At The Risk Of Repeating Myself

It can be frustrating to repeat yourself. In a long-running debate such as the one surrounding education, it is easy to find yourself pushing out the same points again and again. Lately, I've heard several folks on the pro-public side (The Resistance, if you like) expressing their frustration (most notably the absolutely awesome Audrey Watters).

I get that. I've put up (checks notes) over 3100 posts on this blog alone, and there's a certain amount of redundancy in there. I'm running out of ways to show that a charter school is not a public school. I feel the repetition in the struggle to write titles for posts-- how many ways are there to say "Florida has done something unspeakably stupid and hostile to public ed"?

Nevertheless, I will continue to repeat myself, and I encourage my compatriots to do the same.
Here's why:

As Educators, We Know the Power of Repetition

"I explained this point to them once, back in September, so I'll never need to explain it to them again," said no teacher ever, unless she was telling a joke. People don't get things in one shot. They need to hear it again and again in order to wrap their brains around it. It's Teacher 101-- you will have to explain the material more than once.

New People Are Entering the Conversation Every Day

It's 2018, and you can still often hear some version of,  "So what's the big deal about that Common Core stuff, anyway?' Education activists suffer from the same problem as any people deeply committed to a particular field of study or advocacy-- spend so much time eating, breathing and sleeping a subject and you can start to forget that the world is filled with people whose daily lives are focused on other things entirely.

The education debates are like an ongoing conversation in which every five minutes a new person walks up and says, "So what are y'all talking about here?' Yes, a recap or new explanation will be redundant for a whole bunch of people who've been there for a while, but news need help working out what's going on.

Repetition Is Important For Messaging

Through sheer dogged repetition, Coke and Pepsi have made themselves the near-universal default for people who want something to drink. They didn't win some debate with a case of RC Cola. They just kept putting their name and their product in front of people all the time.

Why do we think we need eight glasses of water per day? Because we've heard it over and over. Why do so many people believe that the US public education system is terrible? Because we've heard it over and over again.

It may be that educators have trouble accepting this because they are more rooted in the academic world, and in the academic world, you construct your case carefully, articulate it clearly, put it out there once-- and then you move on. You're done. The most repetition you might get is when other people cite your work, but academics do not say, "I think I'll go ahead and rewrite that paper I wrote last month and just put it out there again." That's not how the academic world works.

Politics and PR, however, are a whole other thing. You get your talking points, your key pieces of framing language, and you make sure to get them out there time after time after time. You hire a PR firm or advocacy group to do nothing but put the same points out there again and again and again and again, because that's how you get people to just, say, reflexively think of charter schools as public schools. In fact, in the world of politics and PR, you can get far more "penetration" by repeating a claim than by actually proving it (Exhibit A: The current occupant of the White House).

This is why amplification is so important on social media. The more times we see the same article or essay popping up on our feed, the more we're inclined to believe that the article must be Really Important or Extra Good. Reposting, retweeting, sharing and passing stuff along is a big deal. If you don't, you should.

It's a challenge to repeat the same points, to shout the same alarm into the theater where people mostly ignore your warnings about the fire so that they can watch the rest of the film. Repetition challenges your creativity and your passion for the points you want to make. But it's not a waste of your time; in fact, it may be necessary to get your point across. And you know who understands that really well? All the PR and advocacy experts working for the modern ed reform biz. 

Will Indiana Clean Up Its Cyber Charter Mess?

It has been over a year since Chalkbeat published a Shaina Cavazos story about virtual schools in Indiana., making clear what a huge mess it has on its hands. Now there's noise that next year the legislature might do something about it.

Not counting on this guy.

The state of cybers in Indiana should come as no surprise-- even CREDO, a charter-friendly organization, found that cyber schools are literally a waste of students' time. Cavazos found that all the usual problems of charters schools in general and cyber schools in particular were in play in Indiana. Crooked self-dealing, where school operators hired their own companies to provide services for the school. Massive lack of sufficient qualified personnel-- how does a student-teacher ratio of 158-1 sound?

Some of the numbers in the Cavazos are staggering-- 10% of budget spent on instruction! 10%!!

Cyber schools without "live" lessons-- just log on and read the assignment or watch the video. Teachers feel disconnected, and there are few accountability measures to insure that the actual student did the assigned work.

At the time the article was released, many officials clutched pearls, hemmed, hawed, gasped in outrage, and waved their angry finger in the air. But nobody actually did anything.

But in a story from yesterday, Cavazos reports that Governor Holcomb now believes that the time is right to do something.

Holcomb said in an interview Tuesday with Chalkbeat that he expects lawmakers to act during next year’s legislative session on an array of proposals to improve virtual charter schools, which were recently approved by the state board of education.

The recommendations are a varied bunch. They include a call for a single statewide authorizer,  There's a call to expand state oversight beyond virtual charter schools to cover any online education services at all. There's a recommendation to monkey with cyber per-student funding. Monitor student participation more closely. If a cyber charters test results stay too lousy for too long, the charter would be forbidden to take on new students.

A measure of outcomes would be useful as well. I'm an opponent off test scores, but if that's how we're playing the game, let's play it. PA cybers are infamous for never once making the test results cut, but never paying a price for their failure.

That is undoubtedly related to the power of charter lobbying. Cybers in particular lobby heavily, with Indiana being the number two destination for K12 lobbyist money (see below). Congrats on that. The biggest obstacle to cyber charter reform in any state is well-connected, well-financed opposition of the companies themselves (and as long as cybers are paid per student rates based on the amount of money the sending district sends, rather than the actual cost the cyber itself, running a virtual charter is as good as printing money).

“The state board did their job, what they were asked to do, and that is to lay out these guardrails,” Holcomb said. “Here’s the action steps that have to be taken to improve the system. We didn’t have that before.”

I suppose that's a step forward. But the last piece of this puzzle is that Holcomb is the designated successor of Mike Pence. He ran on the promise of perpetuating all of Pence's terrible ideas, including all manner of charter and voucher (remember, it was supposedly Pence who promoted Betsy DeVos for Education Secretary). While it's true that bricks and mortar charter fans have turned on cybers before, Eric Holcomb hardly seems like the guy to lead any kind of reform of anything with "charter school" in its name. I'm not sure where this story is headed, but in Indiana I'd keep my eyes peeled for any surprise twists.

OK: Another Rich Amateur Assault On Education.

Hechinger Report elevated my blood pressure with a story that is a near-perfect microcosm of the state of public education and, really, democracy in 2018.

Looks like a fun guy.

Paul Campbell is a successful business guy. He put in over a decade with Rolls-Royce in Indiana, rising to the level of VP of customer business. He put in a few yers with Capstone, a manufacturer of micro-turbines. Then he jumped to Enviro Systems, a "supplier of environmental controls for some of the largest aircraft manufacturers in the world." Enviro was founded in 1979, and its parent company is Zodiac Aerospace, a French company with roots back ton 1896 (they started out with hydrogen balloons). Zodiac is huge-- 100 sites and 35,000 employees. Zodiac acquired Enviro in early 2015; in June of 2015, Campbell took over as President and CEO of Enviro. Enviro boasts 170 non-union employees.

Enviro is located in Seminole, Oklahoma, a town that ballooned to 25k people during an oil boom a century ago, but by 2000 had shrunk to under 7,000 people. It has since bounced back a bit, but it's a small town about an hour away from Oklahoma City; it's in those suburbs where Campbell actually made his new home-- not Seminole.

Campbell hadn't been at the company a year before he was complaining about the local schools-- specifically, that he couldn't recruit or retain good people for Enviro: "We can't get people to work here. The main reason we found is because of the local education system."

Seminole's schools, like all of Oklahoma's schools, suffer from a state government that is hostile to public education. But Campbell, who also became involved in the Chamber of Oklahoma, didn't start lobbying the state for better funding or resources for the local education system. Instead, he set out to create a charter school.

The local school board turned him down twice, so he took his case to the state board, which overruled the local elected board's decision.  The local board argued that the charter didn't have local support, and I'm inclined to believe them because an elected school board in a  town of 7,000 hears about what their constituents do or don't want. At ball games, in church, at the grocery store, on Facebook-- if the voters had been unhappy about the first 7-0 vote against the charter, the second 7-0 vote against it would never have happened. But Campbell, who was by then a bit of an Oklahoma charter guru, knew how to play the game, and he brought a crowd to the hearing.

Seminole schools had their own problems, with a failed bond issue to replace a 80-year-old building that turned out (after the bond failed) to be unusable.

And so Seminole taxpayers got an extra school they didn't ask for and took a budget cut to local schools that they didn't want. And with Campbell's school pulling a mere 29 students, odds are good that actual costs of running Seminole schools will drop by nearly nothing, but they'll lose somewhere between $100K to $270K.

Hechinger reports that some of the anticipated issues haven't arisen yet, but this doesn't seem to matter to Campbell one way or another (his response to the issue of further financial strains on the school system-- "Adapt.") Campbell's concept for the charter is as a source of meat widgets for employers; the first project of the year was research career paths. This is not a bad fit for Oklahoma, where public education is being retooled as work force preparation, which is where "college and career ready" aimed us-- proper meat widget job training for the not-wealthy class.

So there it is. A guy with money and clout and who thinks he's hot stuff (he tells Hechinger "I love doing something that no one thinks can be done") decides that he might as well singlehandedly overrule democratic controls and, even though he knows nothing about running a school, go ahead and create a school based on what he thinks a school should be, which most especially includes making school a training program to provide his business with workers. He's started a whole charter backing organization, because after three years of living near this community, he knows what communities like it need and he kn own how schools should be run.

Campbell talks about the frustrations of dealing with the local school board, and as someone who worked for a small town/rural local school board, I'm not unsympathetic. But let's be real-- after a year of being an employer in a small town (and one who chose not to live in that town) he went to the school board to tell them how he'd like the schools to be transformed to suit him.

Democracy is frustrating and messy. Sometimes you don't like the results. But the repeated bypassing of the process of democracy, particularly in the name of taking private control of a public institution, particularly when done by amateurs who don't know what they're talking about, and most particularly when their intent is to impose their own set of goals snd purposes upon that institution-- this is all bad news, and it has been the story over and over and over again with modern ed reform, from Bill Gates and Common Core all the way down to Paul Campbell and his moves to make rural Oklahoma education in. his own image. It is not good for our nation to have critical public institutions bent to the will of unelected amateurs, no matter how much money and clout they have.

PA: The Importance of District Wealth In One Chart

Pennsylvania is close to the bottom of the nation in state financial support for public education. For years, we've hovered around 35% of school funding coming from the state.

That means that the effects of local wealth are heightened in the state. Rich districts can afford to pony up tax dollars to make up the difference, and poor districts struggle. In other states, state dollars might obscure the real differences in wealth between rich and poor districts, but in PA, the differences are still right there. Which is why this chart packs a punch. For those of you looking for one more test-score-to-economic-status correlation, here you go. The data and the chart come from the state department. The school ranking is (was, actually, but that's another story) based on the School Performance Profile (SPP) and the SPP, for the fancy language and math involved, was 90% based on Big Standardized Test scores.

So that's what you're seeing when you look at the chart-- the correlation between district wealth and the results of the BS Test. Now, that could be a factor of the socio-economic background of the students taking the test, or it could be a factor of the district budget, or some combination of the two. But the one thing you can't say here is that money doesn't matter. The fewer poor students you serve, the better your test scores. One more indication that using the BS Tests to measure student achievement or school effectiveness or teacher quality is simply bunk. I don't know exactly what it tells us about people who don't know when to use "fewer" instead of "less."

PA: The Good News You May Have Missed

Pennsylvanians may remember our old buddy John Eichelberger, GOP State Senator from Blair County. He ran the Senate Education committee, and... well, he was not a friend of public education.

Eichelberger was an upstart candidate, running against the GOP establishment and goosed along by the infamous late-night legislator pay raise. His attacks on teachers and public ed were many. He was the DeVos point man to try pushing vouchers, trashing the teacher pensions, and, in one of his more inspired moments, trying to make teacher sick days something that would have to be negotiated in local contracts (because teachers don't really need or deserve them anyway). For good measure, he also once suggested that Philly was wasting money by trying to get its (mostly black) students to go to college.

This frickin' guy.

Lots of Pennsylvanians have heard stories. One of my own board members came back from Harrisburg with a story of Eichelberger replying to a request for better financial support by snapping that they had already given enough money to "you people."

It was a busy election year, so that's my excuse for not noticing till someone just pointed it out to me that Eichelberger's time in Harrisburg is done. Done done done finito doneso.

He was actually primaried out in what has to be at least partially an act of political vengeance; Eichelberger trashed the Shuster family to get in office, and they helped back his primary opponent, who rode into the spot on a big pile of dark money. That opponent, physician John Joyce, walked to a massive victory over the Democratic challenger in the general election.

Now, Joyce is no prize; he's about as right-winged as you can get. But here's one thing about him-- he has no particular intertest in education. His list of campaign issues doesn't even include it.

We are actually in a period of mystery and suspense in PA education policy. Both the Senate and House education chairs are up for grabs, and nobody seems to feel particularly grabby. Nor apparently are there any obvious choices for the job. The one thing we know for sure-- whoever it is, it won't be John "No Money for Public Education" Eichelberger. Stay tuned, campers.

How To Avert A Strike

It's an odd thing-- we almost always talk about teacher strikes as if they are a choice of teachers and their unions. Yet, the power to avert a strike lies on the other side of the table.

Here's what management needs to understand.

Teachers don't want to strike. No union committee sits down and says, "Well, the board is ready to talk to us with a batch of proposals to get this contract under way-- but screw that. We really want to strike instead." I've been through two strikes in my career-- one as local president-- and I'm here to tell you that generally speaking, teachers would rather do almost anything else in the entire world than go out on strike.

So if your teachers are striking, it's because the board has convinced them that nothing else is an option.

If you are a bad member saying, "I wish they would do anything rather than walk out," I am going to ask you what other options you will give them. Will you agree to meet to bargain in good faith? Will you agree to send negotiators who could speak for the board? Will you make an honest effort to consider varied and creative solutions? Will you deal with them honestly and straightforwardly? Will you agree to do whatever it takes to negotiate a mutually agreeable solution and not waste anyone's time?

If a teachers' union is striking, it means they only see two options available-- agree to whatever the board wants, or strike.

Now, I won 't lie. There have been union locals that have been so unwilling to strike that they have buckled and agreed to accept what was offered. But if you think the school districts didn't pay a price in morale, you're kidding yourself.

This is the funny thing about strikes-- the power in the district-teacher relationship is distributed in such a way that only the district can provide an alternative to striking. Only the district can say, "Here's a thing we can do that we believe will get us to an agreement." Well, the union can say it, but only the district is in a position to make it happen.

No, if you're a school district that wants to avoid a strike, then offer an alternative. Pro tip: "This is our final offer" is not such an offer. It is a dare that means "Take this offer or go on strike." Do districts sometimes provoke a strike because they think they will win the strike? They surely do-- and they are fools, because nobody wins a strike.

The dream sometimes is to "break" the union and the teachers. People who follow this strategy are also fools, the kind of idiots who think that an organization, a school district, works best when powered by broken people. This only makes sense if you think the point of the organization is to feed the ego, power and wealth of the people at the top. This only makes sense if your organization is run by broken people who want to break the world and see it burn.

2018 has been a big year for teacher strikes. That tells us far more about the people in power than it does about teachers, because one things about teachers has never changed-- they don't want too strike.  If you want to stop them from striking, then offer an alternative, and not a threat.

ICYMI: Sleeping In Edition (12/16)

Since you don't get the whole day to read through the list, I'll keep things relatively short.

The Cautionary Tale of Correspondence Schools

Some edu-history of an oft-forgotten chapter with interesting implications for modern reform ideas like personalized [sic] learning. A long read, but an fascinating one.

Christmas Time: A Minefiield for Teachers

Nancy Flanagan reminds us why the holiday season is extra fraught for those who work in classrooms.

School Choice Deception

One more way that Florida insures that students with real needs will get no real help.

Die Hard

Life is not an action movie. Don't arm teachers.

2018: What Happened To The Year of the Teacher?

Hey, wasn't this supposed to be our year? Steven Singer figures out what exactly happened.

Shut Up, Bloggers

The rhetorical approaches bio silencing dissent.