instance, understand the importance of connection and relationship in teaching. Never mind the 10th grade math class that falls apart because it requires high school sophomores to behave and respectfully get their lessons from the stranger on the tv. Imagine a first grade class being taught by someone who's not in the room, who can't smile at or hug an individual student.

The more you think about the idea, the dumber it is. How much pay would it take to make a high school English teacher excited about grading 600 essays in a week. How effectively can student construct a classroom discussion between 600 students who aren't even in the same room. How effectively can a teacher create the important human connection with several hundred students over an internet connection?

Distance learning has been around longer than the internet, and there's a reason you don't hear about it happening very often-- because it's effective only in very limited and specific situations. The rest of the time it's like trying to eat a steak through a paper straw. Parker is imagining, I guess, that teaching is just standing there and dispensing knowledge lecture-style, so students just need to be able to see and hear the dispenser. And yet, it is not 1962.

It's the bane of education. Somehow everyone is allowed to declare themselves an expert in the field and offer their advice. Parker's advice is dumb, and the Tulsa World was dumb to publish it. This kind of thing does not help advance the education debates in any meaningful way, particular in a state like Oklahoma.

FL: Taking the Next Step To End Public Ed (Update)

(Update: I am happy to report that this morning, a judge threw Amendment 8 off the ballot. For the moment, public education has won one. However, that decision has been appealed, with the court to take it up on September 5th-- so stay vigilant.)

There are times when I think I could write about Florida all the time. The state's legislators lead the nation in outright hostility to public education and indifference to children. And this time they're really outdoing them with some Franken-bill known as Amendment 8.

Amendment 8 was produced by the Florida Constitution  Revision Commission, which voted to put it on the ballot as an amalgam of three amendments to the state constitution.

We're well past the point of using lipstick.

One amendment would mandate "civic literacy" as a subject in public schools. One would weaken school boards by imposing term limits of eight years. And one would render elected public school boards obsolete while giving the charter industry the power to inflict taxation without representation on communities. Some authorizer could establish a charter school in your community, and then all oversight and operation of the charter would be by the state. The only part of the charter than the community would be involved in is paying the bills; the amendment completely circumvents the elected school board.

Guess how the legislators have been publicizing the bill.

The amendment's official title is “School Board Term Limits and Duties; Public Schools” and official summary is:

Creates a term limit of eight consecutive years for school board members and requires the legislature to provide for the promotion of civic literacy in public schools. Currently, district school boards have a constitutional duty to operate, control, and supervise all public schools. The amendment maintains a school board’s duties to public schools it establishes, but permits the state to operate, control, and supervise public schools not established by the school board.

The League of Women Voters considers that misleading enough to file a lawsuit about it. Said Patricia M. Brigham, president of the League of Women Voters of Florida,“Voters will not recognize that the real purpose of the amendment is to allow unaccountable political appointees to control where and when charter schools can be established in their county."

Backers of the measure say the League just doesn't like the bill. But hey-- who are the backers of this proposed amendment sandwich, anyway?

The FLCRC board includes Erika Donalds. Donalds is a partner in a New York investment group. She founded Parents' Rights of Choice for Kids (Parents ROCK). Then she got herself elected to a school board, and founded the Florida Coalition of School Board Members, a group with only six founding members and which seems devoted to austerity and school choice. The group appears to be tiny, but in tune with the priorities of Florida's reform legislature. Amendment 8 is Donalds' baby. Also on the FLCRC board is Patricia Levesque, a well-known name in the reformster world. Levesque has been Jeb Bush's right hand at the various incarnations of his reformy groups. And FCSBM has been plenty cozy with Bush/Levesque's group.

Donalds has a PAC devoted to selling Amendment 8, and it has been collecting money from all manner of charter school supporters and profiteers. And her husband Byron is a GOP member of the legislature and helps run a charter school of his own (Mason Classical Academy). Byron is the guy who gave Florida the law that says textbooks must be "balanced" and that any taxpayer can challenge anything in any text-- a law that mirrored policies adopted by Erika's school board.

Amendment 8 is a classic poop sandwich-- take something radically unpalatable and hide it between two delicious slices of bread. Civics education and term limits-- don't those sound great (the FLCRC has apparently been making lots of poop sandwiches for all the sectors).

But it is also part of a larger long game that Florida has been playing to dismantle public education. Last year the legislature created a powerful means of draining public education tax dollars into charter coffers, giving the charter crew to separate a mountain of money from the public system. Amendment 8 lets them do the same for governance. Under the proposed amendment, Florida's legislators will be empowered to create an entire parallel school system controlled by their own designated school czar. The charters will no longer be accountable in any way to local elected authorities. All charters will answer only to some charter-loving bureaucrat in Tallahassee. From local taxpayers and voters they will not take any direction, any rebuke, any protest, any complaint, or any oversight. Just money.

And of course once all that money has been diverted to private charter schools over which taxpayers have no say, and maintaining public schools will require either higher taxes or fewer services and programs-- well, that will simply accelerate the systemic gutting of Florida's public schools.

I hope Florida's voters fight hard. I hope that folks are going door to door explaining, "If Amendment 8 passes, some person you will never see can start a school next door that would reject your own child, and you will pay the bill. They might open a school even if nobody wants it, and you will pay the bill." This really is taxation without representation. And because FLCRC has unleashed a bunch of these poop sandwiches, cutting through the noise so that people remember No on Amendment 8 will not be easy. But if this amendment passes, the Florida legislature will have nearly finished the business of butchering public education and feasting on the pieces.

Don't live in Florida? Then you just have to remember one thing-- Betsy DeVos thinks Florida is a great example of how education should be managed.

Hat tip to Sandy Stenoff, who directed me to some useful sources for this convoluted mess of a story.

Who's Your Hippo?

Take a moment to watch this... It's a bit of video, now licensed so I can no longer embed it, that shows folks on a boat. Out from the shore comes something aimed at the boat like a massive torpedo, zooming at them with frightening speed. It suddenly rears up out of the water is revealed to be-- a hippe!


Surprise. If your idea of a hippo is a big lumbering fat creature, then discovering that hippos swim like rocket-propelled sharks may come as a shock and a surprise. When you see those ripples headed for your boat, you may not realize exactly what's going on.

Teachers can have their own classroom hippos. It's easy to assume that a student who is bad at one thing is similarly challenged in all things. And that can lead to some problems with expectations.

We often talk about expectations (or were taught about them) as if they're a controlling factor. If we expect Pat to be a math whiz, Pat will be a math hiz. But if we expect Pat to stink at math, Pat will stink. To some extent that can certainly be true, but there are other reasons to watch our expectations.

As human beings, we see what we expect to see. The hippo will not be affected at all by our ideas about how well it can swim, but our expectations about how well hippos swim will affect how well we understand the situation we're witnessing.

Our expectations can change how we handle the data. If we decide that Chris is a horrible person and we expect Chris to do nothing but horrible things, then when Chris saves a bus load of orphans and puppies from a fire, we'll explain it away. "Oh, Chris was just trying to show off and get attention."

If our hippo shows us it can swim, we can accept that information and alter our expectations about hippos, or we can explain it away. We do that with our classroom hippos. We expect Alex to be a huge jerk, so when Alex says something that might be considered nice, we assume there's some level of sarcasm in there. We expect Pat to stink at fractions, so if Pat does a great job on a fractions test, we may dismiss it as an aberration. In an elementary classroom, or a language classroom, where many different subject areas are involved, it's frighteningly easy to assume that low ability over here means low ability over there. I am ashamed to think of how many times in my career I was far too slow to understand that my classroom hippo was an awesome swimmer. A student who was such a rude jerk most days that I didn't see at first that he was really deeply concerned about the people in his own life. The student who couldn't write to save his life, but was a dynamic and engaging public speaker.

This is the real reason not to listen to information about your new students from their old teachers-- it's not that you'll expect them into some academic disaster, but that you might not be able to process the evidence with a clear head.

In my setting, that was nearly impossible, and I always knew many students by name and reputation before I actually met them. The challenge was to stay open to what they could show me about themselves.

That's the challenge in a new year. Keep your eyes open, keep your mind open, and watch out for the hippos.

ICYMI: Stone Skipping Edition (8/19)

Yes, stone skipping. We'll get to that in a second. First, here's some reading from the week that is worth your attention. Remember to share.

How We Known The Reason for the Drop in Texas Special Ed Numbers  

You may remember the story of how Texas quietly capped the number of students with special needs that districts were allowed to find. Here's a follow-up of sorts, a rebuttal of all the excuses given for why the problem might have occurred.

Clash of Visons in Puerto Rico

Disaster capitalists square of against fans of actual public school education in hurricane-damaged Puerto Rico

The Reason for My Work

Chuck Pearson with a worthy entry in the Why I Teach genre.

What We Mean When We Say High Expectations

Jose Luis Vilson looks at the idea of high expectations and who exactly they are for.

Arizona Charter Boasts of Mass Expulsions

A charter in Arizona actually bragged publicly about how it turned itself around by expelling all the students who made it look bad. Now they are experiencing regret (for talking openly about their secret for success).

The Strange Story of Susie Strangfield

Within this tale of Oregon bureaucracy and politics is a fairly horrifying glimpse of their Big Brothery data plan.

NY Bronx Charter Teacher Fired for Reporting Sexual Harrassment by Students  

How bad can conditions get in  the charter world, where teachers have few of the job protections that public school teachers have? This bad.

The City Fund

Yet another tool for privatizing public education.

Finally- yesterday I spent the mid-Augusr afternoon as I have for about twenty years-- serving as a judge for our local rock skipping fest. This year's field included the current world record holder and the champion from Japan. A few year's ago, CBS Sunday Morning visited, and you can get a rough idea of what the event is like here. This has nothing to do with education; just small town life.




If you want to see what the world record throw looks like...



And if that all piqued your interest, there's an actual documentary available on Amazon Prime.