It's a phenomenon noted in many urban education-scapes. The leaders (CEO, Education Visionary, Grand High Muckity Muck, whatever) of a charter operation makes far more money than a) the local public school superintendent responsible for far more students and b) the teachers who work within the charter. But a recent Washington City Paper article by Rachel Cohen lays out some stark examples.
The article starts with Lisa Koenig who left the lawyering biz to teach at a charter. She note that her first year teaching assistant salary was less than her year-end bonus as a lawyer. Koenig stuck with it for seven years, but at one point she asked to see the salary schedule so she could evaluate some further education choices she was considering (would the additional education debt be balance by salary increases). Her charter said no, she could not see that. In fact:
“There are 120 schools but you can’t just call them up and learn their salary schedules,” she says. “It puts us in a position where we can’t make informed choices about where we work. Charter schools are free markets for all the parents and kids, but screw those teachers.”
That kind of information isn't available to anybody, because even though DC charters are funded with taxpayer dollars, they are not subject to Freedom of Information Act requests. As the DC public schools for budget information and they have to tell you. But DC charters, as with most charters in the US, can just say "Nunyabiznis."
Nor is anybody trying to find out. The charters don't attempt to figure out what average charter salary is, and the State Board of Education told City Paper that it's all outside their area.
But while charter teachers are getting shafted, charter leader are making out like bandits.
A Washington Post story in 2015 found that charter boss salaries ranged from $90K top to $350K in 2013, and that two DC charter leaders made more than the DC schools chancellor, even though she was responsible for far more students.
City Paper found that things have escalated since then. In 2017, three charter chiefs made less than $100K, while eight made more than $200K. Some of the raises-- paid for, remember, with public tax dollars-- are astounding.
Allison Kokkoros, the head of Carlos Rosario International Public Charter School and the highest-paid charter official in D.C., has gone from $248,000 in 2015 up to $541,000 in 2017. Patricia Brantley, head of Friendship Public Charter School, was bumped from $231,000 to $308,000 between 2016 to 2017. Nor are other DC charter chiefs hurting: In 2017, KIPP DC had four administrators making approximately $200,000 annually, and its president earned $257,000. The chair of Friendship, Donald Hense, earned over $355,000 annually between 2015 and 2017, and its CFO earned between $171,000 and $197,000 in each of those years. DC Prep’s Chief Academic Officer earned $203,000 in 2015, and $223,000 one year later. The board chair of AppleTree Early Learning earned over $231,000 annually each year since 2015, reaching $245,000 in 2017. 990 tax forms list another 110 charter administrators earning between $100,000 and $200,000 annually, although this list is likely not comprehensive, as schools are only required to disclose their top five highest-paid employees.
Probably the most amazing example City Paperr turned up was this one:
In one remarkable instance, Sonia Gutierrez, the founder and former CEO of Carlos Rosario, who now sits on the school’s board, earned $1,890,000 between 2015 and 2017. Board chair Patricia Sosa, when contacted about this large sum, says much of that had been awarded as deferred compensation from Gutierrez’s time working between July 2010 and December 2015. However, according to tax records, she was also paid an average of $326,000 annually during that period.
The argument is, of course, that charters must pay competitive salaries to attract and retain top talent.
It is free market hypocrisy of the worst sort. On the one hand, charter leaders embrace the free market in order to throw big piles of taxpayer money at charter leaders. On the other hand, charters avoid transparency in order to thwart the free market when it comes to paying teachers. Charters suffer from huge turnover, but apparently they just don't care. But keeping teachers poorly paid and in the dark so that more money can be spent on top managers is inexcusable and unsustainable, and the rules that allow charters to hide their use and misuse of taxpayer dollars ought to be changed.
I'm asked from time to time (mostly, I think, because some people are curious but reluctant to ask) what it's like to be in my particular spot in life. Retired from teaching, sixty-one years old, raising two babies about thirty years after I raised two other babies-- as my wife and I have said at various times over the last decade, we are kind of off the map here.
So my honest answer is that I'm figuring out what it's like, trying to grow into it. But here's what I know, and I promise, beyond this navel gazing, there's a point about education.
When you first have kids, everyone tells you to focus, to pay attention, to enjoy this time because it goes by so fast. You sort of get it, but not really-- not until you've turned around the world a couple of times and suddenly your babies are gone and your full-grown human offspring have arrived.
With the twins, I can feel all the usual things-- the checking and rechecking of the developmental mileposts and getting anxious when it seems as if, maybe, they're lagging. And there is no doubt in my mind that this is far, far worse than it was thirty years ago. I already knew that-- I spent the tail end of my career teaching students who were pulled out to a high-tension stretched-thin level of anxiety driven by the certainty that they had to be on The Path or their lives would be desolate and disastrous. It's not their fault. Their parents are panicked, and why not-- there shrinking of the comfortable middle class means that folks are increasingly likely to end up either rich or poor, winner or loser, feast or famine. Despite that, I suspect we spend too much time anticipating disaster that could destroy us around every corner.
At any rate, I can feel that pull with the twins. They're about twenty months-- why isn't their language development further along? Are they too clingy and fragile? Should we re-try the thousand-and-one techniques for getting them to sleep in their own beds all night? They're almost two-- should we start looking for a pre-school, because lord knows we need to get their math and reading skills going here. After all, time's a-wasting.
I feel all of that, but at the same time I know that we will turn around a few times and they will be young men. Before you know it, they'll live on the other side of the country and we'll be futiley trying too get them on the phone. They'll have families of their own, with their own struggles and challenges, occurring (if life in this small town runs true to form) some place beyond our immediate reach. I know it will happen, because for me it is happening already.
American society has always leaned into the hustle, but we now live in desperate haste, and we have successfully communicated both the haste and the desperation to our children. Kindergartners must do what first graders, even second graders used to do. Why? What benefits will come from it? Don't ask-- just get moving. Go! Go! Go! Now! Now! Now! Make sure that four year old is learning letters-- you don't want to be left behind.
There's nothing wrong with learning early. One of my grandsons, a preschooler living oh so far away, has discovered that he can use letters to spell words, and no scientist in the history of the world has been as excited to discover anything. But nobody pushed him. Nobody sat him down at a desk and said, "You can go play when you've written your own name five times."
If there's anything we routinely ignore in education, it's that people get where they're going in their own way in their own time. That doesn't mean that people don't benefit from a push, a nudge, a little pressure. But to try to push everyone down the same track at the same speed to the same place is a fool's game.
So when a son demands to be held off his nap, or has to curl up in bed with us (and by "curl" I mean "fling his legs around like a sleeping kung-fu master") there is always a voice that says to push him to be more grown up, but that voice is drowned out by the one that says, "I would swear it was just yesterday that I held my daughter like this, and now she's thousands of miles away and busy enough that I'll be luck to catch her on the phone this week." And I leave the child right where he is.
One of the great mysteries, for me at least, of education reform is how much energy is directed toward eradicated childhood, how little trust there is in our children. We must push and contrive and control their "educational achievement," as if they were not already natural learning machines of great and terrible beauty. As if they were not built to grow, quickly and soon, despite our best efforts.
I have always described the business of education as that of helping people become more fully themselves, learning to be what it means to be fully human in the world, and seeing my four children-- two on either end of that business-- only makes me more acutely aware of awesomely mysterious, brutally challenging, and heartbreakingly swift the business is.
I've watched people caught in the middle, teens working their way through, my whole career. It's messy. It's filled with obstacles (and obstacles are not always bad-- they're the weight against which we build our strength). And it flies by on its own; why some folks feel the need to accelerate-- well, why be in a hurry to get to the end?
Education is part art, part science, but it is not a job for technicians. You cannot engineer tiny humans as if they were toasters. They are not machinery on which you can press button to reliably achieve result X. They are also not mysterious wisps at which you vaguely wave your hand and somehow they transform in magical ways, but it's the button pushers, the technicians, who hold sway in education these days.
Are there secrets that I learned from my first two children that I can apply now? Ha. I'm older now, and if not wiser, at least less of an ass. Like every other parent, I've learned that the secret is there's no secret; love them, pay attention, listen, hold them while you can, let them go and grow when you must. Be with them as they are and not as you wish they were. Do not rush the time; it will move swiftly all on its own.
Teaching is not that different. Meet them where they are. Care about them. Respect them. Help them. Support them. Push them, but don't be a jerk about it. If you must think of education as a technical engineering problem, then let me phrase my concern this way-- do not try to force what cannot be forced. This is where we are now-- technicians who are frustrated that their beautiful machine is not cranking out perfectly formed meat widgets fast enough have decided that the problem is the raw material, the tiny humans, and so we must move backward to a point before the manufacturing process, back to when the raw materials, the tiny humans, are being first formed, and commandeer that process so that the system can have raw materials that better serve the system. And so the dehumanization of education marches on, and policy leaders eye my twins with suspicion because they just might not be getting enough test preparation soon enough.
If I were a first time parent, it might be possible to scare me. But I taught for thirty-nine years and raised two wonderful human beings through a divorce and, in one case, more than a little conflict. My wife and I will get things wrong and get things right, and there will be no way to be certain ahead of time which things are which. But most of all I know that time is short, life is fleeting, and there is not only no need to rush, there is a need to not rush. Every day is a day you don't get over, and every moment may very well be the last of its kind.
One of the issues that was hanging over the Los Angeles teacher strike is the idea of portfolio management; the UTLA asserts that Superintendent Austin Beutner already has a plan prepared for converting the LAUSD to a multi-portfolio model. In Denver, the model has already been rolled out, to less than stellar result. It's a challenging issue to discuss because so few people understand exactly how a portfolio model is supposed to work. So here, with issues over-simplified and corners cut, is your dummies' guide to portfolio management.
The first thing to understand about the portfolio model is that nobody anywhere knows exactly what a portfolio model is. Back in 2010, it took three writers at Education Week (Jeffrey R. Henig, Katrina E. Bulkley, & Henry M. Levin) to come up with this pretty good explanation: The strategy is, rather, a loosely coupled conglomeration of ideas held together by the metaphor of a well-managed stock portfolio and its proponents’ unshakable belief that the first step for successful reform must be to dismantle the bureaucratic and political institutions that have built up around the status quo. That's the second thing to know--that "portfolio" here is based on the idea of an investment portfolio (Austin Beutner, for what it's worth, made his bundle in investment banking). With an financial portfolio, you move your money in and out of various investments depending on how they're performing and what your goals are. With a school portfolio, you move your resources in and out of schools--all schools including public and charter--based on how those schools are performing. The Center for Reinventing Public Education, a Washington state ed reform thinky tank, has tried to work up a portfolio model strategy guide, and they list seven characteristics of portfolio strategy: Unbridled school choice, school autonomy under strong principals, funding on per-pupil basis (the money follows the child), recruitment of talent, outside "partnerships," performance-based accountability, and public engagement. There are ideas here that are implied but not always said out loud by portfolio fans. A big one is the notion that all of the old educational bureaucracy will be obliterated. Each school is run by a high-powered CEO who answers to the high-powered super-CEO (or super-CEO board) who runs the whole portfolio. This means removing as many rules as possible and, ideally, union protections for teachers. These hero CEOs would be able to do as they see fit without having to deal with regulations and bureaucracy and elected school board members. Another idea is that public schools and charter schools are gathered in the same portfolio, so that charters have easy access to the same pile of public tax dollars that public schools do. Portfolio models favor the common enrollment system, a one-stop shop that has the effect of turning all students in the system into potential charter customers. Even less openly discussed is that portfolio models are privatization writ large. In places like Indianapolis, the portfolio model has been pushed and overseen by a group of "civic-minded" private operators. The Mind Trust of Indianapolis flexed its political and financial muscle and elbowed its way into "partnership" with the public school system, pushing for the expansion of charters in a manner perhaps calculated to destabilize the public schools and create financial peril for low-scoring schools. There is a certain gutsy aggressiveness to how portfolio models are established. Step One: Bob sets up a snack vending stand in the lobby of a local restaurant. Step Two: When the owner complains about how Bob is draining business, Bob smiles and says, "Look, let's just become partners under one brand. And I just happen to know a guy who would be great to run it." In other words, another way to understand the portfolio model is as a forced merger between public and charter schools, with the charter school management model used to run the new entity. With a good helping of "firing your way to excellence" on an institutional scale. A variety of wrinkles can be added. Beutner's idea for L.A. involves thirty-two separate "portfolios" that would compete against each other for resources. The results of such competition are easy to predict--the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The problems with the portfolio model are numerous. Central to the model is the ability to measure success in schools, so that the least "successful" can be closed and their resources redistributed, their operation replaced by some hot new edupreneur. The problem is that here in 2019 we still have no reliable valid means of measuring school success, still defining it most commonly as scores on a single standardized math and reading test. Trying to fudge that evaluation gap gives schools powerful motivation to cream the best students and push out the rest (just one of the problems to emerge in New Orleans, another supposed example of portfolio awesomeness). The result is a school choice system that is really a system in which the schools choose their students, and low-performing students who struggle get no choice at all. And there is no place for parents to voice that concern, because in sweeping the bureaucracy away, the portfolio model also sweeps away local voice. At its heart, the portfolio model is about the school czar being able to move resources in and out of the best and worst schools, like dollars shuffling between stock portfolios. But dollars don't care where they're invested. Students, on the other hand, do not benefit from a system in which they are shuffled around like poker chips on a tilted table. Within its discussion of portfolio strategy, CRPE writes "Portfolio cities make sure there are good schools in every neighborhood." But cities and states could do that now, by simply investing fully in the public school system, fulfilling the promise that every child in this country should be able to attend a great school without leaving her community.
The quick take is that the study followed 20,000 kindergarten students and found that they both achieved academically and their social and emotional development was just fine. So, apparently, all the adult humans who were concerned that over-emphasizing academics with five-year-olds was developmentally inappropriate, at best a waste of time, and at worst destructive-- well, all of those folks can just chill because this study says everything is hunky and dory.
Here are some of the reasons that you can ignore this study.
1) The study is based on the 2010-2011 school year. That means these students were barely, if at all, subjected to the rollout of Common Core, a set of standards that seriously pushed developmentally inappropriate instruction into the primary grades. It means that the study was only looking at the academic advances in kindergarten that happened under No Child Left Behind, but predates the even huger ramping up that happened in the last decade.
In other words, this is like saying, "A study of increased auto speeds between 1910 and 1915 showed little correlation between auto speed and traffic fatalities, so there's no reason we can't increase the current speed limit to 150 mph."
2) If you're a regular reader, you already know what I'm going to say-- their measure of academic achievement is based on a math and reading test. That's it. For the love of God-- show me a parent who sends their precious five year old off to school saying, "Take good care of her this year, and whatever you do, get her to score well on a standardized math and reading test."
And that was a test given at the end of the kindergarten year, which means that if the study proved anything at all, it proved that spending a year getting students ready to take a test tends to improve their score on that test. Give them the test at the beginning of first grade and then we can talk.
Those first two points are, for me, enough to disqualify the study from serious consideration. But there's more.
The authors based their conclusions on kindergartners’ test scores in math and English language arts. They note that, in the standards-and-testing-based “reform” movement of the 1980s and 1990s, “standardized testing was not mandated until the third grade.” But they don’t say why. The reason is that testing experts universally agree that standardized test scores have virtually no meaning before third grade. According to the findings of the National Research Council’s definitive “High Stakes” study, basing educational policymaking on kindergarten test scores is essentially a form of educational malpractice.
4) The other missing link here? Any kind of causal connection between early display of reading skills and benefits to the student further down the line. Do children who start reading earlier end up lifelong readers or outstanding students? And if so, is that simply correlation and not causation. In other words, we might find that students with larger shoe sizes at age 5 are more likely to grow up to be basketball players, but it would not follow that surgically enlarging the feet of kindergartners would turn them into later-life NBA material.
There are other problems.
5) How, exactly, are we measuring social and emotional health in five year olds. DEY has some thoughts about that, but I find the idea of measuring SE health in littles a bit mind-blowing. I'm especially afraid of systems that mark compliant behavior as healthy. But that's a conversation for another day.
6) The study hinges on spending "additional time" on "advanced" material. Neither term is clearly or exactly defined.
One more bad study would be neither here nor there, except this is exactly the kind of study some folks are dying to use against the umpteen studies that show that hammering littles with academics is a bad idea. If you are having a spirited discussion with one of those folks, and they try to wave this study in your face, do not be impressed or intimidated or silenced.
So we just froze our way through School Choice Week, the annual PR blitz in favor of privatizing public education, and I find myself troubled and annoyed by the word "choice."
See, I favor choice. In all my years at our tiny small town/rural high school, we'v e graduated students who went on to become doctors, artists, teachers, welders, construction workers, lawyers, telephone linemen, and jobs you don't even realize exist. We have sent them to Ivy League schools and community colleges and two year tech schools and straight into jobs they love. And our students were able to choose those paths in life because they were able to choose the kind of education they wanted while they were with us. They could spend half their days in a shop at the CTE program we've offered for fifty years. They could pursue extra challenging courses in our honors track, prep for college, or aim for working world skills. They could take art classes, cooking classes, go full band geek.
These students had ample choice-- and they could exercise that choice without to apply and re-apply if they changed their minds. Changing their life goals (not exactly an uncommon activity for teens) could be done without having to change schools and upend their entire lives.
But somehow, charter advocates keep trying to paint this as "one size fits all" schooling, as if every student in a public school must follow exactly the same path-- which is pretty much the opposite of how public schools actually work.
It's true (and maybe ironic or maybe ill-intentioned) that standards-based reform has tried to turn this one-size-fits-all model into reality, with Common Core college and career ready standards the special dream of folks who think that uniformity and conformity are virtues. It is absolutely tragic that some school districts have bought into the notion that education should be like tofu-- exactly the same however you slice it.
Part of the language we should have been using to beat back the standards movement is the word "choice"-- students should be able to choose from a variety of paths within their school.
But "choice" hasn't been available because the term has been co-opted by another brand of reformster-- the charter cheerleaders, who are not just interested in charters, but in privately operated corporate style run-like-a-business charters. So the word "choice" has not only been co-opted, but narrowed to serve as a stand-in for "privatization."
We don't even see it anymore. School choice could mean any number of ideas, such as the pioneering schools-within-schools of New York City (see Andrea Gabor's After the Education Wars for a history of these revolutionary schools). It could mean deliberately fostering multiple approaches within a single public school district run by various and varied teacher leadership teams. Heck, on the other side of the scale it could-- and once did-- refer to voucher systems. But vouchers are controversial even as they reveal the empty promise of school choice-- no voucher in the world can make a private school accept your child if they don't want to. And choice fans have backed away from including vouchers in the "choice" brand.
My point is that "school choice" could have a big broad batch of meanings, but it has been carefully narrowed by and large to mean a system of privately owned and operated charter school businesses.
It's a deliberate framing maneuver, of course, suggesting that if you are anti-charter, you are against choice and freedom (and probably hate apple pie, too).
Yet a modern charter system is no better at providing choices than a traditional public system. A modern charter system provides only the choices its operators decide to provide, and only to the students that "fit" their charter, and no group of parents have the option of showing up at a board meeting to demand other choices. Meanwhile, charters drain resources from public schools, reducing the choices available to students there.
Charters were going to be laboratories that taught us new things about education. That, of course, turned out to be a crock (name one new educational instructional pedagogical anything discovered and disseminated by a charter school). Charters have "discovered" that if you spend extra time on students who are "good fits" you might do well on standardized tests. And charters have underscored one other piece of not news-- the best way to get more educational choice for students is money. The more money, the more programs, and the more choice.
Wealthy public schools have all the languages and arts and music and theater and AP courses and specialized classes. Poor schools get the basics. Charters develop resources of wealth by managing costs (no students that are costly to teach, low wages for teachers) and by hitting up donors.
If we were having a real discussion about educational choices, we'd be talking about how to get more money to public schools, the schools that are already well-structured to provide choice inside their big tent. But we've been suckered into accepting that "choice" must mean privately owned and operated charter schools.
If you want poor families to have choices like Latin, a strong theater program, and awesome science labs, you don't get there by spreading dollars thinly across multiple charters that those families may or may not have access to. You get those choices by pumping money and resources into the schools that are already in place and already committed to educating those students. This is one of the crazy assertions of modern charters-- if we take the same money that wasn't enough to run a single school system and spread it across multiple systems, it will suddenly act as if there were more of it.
We need to take back the word "choice," because it's an important word in education. Students do deserve choices-- real choices-- and the best way to get them is to fully fund and support the public school system so that we can build variety and meaningful options under one roof. That's real choice
Was it the cold? Did we all just have more time to wander the internet? I don't know, but it's a huge list this week. Remember to share-- that's how the word gets out.
The LA strike was extraordinary in that it addressed so much more than wages and benefits, but also addressed policy as well. Here's a good look at where the LA charter movement fits in the bigger picture. The Headband Obsession with Student Concentration.
From the "You Can't Make This Stuff Up" files, the program that's going to read student minds via fancy science headbands.l
DeVos likes to tell a story about a teacher named Jed to help make some of her points. Rebecca Klein tracked Jed down; turns out he wishes DeVos would knock it off.
This might be the "if you only read one piece this week" article. Susan Adams is the education editor at Forbes, and she took a good hard look at Max Ventilla's super cool ed tech charter, Altschool, and probably got one of the most fluff-free looks at it ever (complete with cringing PR people). Joins Andrea Gabor's book in pointing out that some of these guys thinking they can business model their way to ed reform are actually using bad business models.
Speaking of bad business. A Harvard grad goes on shark tank with her idea for mail order Montessori and her tail of having blithely burned through a mountain of investor money. Things do not go well for her.
City Paper goes digging, and has to work at it, because of course Freedom of Information Act doesn't apply to charters. Most amazing part-- a charter wouldn't let a teacher see her own salary schedule to know what steps up she might expect. Another KIPP Teacher
Need another reminder of how awful a Teach Like A No Excuses Champion school can be. Here's are some words from a teacher who used to be a KIPPster.
Two items tossed my feed this week that underline contrasting ideas about what constitutes success in education.
First, let's go to the Jackson-Madison County school system of Tennessee. At JMCSS folks are pretty excited because they've made such strides with the addition of a unified curriculum. They know this worked because they have all sorts of growth data, much of it exceeding expectations.
Not on the same page.
Now, I don't want to gloss over the good parts here. Having some sort of planned curriculum is probably a good step (no district has "no curriculum," even if that curriculum is "whatever the teacher decides to do today"), and I'm sure that it probably helped. But we can't really tell, because all JCMSS has to say for itself is "We made test scores go up." And as every teacher knows, you can raise test scores without really teaching anything worthwhile except how to do better on standardized tests.
Nor is the "how they did it" part of the article very encouraging. Talking to Superintendent Jared Myracle (I swear I am not making that up):
“It’s a game changer,” he said. “Getting everyone on the same page, having everyone use the same approach is a huge thing.” With a new, uniform curriculum, there is consistency across the district. He said that’s important because students at one school shouldn’t be learning differently than students at other schools, especially because families move across the district.
Sigh. So they found a super-duper one-size-fits-all program and jammed the entire teaching staff into that one size. All students learn the same thing at the same time in the same way, and that's how we raise test scores. This is how public schools help promote charter school and home schooling-- by insisting there's just one way to teach and learn and measure what has happened.
But meanwhile, elsewhere in the world, there is this:
In many people's lives there is at least one teacher who inspired them, and helped them become who they are today. In our early years, when we are still being formed, they often see in us more than we see in ourselves, more than our families see and, as a result, help us to evolve into who we ultimately become. These inspirational people are not often recognized for the life changing role they have played. These are the teachers who define us, teachers who widen our horizons and encourage us to explore. These teachers are touchstones to paths of achieving more than we might have otherwise accomplished, in directions we might not have gone. That's from the website for the Kennedy Center/Stephen Sondheim Inspirational Teacher Awards. It's time again for nominations to this prestigious award that recognizes teachers who-- well, you just read the paragraph. I've poked through the whole site, and there doesn't seem to be anything about "teachers who faithfully got one the same page as everyone else in their building" or "teachers who implemented one-size-fits-all programs with fidelity" or even "teachers who helped students get higher scores on the Big Standardized Test."
But here's what one nominator wrote about the teacher she put up for the award:
At the age of 15 the word "different" was something I never wanted to be. Despite detecting my "differences" at a very young age, I decided to try to deny that part of myself existed in order to fit in... [Coach Brown] helped me recognize my differences not as flaws, but rather my most precious and unique pieces that make me special.
So you tell me. Would you rather have your child in the classroom of that guy, or of the guy who carefully stayed on the same page of a one-size-fits-all program? If you teach, how would you like to be remembered by your students? As someone who widened horizons and inspired students, or as someone who helped raise standardized test scores?
The information about how to nominate someone for the Kennedy/Sondheim award is on the website.
