A standard piece of charter/choice rhetoric is to refer to the public school monopoly, the suggestion being that school choice is needed in order to break the public school stranglehold.
I'd argue that the term is not accurate, that it suggests a single nationwide education entity that imply doesn't exist. Can an enterprise be a monopoly if it's actually several thousand individual entities?
But that's not what I want to talk about today. Instead, I want to talk about what the use of he word "monopoly" reveals about the choice cheerleaders ho use it.
Let's think about this for a second.
What is a monopoly, anyway? It's a way to capture all of the market for a particular business. If I have a monopoly on widgets, that means everyone who wants to buy a widget will be giving their money to me. If you want to start a widget business, your problem is that I have captured all the customers and therefor all the money.
For many choice fans, the complaint is that the public school system had boxed out all competitors. "We would like to make money in the education business," they opine. "But the public system has captured all the customers. We could collect some of those sweet, sweet tax dollars, but first we have to bust some of the market loose."
Now look at what this framing does to students and their families. They are now part of a market to be captured in order to generate some revenue, not people to be served by fulfilling the promise of a free education for every single student. We are back to free market thinking, which has not, does not and will not serve education or students well. Where providers fight for a slice of the market, they will fight for the best parts of the market. In the free market, all customers are not created equal, so that competition to deliver mail to customers fifty miles out past East Nowheresville, to build roads through less-traveled regions, to educate students who have costly special needs--that competition isn't going to happen.
The use of "monopoly" is a signal that someone sees education as just one more market to be "liberated," and while I like the free market just fine for many things, I'll argue at length that it does not fit the needs or aims of public education. (Here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, for starters.) It signals that someone wants to have an argument about business, not education. But education is not business, and students and families are not a market.
Does public education have issues? You betcha. Are there some students who are not as well-served as they ought to be? Absolutely. But in the search for solutions, there's no reason to jump immediately to "how about a bunch of privately owned and operated schools with no transparency or local control." Even if a charter fan is not simply a privatizer looking for a way to score some tax dollars, framing education problems as business problems leads, unsurprisingly, to looking only for business solutions.
The use of "monopoly" is a signpost that tells you you're on the wrong road. It often, but not always, signals that you're dealing with someone who's more interested in privatizing education than actually solving education problems.
In my four decades of teaching, I went through a strike twice--once as a first year teacher, and once as the president of the local union. Writing about education, I have followed dozens more. No matter what kind of public support a strike is getting, there are always some familiar tunes you can expect to hear played in opposition to a teacher walkout. Here's your guide to all the classics.
Don't they understand the district can't afford their demands?
When we were strike, a member of the board's negotiating team said publicly, "Yes, we have the money. We just don't want to give it to them." That's not usually how it goes. Folks all the way up to former US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have been chicken littling the impending financial doom of Los Angeles schools, and that's a fairly typical stance. Here's the thing to remember. When we were on strike, our state association sent us a trained education accountant to dig through the district's records (which, as a public school system, are completely public). By the time he was done, we knew as well as they did exactly what they could and could not afford. We kept that information in mind when negotiating because it would have been stupid to make demands that the district couldn't fund. When it comes to the financial side of negotiations, no union is flying blind, and no union is making demands that can't possibly be met.
It's those damned union leaders.
The teachers are fine, but those damned leaders are forcing them to strike. This tune appears in the coverage citing union president Alex Caputo-Pearl's "blind ambition." While people taking this approach often claim to love teachers, just not the union, this framing of a strike assumes that teachers are just a bunch of sheep that can be easily guided by a power-hungry union leader. Teachers are educated, used to working as individuals, and--this cannot be said often enough--not generally desirous of a walkout. Leading a teachers union is more like herding cats than sheep. And, as with most leadership positions, it's much more about following the group where it wants to go- not making up their minds for them. As the statewide strikes demonstrated last year, you can take away the union, and teachers will still find a way to unite and stand up.
Striking is so unseemly and unprofessional.
If teachers want to be treated like professionals, the argument goes, they should act like professionals, and professionals don't strike. Well, no. When your lawyer or your plumber decide they need to be paid more, they don't go on strike--they raise their rates, and the customers can take it or leave it.
Nobody gets those kinds of benefits.
This argument says that since people who work at box stores and gas stations get low pay and no benefits, why the heck do teachers need such great stuff? This is the race to the bottom. Rather than ask why teachers deserve a living wage and good benefits, better to ask why so many workers in other sectors do not.
But wait--these teachers get great pay!
The Los Angeles strike has brought up the question of how well teachers are already paid, though, of course, the LAUSD strike is about far more than teacher salaries. It is true that the average LAUSD salary is more than I ever made in a year of my entire career. It is also true that if my house were somehow replanted in L.A., it would cost ten times what I paid for it. My son lived in Los Angeles for a few years; I know how expensive it is to live there. LAUSD teachers are not overpaid. Nor are teachers generally overpaid compared to similarly-educated professions.
But what about the children?
Believe it or not, this is the objection that keeps striking teachers up at night. In fact, this might define the tipping point at which teachers walk out. On the one hand, there will be disruption and a loss of educational continuity while the strike is going on. On the other hand, things like 45-student classes are already damaging education for students, and will continue to do so for years to come. At some point, the short-term educational disruption for students right now has to be weighed against the long-term educational disruption of a system that is overcrowded, under-resourced, understaffed, and unable to attract the best teachers to work. Strikes happen when the needs of tomorrow's students loom large.
I sympathize, but this is not the way.
Ah, concern trolling. "You have a good point, but you're just hurting your own cause with this strike business. You should really find some other way." There's only one response to this song--what other way would you suggest. A strike is the tactic of last resort; when teachers strike, it's because every other option has been either been exhausted or ruled out by district administration. Sometimes what this objection means is "Strikes are hard on people and I really don't like it" and that's understandable. I don't think you can find a teacher anywhere--particularly one who has been on strike before--who would say, "Boy, I really wish I was on strike right now. Those were good times." But sometimes what this objection means is "I wish teachers would just complain in some way that was easy for everyone to ignore, like lighting candles at home or something that would let me pretend that nothing is wrong and nothing is happening" and even that is understandable, but of course it doesn't solve a thing.
The worst version of this concern trolling is when it means "Teachers should not strike or complain at all. They should just accept what the district brass decide to give them. They should know their role and shut their hole." But here's the funny thing--even if you, for instance, rewrote state law so that teachers only had the shut up and behave option, you wouldn't end teacher walkouts. In those states, teachers still walk out--but they do it one at a time, and they never come back. That's why the state of Florida, as rough as they are on teachers, are not talking about any big strikes. Instead, they're talking about teacher shortages and the vast number of students being taught by non-certified teachers.
In the end, while there are many reasons to be sad about a teacher strike, there is only one solution--the district creating a trustworthy path to resolution of the issues that the teachers have raised. Anything else is just whistling to pass the time.
An Iowa state senator has caught on to one of the problematic side effects of many choice programs-- disenfranchised taxpayers. Or, as somebody put it a while ago, taxation without representation.
Iowa has long allowed open enrollment; an Iowa family can enroll their student in any public school district, whether they live there or not. Currently the full per-pupil expenditure follows the student-- including the part of the expenditure that is collected by the taxpayer in the student's home district.
In other words, if I live in East Spamwich and pay taxes on my home there to fund the school. Only a large number of students from the area may attend school in West Spamwich. I'm able to vote for the school board members in the East Spamwich school board, but in West Spamwich, where much of my money goes to be spent, I have no say at all.
“The Burlington School District totally surrounds the West Burlington School District. The West Burlington School District has 800 and 900 students; 53 percent of those students reside outside the boundaries of the West Burlington School District,” Greene says. “A huge amount of money comes into the West Burlington School District from outside, but those taxpayers have no say in how that money is spent. That’s my biggest concern.”
This, of course, is not just a problem with an open enrollment system like Iowa's, but with any choice system around. Charter and voucher fans like to extoll the free market mechanics of such a system-- if a school is bad, everyone will vote with their feet and it will deservedly close. But there are other taxpayers paying into that system-- taxpayers without students and so who cannot vote with either their feet or any other appendages. A choice system completely disenfranchises taxpayers without school age children.
Greene is proposing that only the state and federal money follow the student, which is not much of a hardship for receiving schools in a state in which local property tax only pays about 12% of the total cost.
But to establish the principle that you can't just take tax money and stick it where the voter representation don't shine would be a big change in how choice systems are handled and would have immediate implications for charter and voucher systems (though Iowa charters must be authorized and supervised by local school districts, so it's not quite as bad as California or Ohio or Florida where schools can be foisted on taxpayers by people who are neither elected nor in the district). If the bill passes, and if anybody pays attention to the implications. Keep an eye on Iowa.
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.
