PA: The Death of Cyber Charters (Maybe, Finally)

In the entire education ocean, cyber charters continue to be a festering garbage patch, and a recently proposed bill could clean them out of Pennsylvania.

It is not that cyber charters could not be useful for a select group of students with special needs. But in the whole panoply of failed reform ideas, none have failed harder and more thoroughly than cyber charters. In fact, they have failed so hard that among their opponents you will find many supporters of bricks and mortar charters. CREDO, the clearing house for choice friendly research, found them hugely ineffective. Their problems are legion. Even The 74, a generally pro-choice site, recently took a hard swing at cybers. In at least five states, cybers are being shut down.

But in Pennsylvania, it's still cyber-Christmas. Pennsylvania has one of the largest cyber-sectors in the country, and provides no oversight or accountability? How little? No PA cybers have yet "passed" a single year of school accountability scores. One of the biggest fraudsters had to be caught by the feds. And perhaps most astonishing, we learned last month that ten of the fifteen Pennsylvania cyber charters are operating without a current charter agreement! In one case the charter expired in 2012.

PA cybers are huge money makers; they are reimbursed at the full per-pupil formula, but spend far less. So a cyber collects generally from $10,000 to $25,000 for each student, and spends a fraction of that on each student, pocketing the rest.

Several lawmakers in Harrisburg would like to put a stop to that.

Senate Bill 34's prime sponsor is Judith Schwank of Berks County, a former dean at Delaware Valley College who's been in the Senate since 2011. Her bill's principle is pretty simple-- if a district has its own in-house virtual school, it does not have to pay for a student to attend an outside cyber. If a family pulls a student from Hypothetical High and decides that instead of Hypothetical's own cyber school they want to send Junior to, say, K12 cyber school, then the family has to pay the bill-- not the school district.

“It’s crazy,” said State Sen. Schwank, of the fees districts pay to cyber charters. “It’s not based on actual delivery of educational programming.”

What the impact be?

“I think cyber charter schools would no longer exist,” said Maurice Flurie III, CEO of Commonwealth Charter Academy, the state’s second-largest cyber charter.

Most school districts already have that in-house cyber-capability, either within the district or through the state's regional Intermediate units, and could start handling the cyber influx tomorrow.

How important would this be to school districts? Well, the commonwealth's 500 school districts paid about $454,000,000 to cyber schools in 2016-2017. So financially the impact is huge. There is also the human impact-- a large number of cyber charter students return to public school, academically behind (and if the charters hold onto the student past a certain date, they get to keep all the money but jettison the costs back to public schools). In short, the financial cost is huge, but the human and educational costs are incalculable.

Cybers are complaining that families could not afford the tuition, but then, the tuition is grossly over-inflated (the cybers have none of the expenses of a school with a physical school, yet collect the same funding as a bricks and mortar charter), so maybe they would go out of business or maybe they would have to cut tuition costs and lose their huge profit margins if they really wanted to stay in business.

How likely is it that any of this will happen? Well, a similar bill is slated for the House of Representatives by Republican Curt Sonney of Erie, who is now the new head of the education committee, so that's good-- but this bill has been raised in Harrisburg before, where it died a quiet death. Our GOP controlled legislature is not very public school friendly. And when you are making truckloads of money, you can afford some pretty aggressive lobbying. Just two companies-- K12 and Connections-- spent tens of millions of dollars over fifteen years to keep legislatures friendly, and plenty of that has been spent in Harrisburg.

And yet. And yet.

The drumbeat about charter funding general and cyber charters in particular has been heard in this state for years now, particularly from local boards of all political stripes who are getting tired of taking heat for decisions made by the legislature (I have heard more than one board member express "They yell at us for mismanaging the money, but it's the damn state!" There's no reason this couldn't be the year we hit a tipping point. There's a big state push for full funding for public schools and if your representative wants to ask where he's supposed to find the money, well, there's a whole big pile marked "cyber schools" that is essentially thrown away.

So if you're in PA, contact your legislator and tell him the time has come to pull the plug on the most failed experiment in education. Tell him to put the taxpayer's money back where t belongs-- financing public schools.

Speedbumps on the Road to Curriculum's Golden Age

Among the recent shifts in reform thought is one to a focus on curriculum and content, and I don't hate it. One of the hugely screwed up features of the last two decades has been the content-stripped focus on hollow skills. Reading is not a set of skills that can somehow be taught and practiced in a content-free vacuum, but that's what we've been trying to do for most of the 21st century, so far.

So this piece by Robert Pondiscio on the Fordham's blog is a welcome addition to the ongoing conversation about education. Pondiscio has been a rich content guy all along, and it's good to see him arguing how strong content can push aside the bad practices of recent years rather than making twisty arguments that Common Core and rich content are somehow two peas in a pod.

There are several points in the piece I want to underline, but I also want to note a huge roadblock or two on the trail to Contentville.

Most important: Under NCLB and Common Core, curriculum is judged strictly on its "alignment."

There are a variety of problems like this, not the least of which is that "alignment" can be completed successfully as a complex paperwork problem. But as Pondiscio correctly points out, alignment doesn't care about content:

“Alignment” also tells us nothing about literary merit, quality, or lasting value. You can explore themes of fratricide and revenge by studying Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Disney’s The Lion King. In no way are they “equal.” A three-star restaurant and Taco Bell may both get “A” ratings from the board of health if they’re aligned (as they must be) to safe food handling standards, but they are not otherwise comparable.

Pondiscio also notes that the skills-centered movement we've been living under completely ignores the importance of prior knowledge in reading-- and writing, too, for that matter. This is huge. At the lower levels, it is useless to decode a word you've never heard of. At higher levels, it's hard to comprehend what you know nothing about, no matter how well you've practiced your drawing inferences and context clue reading. When you don't know anything about the context, it will not yield any clues.

The article is written mainly to plug a new tool for measuring ELA curricular sweetness, and I have no opinions about it at this point. As described by Pondiscio, it sounds like a good idea.The team to watch for is David Steiner and Ashley Berner, and their tool is about knowledge mapping. For the moment, I'm agnostic. At the same time, Chiefs for Change are involved, so I am hesitant to get excited. But all of that is for another day and the general topic of "How are reformsters going to screw this up?"

One line of Pondiscio's piece brought me up short and reminded of other major obstacles in the path of any golden (or even bronze or pewter) age of curriculum:

It’s been a pleasant surprise to see curriculum come into its own in the last few years as a potentially powerful lever for improving student outcomes.

Please, God, no. "Improving student outcomes" still means "raising test scores," and as long as that's our metric, the quartz age of curriculum is doomed.

Test scores are still tied to the skills-centered baloney of the last two decades. They still ignore, for instance, any of the type of learning involved in reading an entire work, chewing on it for a week or two, and then writing a thoughtful self-directed response to the work as a whole. The tests are still based on reading a short excerpt and answering some multiple choice questions.

It would not matter if we could some how drop a rich curriculum into the hollow heart of the current test-centered practices. But that's not quite possible, for two reasons.

First is that high stakes testing drives curriculum. We may measure curriculum in the abstract by checking on its alignment, but on the ground, in schools, the test is driving the curriculum. For example, the standards include speaking and listening standards, but nobody cares because they aren't on the Big Standardized Test. Meanwhile, English teachers are being pummeled with test prep materials and practice and giving the NWEA MAP test or some other pre-test test and crunching the "data" to see what they need to teach harder in hopes that students will get a couple more questions correct.

Second. Although I like to call the skills-centered standards hollow and without any content knowledge involved, that's not exactly true. There is content, but it's content along the lines of "Types of Distractors Preferred by Makers of the Big Standardized Test" or "What Testmakers Mean by Terms Like Mood and Best." The test manufacturers have their own language, their own preferred lines of reasoning. That's why they think opinion questions like "Which sentence best supports the author's intent" only have one answer-- their answer. This is not valuable content, and it certainly isn't rich content, and it has no use except to prep students for the test-- but it is content and as such takes up space, time, and oxygen in the classroom. And while plenty of teachers are quietly thumbing their nose at it and ignoring it, many are using it as their course content.

Which means that in order to make space for an actual rich curriculum, this other crap has to be cleared away. And that won't happen as long as too many administrators are "data driven" acolytes of testing.

In order for the golden age of curriculum to dawn, the chintz age of testing has to end. The Big Standardized Test has to be swept away, drawn and quartered, killed with fire then its ashes spread to sea-- pick your metaphor. It has to go. Otherwise school districts and administrators and policy makers are going to look at curricula certified by knowledge maps and go back to the same old question-- Will this raise test scores. Administrators and school districts will look at a rich content curriculum and say, "Yeah, this looks great. You can definitely go ahead and do this once your kids are ready for the test-- hey! maybe you could do this in the last half of May once the testing is over!"

For us to enter a golden age of curriculum, tools like the one Pondiscio describes will be necessary, and they will involve a fight that will never ever end about which works, exactly, belong in such a curriculum. But we have other work to do before those tools can be used. Perhaps a silver or wooden age of curriculum-- then we could make bullets and some stakes.

NY: Parents Call For Charter Pause and Evaluation

NYC school district's parent board has come out in opposition to raising New York's charter school cap. Will Governor Cuomo hear them?

The New York City schools are under mayoral control (never, ever, an ideal system), so they have no school boards. What they do have is thirty-six Community Education Councils composed of elected parents. Those CECs in turn have an Education Council Consortium, composed of representatives from each of the CECs. Their stated purpose is "to address issues that affect schools and communities throughout all the boroughs and meets regularly with the Chancellor to help shape, advise, provide feedback and comment on educational policies, visions and goals."

Time to check his hearing.

The CECs are more like a community school board than, say, a PTA, and they have been known to get feisty and vocal. Last fall they wrote to the state legislature to ask the mayoral power over NYC schools be "reined in."

Now the ECC has issued a unanimous statement about both the charter cap and the subcap (the cap for the state and for the city, respectively). The resolution, passed last Saturday (Feb 9) is heavy on the whereas, but it has some strong points to make:

The resolution characterizes charters in New York  as a "charter experiment" or the "unproven experiment" and describes New York City as "oversaturated" with charter schools (NYC has 39% of the state's students, but 71% of the state's charter schools). Noting that the city also has plenty of private and public options, the resolution asserts that NYC "is demonstrably not a region with a lack of alternatives as originally contemplated" in the original charter law. Meanwhile, other parts of the state have few or zero charters. If choice is so important, the resolution suggests, why aren't charter fans working on areas that have few options instead of focusing on the hot market in the city.

Charters take "substantial"resources from public schools, to the tune of $44 million in NYC (in part because NYC charters are allowed to commandeer public school buildings for free).

Charter schools lack sufficient oversight and accountability by design. Increasing the number of charters operated by CMOs would "further weaken public accountability by placing even more public funds and space resources under private CMO management" basically acting as "parallel independent school districts that operate free from public oversight"

The ECC also takes on the issue of audits. "The substantial use of public resources by Charter schools combined with a lack of oversight merits regular financial audits of all Charter schools and their CMOs through the state or city comptroller with enforced recommendations." According to law (§2854(1)(c), the charters are sub sect to audit by the state or city comptroller. The ECC is only aware of four audits actually occurring, and of course we know that some charters have fought hard against being audited. ECC notes that after the 2016 audit of Success Academy, the charter simply ignored the recommendations of the auditor.

Meanwhile, there has been no full-scale examination of what effect charts have had on the NYC system, no look at the fiscal impact of collocation, no look at the academic impact across the city, no look at the social impact on factors like diversity, no look at how waitlists actually work, no look at recruitment and retention practices.

It's a lot of whereasing, a lot of issues that the ECC would like to see addressed. But finally we arrive at the conclusion:

The Education Council Consortium, therefore,

RESOLVES, to propose a five-year moratorium on issuing new Charters in New York City and complete a system-wide impact evaluation by an outside evaluator.

Via email, Antonia Ferraro of CEC15 said yesterday:

We understand that the NYC Charter Center as well as other Charter school lobbyists and advocates are descending on Albany tomorrow [Tuesday, Feb 12]. We have been told the Governor may slip a Charter Subcap increase into the budget without consulting the public. This can’t happen. Frankly, a Charter Cap/NYC Subcap increase should be a ballot measure, not a backroom deal.

It should be noted that the parents are not pushing for a rollback of charters or an end to to charter schools in NYC,  but are asking to hit pause and evaluate, to take a few years to figure out exactly what charter schools are doing to the NYC educational landscape. Will charter-loving Governor Andrew Cuomo or the charter-friendly legislature in Albany listen to them? Well, if all their rhetoric about how choice is needed so that parent voices can be heard and n to just ignored by the system-- if all that rhetoric isn't just political banana oil, then certainly they'd stop to take seriously the resolution passed by the elected representatives of all the school parents of NYC.

We'll see if they really want to listen to parents, or if parent voices only matter when they are pro-charter.

The Problem with "Monopoly."

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.

ICYMI: Valentine's Edition (2/10)

A handful of worthwhile reads this week. Remember to share!

Defining High Quality Curriculum

Nancy Flanagan wants to know why curriculum is supposed to be so hard for actual teachers.

Charter Schools Are Pushing Public Education To The Brink

Jeff Bryant looks at how badly charter schools squeeze public school finances. (Spoiler alert: pretty badly)

Active Shooter Drills

A reminder, if you need one, of just how badly this business stinks, and how damaging to a school's atmosphere these little death plays are becoming.

A Wake-Up Call To AI Companies

An interview with Anand Giridharadas, a guy you should definitely know about.

What Part of No To Vouchers Do Lawmakers Not Understand   

Arizona lawmakers are determined to just sort of ignore the results of recent elections, decisions, uprising-- you name it.

The Myth of De Facto Segregation    

From the Kappan. Segregation didn't just kind of happen, and the soft bigotry of low expectations is not the major problem.

Third Grade Flunk Laws and Unintended Consequences  

Yes, Nancy Flanagan is on here twice. I can't help it if she keeps writing indispensable stuff.

The Trouble With Test-Obsessed Principals

Steven Singer takes a look at how testing messes with the front office and what that means for everyone else in the building.

Portfolio Governance Creates Unstable Charter Sector    

Firing your way to excellence involves closing lots of schools. That's not really helpful in any district.

Field Guide To Strike Objectors

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.

Originally posted at Forbes.

IA: Choice Is Taxation Without Representation

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.

Republican State Senator Tom Greene (no relation, as far as I know) was newly elected in an upset contest in 2016. In real life, he's a pharmacist, but he was also the board president of Burlington School Board, and that gives him some perspective (from Radio Iowa).

“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.