Yes, we're right in the thick of it, so many of you are busy with a hundred things other than your usual internet diet of education goodies. But the world keeps spinning, so here are some pieces to look at while you're enjoying vacation.
Can Charters Be Reformed? Should They Be?
Carol Burris offers five reasons that charter schools cannot become a productive part of the education landscape.
Pa Changes How It Measures Schools-- But Will Anybody Pay Attention?
Pennsylvania will now check to see if schools are Future Ready. One example of the new post-test-centric evaluations under ESSA.
Why Education Policy's Big Listening Moment Doesn't Involve Much Listening
Rick Hess with some reform self-evaluation. Some good points made here.
Top Ed Tech Trends and Stories
Audrey Watters signs off for her final wrapup of the ed tech stories of this year (which seem a lot like the stories of the previous year).
Cut And Paste End Of Year Letter for Education Advocates
Rick Hess makes two appearances this week, and this one is good for a chuckle.
Santa Claus Is Comin' To Town Or Not.
Nancy Flanagan looks at how Christmas lands in the midst of a challenging time this year.
Why Do Keep Falling For School Scams
A look at the T. M. Landry school scandal, the responses to it, and the reason we'll probably fall for the next one that comes down the pike.
Sunday, December 23, 2018
Saturday, December 22, 2018
8 Reasons Not To Love Personalized [sic] Learning
As we roll into 2019, it becomes increasingly clear that much of the education debate is going to center on Personalized [sic] Learning. I've poked at various parts of PsL at length, but I'm going to respond to someone who just wanted me to lay out the problems in a simple list. Challenge accepted.
First a note on terminology. We're going to have to start distinguishing between Personalized [sic] Learning, which is highly problematic, and personalized learning, which has been a good and worthwhile aim of classroom teachers for decades. The latter is the simple work of a human teacher trying to customize the educational experience to meet the needs and interests of a human child. The sales force for PsL would like you to believe they're selling the same thing. They aren't-- they're selling a adaptive algorithm doling out computer-based education-flavored materials, what is unironically called "mass customization." Here are my reasons for objecting to PsL:
1) The bait and switch. Wouldn't you like to have your child's education customer to meet her specific needs by a caring trained educator? Well, we won't actually give you that, but with this software we can provide sort of almost like it kind of a bit.
2) The lack of evidence. Does this actually work? There's no evidence that it does, though some purveyors are pretzeling themselves int a state by trying to cite things like an old study about tutoring.
3) The destruction of teaching. Personalized [sic] Learning proposes to remove the trained professional persons from the classroom and replace them with "mentors" and tech monitors, leaving students to get their personalized education from a machine.
4) The destruction of schools. If all we need is an internet hook-up, we can not only dismiss with teachers, but we can get rid of the whole "school" thing. We can learn anything from anyone anywhere at any time, which sounds cool until we consider learning cosmology from Bob's Space Stuff School or the Flat Earth Academy.
5) Educational decisions made by tech companies. For the gazillionth time-- software is not delivered by God on a velvet cloud. It comes from humans. If you have educational software created and designed by software engineers, then once again you've got school run by amateurs, a pastiche of biases and prejudices hiding behind the mask of technology. And it will the educational content will be chosen and designed for the delivery system, rather than vice versa-- and that's backwards. Tech companies, for oh so many reasons, should not be in charge of our education system.
6) Data security. These systems must be collectors of massive amounts of data. One of the biggest companies in PsL is Summit, which is backed by one of the biggest social media companies, Facebook, which has spent 2018 showing us all the reasons we can't trust it. From data that's grabbed by shady operators to data that's shared by the companies shady deals, there's an awful lot of data insecurity.
7) More top-downiness. Just like Common Core, PsL flows down from far away places. The computer-centered delivery system is a conduit that flows only one way, with the student being a passive recipient of what the system deals out. You can claim that the system deals materials out based on its careful reading of the student, and even if that weren't a load of baloney, it would still mean that the student is sitting there passively having education done too her.
8) Actually, we've seen this, and it stunk. PsL at its very worst is basically cyber-school, and what we've seen time and time again is that virtual schools don't get the job done. Rocketship Academy didn't change the face of education. Summit Learning is not universally beloved.
There's a great deal to dig through in detail here, and I have and I will, but if you want a quick answer to "Why shouldn't we cheerfully embrace Personalized [sic] Learning, this is it.
1) The bait and switch. Wouldn't you like to have your child's education customer to meet her specific needs by a caring trained educator? Well, we won't actually give you that, but with this software we can provide sort of almost like it kind of a bit.
2) The lack of evidence. Does this actually work? There's no evidence that it does, though some purveyors are pretzeling themselves int a state by trying to cite things like an old study about tutoring.
3) The destruction of teaching. Personalized [sic] Learning proposes to remove the trained professional persons from the classroom and replace them with "mentors" and tech monitors, leaving students to get their personalized education from a machine.
4) The destruction of schools. If all we need is an internet hook-up, we can not only dismiss with teachers, but we can get rid of the whole "school" thing. We can learn anything from anyone anywhere at any time, which sounds cool until we consider learning cosmology from Bob's Space Stuff School or the Flat Earth Academy.
5) Educational decisions made by tech companies. For the gazillionth time-- software is not delivered by God on a velvet cloud. It comes from humans. If you have educational software created and designed by software engineers, then once again you've got school run by amateurs, a pastiche of biases and prejudices hiding behind the mask of technology. And it will the educational content will be chosen and designed for the delivery system, rather than vice versa-- and that's backwards. Tech companies, for oh so many reasons, should not be in charge of our education system.
6) Data security. These systems must be collectors of massive amounts of data. One of the biggest companies in PsL is Summit, which is backed by one of the biggest social media companies, Facebook, which has spent 2018 showing us all the reasons we can't trust it. From data that's grabbed by shady operators to data that's shared by the companies shady deals, there's an awful lot of data insecurity.
7) More top-downiness. Just like Common Core, PsL flows down from far away places. The computer-centered delivery system is a conduit that flows only one way, with the student being a passive recipient of what the system deals out. You can claim that the system deals materials out based on its careful reading of the student, and even if that weren't a load of baloney, it would still mean that the student is sitting there passively having education done too her.
8) Actually, we've seen this, and it stunk. PsL at its very worst is basically cyber-school, and what we've seen time and time again is that virtual schools don't get the job done. Rocketship Academy didn't change the face of education. Summit Learning is not universally beloved.
There's a great deal to dig through in detail here, and I have and I will, but if you want a quick answer to "Why shouldn't we cheerfully embrace Personalized [sic] Learning, this is it.
Friday, December 21, 2018
The 13th Clown and Best Classroom Practices
Many leading voices of the ed reformist movement have started calling for an emphasis shift from policy to practice. That makes a certain amount of sense; the last two decades provide plenty of evidence that policy can interfere with practice far better than aid it, and ultimately students are educated by classroom practices, not by policy.
But when discussion among edupolicy wonks turns to the use of best practices in the classroom, one complaint inevitably surfaces: "Why aren't more teachers using the proven work of Dr. Wisewhacker on teaching [insert topic here]?" Why is the path from great idea-hood to widespread classroom practice so hard to navigate?
People who ask these questions are rarely actual classroom teachers, nor do they understand just how many people come at classroom teachers with great ideas to market. Yearly, weekly, daily, someone knocks on the classroom door to say, "I've got something for you here that is going to be awesome. You really need this." Sometimes they are ushered to the door by the teacher's boss, or the boss's boss, or the state, or even the feds. Every single one of them claims to be evidence based and research proven. Most of them are lying a little bit; some are lying a lot. Evidence can be a company-run focus group survey of ten people. Research can be a study conducted with a dozen college sophomores. There is enough bad education research in the world to build a model of Kilimanjaro on top of the Grand Canyon, and that's before we even get to all the research that wants to pretend that higher test scores are the same thing as better education (that research is also junk, unless you think the whole point of education is to a high score on a single big standardized test).
Good research that produces solid practices has a 13th clown problem. You may recall the old political observation: if 12 clowns are in a ring slapping each other with herring and falling on banana peels, you can jump into the ring and start reciting Shakespeare, but to the audience, you'll just be the 13th clown.
So how do we filter out and rescue the good stuff?
If the principal walks into a teacher's room and says, "Hey, I've got 143 program and textbook proposals on my desk. Could you go ahead and thoroughly check each one out so we can decide what to get. You know, in your copious free time, " coffee cups will be flying.
Government, at various levels, has tried to take on the job, but that has two major problems. First, the review of practices is invariably done by some non-teacher bureaucrat who can answer questions like "Is this aligned to the standards" but not questions like "Will this actually work in my math class?" Second, the companies that produce materials don't like bureaucrats stepping in to contradict their marketing copy.
And any attempt to get the pipeline flowing smoothly has to address one other issue--cost. Most teachers are too familiar with the experience of gazing longingly at a set of books, a piece of software, or a technique that depends on some pricey gadget, and knowing that there is no hope that they will ever be allowed to buy it.
And any attempt to get the pipeline flowing smoothly has to address one other issue--cost. Most teachers are too familiar with the experience of gazing longingly at a set of books, a piece of software, or a technique that depends on some pricey gadget, and knowing that there is no hope that they will ever be allowed to buy it.
So is there a working pipeline into classrooms? Sure. The most effective PR for any classroom practice is a trusted teacher saying, "I've done this, and it totally worked." Publishers and other manufacturers of teacher stuff know this; that's one reason that sales forces are filled with former teachers. There is no better source of teacher-trusted research than a classroom. Every classroom is a research lab, and every teacher is gathering data every day--not just columns and numbers but things like how many of which students look lost and which are fully engaged and learning. How does this technique affect the energy in the room? How much confusion persists afterwards? How does it play with the top students? The not-so-top students? Teachers test out techniques every day under authentic field conditions, with actual live students, then tweak and edit those techniques on the fly for maximum effectiveness.
Teachers are the front line experts. Anybody interested in education practices needs to connect with the actual practitioners. Skip the clowns. Go visit the big show.
Thursday, December 20, 2018
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.
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.
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.
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.
 |
| Not counting on this guy. |
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.
Wednesday, December 19, 2018
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.
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.
 |
| Looks like a fun guy. |
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.
Tuesday, December 18, 2018
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."
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."
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