OK: Voting With 60,000 Feet

Fans of market dynamics have a deep and abiding faith in the power of the podiatric plebiscite. When parents vote with their feet, schools will get better. Unions and minimum wage are not necessary, because if workers vote with their feet, employers will be forced to improve their offer.

And yet, we have Oklahoma and teachers.

The red flags have been numerous. The Oklahoma State School Boards Association has crunched some numbers. A massive increase in student population over the last twenty-five years. Spending far less per pupil than any states in the region, as well as the lowest teacher salary, which might explain the increasingly huge number of emergency certificates-- almost 3,000 this year, which as about 1,000 more than last year. The Network for Public Education gave them one of the worst grades for privatization in the country. And after teachers were pushed to the point of striking, some legislators thought the problem revealed by the strike was that teachers have too much freedom to speak.

But it turns out that the teacher walkout was even bigger than reported.

The 2018 Teacher Supply and Demand report has just been issued, and among the pages of information is a stunning data point-- over the last six years, 30,000 Oklahoma teachers have walked out. Over six years, Oklahoma has lost 30,000 teachers. To put that in perspective, there are just under 42,000 teachers in the state.

The report considers many possible factors, and cites an interesting source-- an October 2017 survey of people holding an Oklahoma teaching certificate who were not using it. One third said a pay increase would be enough to tempt them back to the classroom, but two thirds said it would take something more. In Oklahoma, it's not just the low pay, but the low support, the low respect, and the ever-increasing workload.

But 30,000 teachers voted with their feet. 30,000 teachers walked away from the job. That's a lot of feet.

As I understand it, what's supposed to happen next is that the legislators and other leaderly types are supposed to meet market demand by improving their offer. And yet, we have Oklahoma's legislators.

I suppose there are some factors that could cause the market forces to malfunction, most notably people in charge who don't care whether they can hire and retain all the nest teachers or not. Or who want the whole business to fail, because then charters and vouchers and other reformy businesses would have a better shot at the plating field. Or who are just so hostile to teachers that they'd rather see schools collapse then give those damned teachers one more cent.

Whatever the case, Oklahoma is totally screwing up the whole market forces thing. Let's hope they figure it out soon.

OH: Lorain Schools In State Of Emergency

The state takeover of Lorain City Schools continues to spiral out of control (if you are joining us for this ongoing mess, you can start the story here).

Here's what has happened in the last couple of days.

After announcing last Thursday that teachers at Lorain High School would have to reapply for their jobs, CEO David Hardy went on the television box to do an interview to try to-- well, it's not clear what he was trying to do. The video has a glitch in the middle, but there are a couple of points worth noting:

The interviewer explains the state-appointed job as a "dictator," and Hardy doesn't love the word, but he doesn't have a better one. I like "tsar," but that didn't come up.

The interviewer asks some fine questions, like whether the selection process is just a way to get rid of all the high-cost teachers. Hardy says, kind of, that it's not.  The interviewer also brings up the 98% no confidence vote from the staff and asks, in effect, doesn't this indicate you have some problems between leadership and your people, to which Hardy replies, "I don't give a shit." Okay, I'm paraphrasing; the reformspeak version he uses is that he's here to just focus on the students and that's what he's going to focus on. This is not a great way to run a-- well, anything.

Hardy does finally answer the question of whether people can lose their jobs over this-- the answer is "yes." And he tries to expand the criteria beyond the original "prove that you'll be supportive of my vision for the district." But mostly he waffles and gives answers that aren't actually answers to the question that was asked.

But none of that actually matters because--

Tuesday, Hardy announced that the whole "reapply for your job thing" was off the table.

I left our conversation Friday deeply moved by your statements. Your statements expressed a number of emotions, valid points, and perspectives. I was encouraged by the dialogue. I have also been in consultation with our State Superintendent, Paolo DeMaria. I want to reconsider how best to achieve the excellence that I know is possible at Lorain High School. For that reason, I will suspend the selection process previously announced. I created a very different understanding of what I was intending to accomplish, and I apologize for that. Suspending the process will allow us to collectively and collaboratively identify and implement the changes necessary to ensure our scholars succeed.

He also allows that he expected a round of absence in response. Then he sort of loses control of the whole language thing:

I will be the first to tell you that I take decisions like this seriously, but I take your words equally as serious. Our scholars deserve the best from all of us, something that can only happen with your voices at the table. My ask of you is that we continue our conversation and come together around solutions to create the Lorain High we all want. One that is full of love and high expectations for scholars, teachers, staff, and leaders alike; one that is focused on our kids and the well being of all; one that raises our collective belief in what is possible; one that is led by a solution-orientation that suspends disbelief; one that allocates our energy on positivity ; one that leads us to a level of collaboration that will bring us to what is truly possible for all of our scholars.

If one things is clear, it's that Hardy loves sweeping visionary-ish prose more than he loves actual specifics.

Was this a win? Did he blink? Did somebody in Columbus tell him to get his house in order? Board President Mark Ballard has a theory:

“The big story is the big boys down in Columbus called him and said, ‘You’ve got to fix this now,’” he said. “They know he’s out of control, as we do. Now he apologizes and said he changed his mind.”

Maybe, but I find the change of course pretty disturbing, because it indicates just how little thought went into the original proposal.

Look, if someone is going to use the nuclear option in any situation, I actually want it to be a little difficult to talk him out of it, because that at least means I'm dealing with someone who's thought long and hard about what he's doing. If he can change his mind quickly and easily, that means he pulled that nuke out on a thoughtless whim, and that's scary. Either Hardy didn't understand the enormity of his decision to make everyone at the high school reapply, or he just didn't care, and neither one is very comforting going forward. Remember, ten days before he dropped the bomb, he assured the union everyone's jobs were secure. My initial reaction was that ten days prior he just plain lied, but now it seems possible that he really didn't know what he was going to do. A guy who can make decisions this large with such little refection doesn't belong in charge of a lemonade stand, let alone an entire school district. It's also possible that big boys in Columbus did call him on the carpet, which means this is not his idea and everybody had better watch their backs-- a former Hardy co-worker has told me that he can be "as vindictive af." If these folks have made him look bad in front of his bosses, he will be stewing. (There is one other even worse possibility-- that every step of this has been a plan to kick the teachers in their collective guts to say, "Do I have your attention now?" But that would mean Hardy is a sociopath of frightening proportions, so let's assume that's not it.)

However, the community was already primed for a meeting last evening, and so the Academic Distress Commission (well, part of it) and the school board and a few other dignitaries and lawyers and a whole lot of community members gathered in the "media center" (that's "library" for you older folks) to share alarm over a variety of issues. Then they declared a state of emergency for the Lorain City Schools. After that, a whole lot of folks stepped up to the mic to express concerns while other folks chimed in on Facebook Live (you can find the video at the bottom of this story.)

What does this formal resolution proclaiming a state of emergency actually do? It's a good question; it would seem that what the folks want most immediately is to have their school system back, and under HB 70 that's not going to happen. It's also fair to note that, as several on-line commenters have pointed out, the district wasn't exactly going great guns under previous management. However, there's no sign that a state takeover is working, at all.

You can say that the principle of state takeover is sound, and that the problem is that the state made a Very Bad Hire in David Hardy. I don't think that's true. Yes, Hardy is really bad at this job. But I'm trying to imagine what someone who was both good at it and willing to take it would look like, and I don't think it can be done. Ohio has created a terrible job that can't be done-- come into a community from outside, strip people of their representative democracy, take over one of their most beloved and valued community assets, make them like it, and operate a large multi-faceted complicated organization that runs on a myriad of relationships that the state kicked in the face just by sending you here. This is already an impossible job, and when it's created by a reform-minded state like Ohio, the assumption is that the tsar should be an outsider who lacks the training and experience to have any idea how to do it. David Hardy is a terrible choice for this job-- but he's exactly what the people who created this job had in mind.

Meanwhile, there are more developments to watch.

The state is sending another head for the academic distress commission (the mostly-state-appointed group that now theoretically is responsible for the school system). That guy is Dr. Randall Sampson, and he, too, is steeped in reformy baloney. He spent one year in the classroom, a few years in administration, and a whole lotta years in consulting and running a school turnaround business that he started. And he's a big fan of some Common Core standards based data-driven value-added stuff. If Lorain is hoping the ADC will now be run by someone who will rein in Hardy--well, I would not bet the farm or any of the dirt on it.

Annnnd then there's this. I'll do a capture of part of the page because presumably it will update with time, but what we're looking at is nine want ads for teachers for Teach for America in Lorain, most with an application deadline of March 1st.

Stay tuned.

FL: Further Dismantling Public Education

Here are two not-entirely-academic questions:

Is it possible to end public education in an entire state?

Can Florida become any more hostile to public education than it already is?

Newly-minted Governor Ron DeSantis and a wild cast of privatization cronies seem to answer a resounding "yes" to both questions.

But how would you do it? What resources would you need? What tactical moves would you make? Well, as always, there's more bad education news in Florida than you can shake a "Swampland For Sale" sign at (the Tampa Bay Tims is now doing almost-daily education update columns). Remember-- Florida already has a head start with more vouchery choicey baloney than any other state, by far. But here are a couple of trends that point us in toward further privatization.

Fresh Astro-turf

Since at least the days of Governor Jeb and FEE, Florida has been fertile ground for growing well-heeled, widely-connected fake grassroots groups, and Florida's favorite face of privatization is back with yet an other group. The group is School Choice Movement, and the face is Erika Donalds.

The group launched at the start of this year (you know-- concurrently with DeSantis's term). Donalds is the lead on this group, but it also includes Shawn Frost, who graduated from Eastern Oregon University in 2006 with a BS in Experimental Psychology and a minor in philosophy. Then he picked up an MBA from Florida's Nova Southeastern University (website text- "Prepare To Dominate") and then he taught high school science for just two years at Sebastian River High School, a high-rated IBS school. There he did things like "leveraged personal network to create 'wow factor' learning experiences" and "conducted customer focus groups and survey research on student motivators and created a 'meritocracy based' incentives program." And then he got out of the classroom and back into corporate marketing work, got on a school board in part with help from Betsy DeVos's American Federation of Children and DeVos herself (this was in 2014), and from there moved to Erika Donalds's "alternative" school board group, the Florida Coalition of School Board Members. He fully intended to leap from there to the Florida Board of Education. He's also a senior strategy consultant with MVP Strategy and Policy, a group that can, among other things, "make you profitable/well-known and profitable." They also specialize in helping with school board races. Frost once taught a class based on The Art of War. I find no evidence that he was TFA, but he certainly fits the profile, and he does love to say that he was a classroom teacher (without mentioning that his "career" lasted two years. And I can report first hand that he has a feisty Twitter style.

Also in the group is Scot Shine, "named by Jacksonville Magazine as one of the First Coast's most influential people." He's also a marketing and politics guy who served briefly on a school board and joined the Donalds upstart group.

Donalds is a Tea Partier who used to be an investment banker in New York. Now she is a well-connected player in Florida. Her husband Byron Donalds is the legislator who gave Florida the law that says all textbooks must be "balanced" and that any taxpayer can challenge course content. Donalds is buds with Patty Levesque, the woman who has been Jeb Bush's right-hand woman on ed reform, and FCSBM includes other well-connected players. In the interest of space, I'm going to skip over the many Florida power couples in which he writes laws about education and she runs a charter school. Donalds landed a seat on the Florida Constitution Revision Commission, from which she helped launch Amendment 8, a three piece amendment that would have added civic education, term limits for school board members, and-- oh, yeah-- also a part that eviscerated school boards and allowed charters to do an end run around local voters so they could pick the taxpayers' pockets. The attempt to just kind of slip that last part past everybody helped kill Amendment 8 in court.

These three are the guts of SCM. The group's advocacy priorities are-- well, they're Amendment 8 without the civics. Term limits for school board members so they can chase pro-public ed people away before the gather too much power. Transportation innovation and funding-- because charters could recruit better if someone else was footing the transportation bill. Education scholarship accounts-- Florida already has these super-vouchers, but SCM would like to see them expanded to everyone. And charter independence-- because it sucks that charters still have to answer to elected representatives of the taxpayers who foot the bill, and charters would be much happier to not have to answer to anyone.

SCM is not thinking small. Combined, these policies would cut the throat of public education. Charters could soak the taxpayers for piles of money, and the only way school boards could relieve the pressure would be to cut public school budgets past the bone. This has been one of effective charter marketing tools in Florida-- hobble public schools so badly that charters start to look good by comparison.

Expanding Schools of Hope And More Vouchers

Of all the policies that pull back the mask of lies that (barely) cover some policies in Florida, nothing is more cynical than the so-called Schools of Hope.

The accountability wing of the reformsters has, mostly, that the purpose of evaluating schools is to get help to the staff, teachers and students . But Schools of Hope reveal Florida's school grading policy as a jackal's method for targeting the weakest members of the herd. Schools of Hope unmask Florida's school grading system as a marketing tool for privatizers.

The principle is simple. Use the grading system to identify schools that are having trouble aka schools that have beaten down enough that charters are starting to look good to the families who attend. Then let charters set up shop right across the street.

There is no fanciful spin that could make this look like a policy that will help or improve struggling schools. But then, that's what all this rhetoric about "putting children's concerns ahead of adult concerns" is too often about-- people who want strong public schools are just trying to save union teachers fat paychecks, and they should be happy to let the public system go down in flames. This will be a stronger argument the day a charter operator says, "Well, good business sense says we should close right now, but these kids are depending on us, so I guess we'll just lose money" or "Give us every kid you've lives nearby-- we don't care how much of a challenge they might be" or even when a legislator says "As long as there's one kid left in that public school, we need to make sure that school gets the best resources we can get to it."

Schools of Hope are a direct assault on public schools. And DeSantis thinks he's come up with a clever way to make more of them. Connect up Schools of Predators Hope to Opportunity Zones to the truckload of money being directed to Opportunity Zones, and you've got the gravy train running right to downtown Fat City. The governor will even throw in a pile of taxpayer money to help the Schools of Hope build.

Currently, just under 50 communities are eligible to Schools of Vultures Hope; the DeSantis plan would up that to just under 250.

DeSantis has also cleared away the obstacle of the courts for another reform dream. In 2006, the Florida Supreme Court found that Bush's voucher program ("Opportunity Scholarships") was unconstitutional. DeSantis has just replaced three of the five justices who signed that ruling-- and proposed the "Equal Opportunity Scholarship."  It's more vouchers, on top of the many vouchery programs Florida already has.

Redefine Public 

I've long said that charter school boosters insist on co-opting the word "public" as a marketing strategy, that they are trying to get families to ascribe certain characteristics to charters that charters simply do not have. Still, it seems curious that some charter cheerleaders are really, really adamant that charters are really public schools. After this piece ran at Forbes, the folks from School Choice Movement wanted to chastise me severely over this very point.

Then I read this editorial from the Tampa Bay Times- "DeSantis redefines public education"--, and while I may be slow, the penny finally dropped.

Yes, there are people who really think charters are public. There are those who co-opt its marketing power. There are charter operators who cynically choose "public" or "private" as it suits their purposes. But for those like DeSantis, the objective is to redefine the term.

He's made his redefinition clear-- "If the taxpayer is paying for the education, it's public education." Oddly enough, that is exactly the argument the School Choice Movement tweeted at me.

Read the statute: farm analogies aside, charter schools are public schools, UNLESS your opinion of “public” begins and ends at union operated schools. Public education is the education of the public, not a single building, or delivery model. pic.twitter.com/GPPqcQt8Gm

— School Choice Movement (@SchoolChoiceMVT) February 15, 2019

Note that this skips over who owns it, who controls it (and whether or not that who is elected), to whom it is responsible (if anybody), who regulates it (if anybody) and most especially who profits from it (answer: "Who cares as long as it's not those lousy unions and their lousy teachers").

Calling charter schools public creates a nice batch of smoke and mirrors, allowing DeSantis and his cronies to privatize giant chunks of Florida's school system while still proclaiming, "No need to worry. You still have public schools!" You could completely shift the education system to privately owned and operated schools while still reassuring parents, taxpayers, and, perhaps, courts, that you haven't done a thing because it's still all public schools.

It's not just marketing. It's stealing the Mona Lisa and hanging up a Polaroid picture of the painting in its place. It's kidnapping your spouse and replacing them with an inflatable doll. It is a gaslighting of epic proportions.

In the meantime, Florida taxpayers, you probably should not try to just stroll into the public governor's mansion you paid for or borrow one of those public vehicles that you bought for officials to drive around in (especially don't try to commandeer a public army tank). Instead, I would keep a close eye on your public schools while you've still got them. And if it's already too late in your county, don't be sad-- your loss of public education has at least made some of your leaders really wealthy.

And the rest of us need to pay attention, too. Remember-- Betsy DeVos is among the many people who think Florida is an educational exemplar.

OH: Lorain CEO's Purge Announcement Raises Fury

Last Thursday night, David Hardy, the state-appointed takeover CEO for Lorain City Schools told the public that all teachers at the high school would have to reapply for their jobs.

If you want to read about how they arrived at this point, that story is here. This is just the next chapter in the story.

After telling the public, Hardy then sent a letter to staff (because when you want to drop this kind of bomb on your staff, you definitely want them NOT to be the first to know). It does not particularly clarify the action. Having created four categories for the schools of Lorain (because a good plan requires specialized new jargon) -- excellent, innovation, improvement and empowerment schools. No schools were ranked excellent, and only the high school was ranked "empowerment." Hardy has not made public the process by which these judgments are made, though they appear to be linked closely to state test results.

Why exactly do teachers need to re-apply? Per the letter:

"...because we know that transformations this large can only happen with a completely unified and committed team, we’re giving leaders at Empowerment Schools the autonomy to choose their staff. "

At the high school, that would be the team led by Executive Director Daniel Garvey.* Garvey is one of Hardy's hires; he graduated from Ohio State with a BA in International/Global studies then, spent two years Teach for America as an English teacher, then three years handling phone interviews for TFA, and six and a half years doing a variety of education-related jobs in the Dominican Republic. Now he's going to take point on deciding if the teachers of Lorain High should get to keep their jobs or not.

Because the corporate reform playbook says that school leaders should be like CEOs who get to pick their teams, even if that means firing people who know far more about the job than the CEO does.

But look at another line from the letter:

This means all teachers and staff members who wish to remain at LHS next school year will need to participate in a selection process to determine whether their experience, commitment and belief in the potential of our scholars are the right fit for the school going forward. 

Hardy's argument is that LHS has to break "patterns of low academic achievement stretching back many years," but he's not going to evaluate teachers based on their academic strength, their teaching skills, their content knowledge-- they are going to be judged on whether they have the right commitment and belief, whether they are, in fact, team players. Is this about the "no confidence" vote that 98% of the staff made public last week? The board vice-president and the teacher union president both think so.

The purge letter also has a paragraph encouraging "educators and staff who do not have a direct ort immediate impact by the process" to keep working hard. That is a bone stupid thing to say-- as if any teacher anywhere in the district could not be immediately affected that at any moment, the CEO could announce that they, too, must do a song and dance to keep the job they already have. Every person who works in the Lorain district is now affected. Only a deeply incompetent manager could expect otherwise.

The purge announcement comes wrapped in plenty of confusion. The letter itself sends mixed messages. "I have seen first hand how hard LHS teachers work every day to do right by their scholars" Hardy writes. And then, "I hope many will decide to be part of the selection process." That process is loaded with unanswered questions. Per Jay Pickering, union president:

They can’t tell you who’s interviewing people, what positions — when you put in your request to stay, there’s not ‘what am I going to teach.’ It was very vague as far as whatever this process is going to be. The only thing, and I made sure that I asked the CEO clearly, if throughout this process if a teacher’s not chosen, could they lose their job in Lorain, yes or no. And he just refused to answer the question.

But then, Pickering has no reason to listen to Hardy's words on the subject anyway-- just ten days before the announcement, Pickering asked Hardy to quell rumors in the district, and Hardy assured him that no teachers were going to be moved.  Now Hardy says that tenured teachers who aren't kept at the high school will be placed elsewhere in the district; he does not offer an explanation of how that will work for teachers who are only high school certified.

Hardy called teachers in for a two hour meeting on Friday to discuss the selection process, which apparently will start in a week. The meeting was billed as an announcement of Hardy's plan, but simply outlined him timeline. "It was a really bizarre meeting and he didn’t really answer any questions directly. There were a lot of tears by teachers today."

The process of announcing intent has begun immediately, as covered by the Chronicle-Telegram:

In an email shared with The Chronicle-Telegram, the district’s People Office sent staff an invitation to complete a “non-binding Declaration of Intent survey,” 6:15 p.m. Friday. Survey questions were not accessible without starting the application process, but the letter states those who wish to remain at the high school must “exemplify our district core values at all times; abide by the district policy, protocols, and identified expectations; abide by the district’s shared expectations outlined in The Lorain Way; uphold the expectations outlined in the Lorain teacher job descriptions; and believe in the limitless potential of all scholars.”

The invitation states “all staff” must submit the form, but only includes a link to the teacher job descriptions. The form is due March 1 and those who complete it will be contacted by a member of the People Office by March 5 to learn of the next steps and schedule a formal interview.

Hardy's public comments continue to be word salads of corporate gobbledegook.

“It was a conversation that we had as a team to talk about the future to give our teachers space to ask questions and think through things they’re grappling with and make sure they understand the process that ensued," Hardy said. "And to ensure we have a space to understand what challenges we’re facing and move forward.”

And

“We know that their lives and days are extremely busy, so we wanted to make sure it is something that allows them to showcase the wonderful things they already do and have conversations with the leadership team about being a part of this transformation,” he said. “Or maybe there are folks who decide they would like to be somewhere else in the district, then we would invite folks who are external to be a part of that selection process.

"But not until we have exhausted all of our opportunities to really talk to our teachers, to understand our teachers who are in this high school and ask them to be a part of what is necessary to move to the next level. At that point, our school leadership team will make decisions on who they would like to see be a part of Lorain High going into the 2019-2020 school year.”

It's an astonishing parade of baloney, and it makes me angry for the teachers of Lorain just to read through this. Though it appears that there may be nobody madder than School Board President Mark Ballard, who argues in a letter sent Friday that Hardy should have to reapply for his own job. Nor did Ballard mince words when talking to the paper.  

“Grades got worse, morale got worse, enrollment got worse,” Ballard said the district since Hardy took over 18 months ago. “… I think there’s probably about 60,000 people in the city of Lorain and he’s probably No. 60,001 that deserve that job based on how he’s been doing it.”

“What I think is he’s just going to go through his games,” Ballard said. “And the people who’s not buying into his program and dancing to his music, whether they’re right or wrong or whether they’re good at their jobs or not, he just wants them out of there so he can have additional puppets to do what he wants them to do.”

The state takeover of Lorain schools is turning into a clusterfarphegnugen of epic proportions. The idea of giving a CEO all the powers of a superintendent and a school board is a dumb idea. Giving that position to someone who lacks the experience and skills to even sort of manage it makes things exponentially worse. For Reformsters who think the corporate takeover CEO model has potential, Lorain is shaping up to be a model for how bad an idea that is, a sort of disproof of concept. We'll keep following this tale as we wait to see just how bad things can get.

And here's the next chapter.

ICYMI: So Long, February Edition (2/24)

Well, that just flew by. Here's a good batch of reading from the week. Remember, if it speaks to you, help it speak to somebody else.

Betsy DeVos vs. Student Veterans

By easing up on predatory for-profit colleges, DeVos has really stuck it to veterans trying to get an education.

TFA Celebrates New Research That Suggests That Corps Members Are Ineffective Teacher

Gary Rubinstein takes a look at TFA's odd choice of research to get excited.

A Teacher's Student Loans Were Forgiven. Then FedLoan Wrecked His Credit

An infuriating tale that highlights just how screwed up this loan program is these days.

This Personalized Ed Program That Was Supposed To Boost Scores Didn't Work 

Teach To One was supposed to totally work the personalized [sic] education magic. A new study says no, not so much.

Oakland Public School Teachers Are Striking Against Billionaire Privatizers 

Jacobin takes a look at the Oakland strike and the real issues driving it.

Are Texas Kids Failing, or Is The Staar Test Rigged?

Yet another Big Standardized Test turns out to be written at inappropriate grade levels.

Boon Or Black Hole: PA Private School Scholarship Program Considers Expansion

PA has its own tax credit scholarship program that is either awesome or disastrous, depending on whether you ask someone benefiting from it or anyone else. Now the move is on to make it bigger.

Kentucky Charter Schools Funding Shelved For Another Year

A recap/update on Kentucky's unique charter compromise-- they've created a charter law, but they won't fund it. That tradition will continue in 2019.

Charter Takeover In Atlanta Struggled

For the gazzilionth time, some school takeover experts discover that it's not nearly as easy to turn schools around as they said it would be.

P&G's Partnership With Strive

What does Cincinnati have to do with building the cradle-to-career pipeline?

I'm a Loser Baby, So Why Don't You Kill Me

Think you've read the last word on Don Jr's teacher comment. Read what Nancy Flanagan has to say last.

John White Speaks At San Francisco TFA Board Meeting

Why is the guy who helped trash public education in Louisiana talking to TFA on the left coast? Mercedes Schneider has your answer.

TN: Market Forces Are Not Magical

Shelby County is running up against two of the fallacies embedded in most charter school policy.

One is the modern charter policy lie-- the notion that you can run multiple parallel school systems with the same money that used to run one system. The other is that charter systems don't need a lot of regulation because the invisible hand of the market will take care of it all.

Shelby County Schools in Tennessee has noticed that it has problems with both of those principles.

The issue was raised back in August when the board considered nine more charter applications-- which would have brought the grand total to 63 charter schools in the county. Superintendent Dorsey Hopson put his finger on the problem:

“No surprise, we have too many schools in Memphis,” Hopson said. “If you got 12 schools in a three-mile radius… and all of them are under-enrolled, we’re not serving kids well.”

Shelby County is home to Memphis, one of the great early charter playgrounds in a state that has always ridden on the reformster train. About 14% of students in the county attend charter schools, and that's enough to leave some schools feeling a financial pinch (the overhead of maintaining a building does not go down whether you lose one student or one hundred). That's also before we count schools being run by the state in the Achievement School District (a method of state takeover of school districts with low test scores).

Nor are the schools well-distributed. Check this map and you'll see that some neighborhoods have clusters of charter schools, while other areas of the county have none at all. It's almost as if market forces do not drive charter businesses to try to serve all students, but only concentrate on the markets they find attractive! Go figure. (Note: charters in Tennessee can be run by profit or non-profit organizations or, of course, non-profits that funnel all their money to for-profit businesses.)

The problem did not happen overnight-- a local television station did a story entitled "Charter Schools-- Too Many? Too Fast?" back in 2017. The answer was, "Probably yes to both." But it also included the projection that SCS would some day be all charter. It does appear that Shelby County is in danger of entering the public school death spiral, where charters drain so much money from the public system that the public system stumbles, making the charters more appealing, so more students leave the public system, meaning the public system gets less and less money, making charters more appealing, so students leave, rinse and repeat until your public system collapses.

Except that's a problem if some of the public system collapses in communities where there are no charter schools. This is one of the many great dangers of an unregulated charter system-- the charters can kill off the public system without actually replacing it, leading to a school system that only covers the most attractive parts of the "market." That's perfectly sensible business functioning in a free(-ish) market, but it's terrible education policy.

 Which brings us to this news:

Shelby County Schools is developing guidelines that would determine if a neighborhood has too many charter schools, addressing a longtime concern of school board members.

The charter school guidelines, called the Educational Priorities Document/Rubric in a proposed district policy on charter schools, would also prioritize what the district wants charter schools to focus on, such as early literacy.

It's a 21-page document, and it removes a considerable amount of the wild west from Shelby County's charter sector. It's the kind of policy that might help save the whole system for the families of Shelby County. Stay tuned to see if charters squawk and push back.

Charter Schools Are Not Public Schools

Modern charter schools prefer to attach the word "public" to their descriptions. Many of the charter advocacy groups include "public charter" in their title. And truthfully, there are no regulations attached to the term--any school can attach the word "public" to its title without having to worry about any sort of penalty.

So technically, any charter school can call itself a public school. Heck, any private or parochial school can call itself a public school if it's so inclined. But while modern charter schools are financed by public tax dollars, they are not truly public schools for the following reasons.

Transparency

When City Paper recently reported on the salaries of DC charter teachers and administrators, it required extra digging to come up with the information because charter schools are exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. In fact, City Paper reported that a teacher employed by the charter was not even allowed to see the salary scale for her own job. In 2014, when the New York state controller wanted to audit the books of Eva Moskowitz's Success Academy, the charter leader took him to court and won, barring the state from trying to see how public tax dollars were spent.

Public schools are required to provide a transparent look at their finances. At times, some outlets have gone so far as to publish the salaries of individual teachers, and that's perfectly legal. Nor are public school boards allowed to meet privately or in secret. Everything that happens in a public school is paid for with public dollars, and is therefor subject to public scrutiny. Charters deliberately avoid that level of scrutiny.

Subject To State Law

The details here vary from state to state (here's a handy chart for looking up your own state), but charter schools generally don't have to play by the same rules as public schools. Non-discrimination, health and safety, and school year length are often (but not always) exceptions--beyond the specific exceptions, charters operate as they will, and may in some states request additional waivers. So, for instance, many states do not require charter teachers to be certified. Public schools, meanwhile, must play by all the rules laid down by the state.

Student Population

Modern charter schools have a variety of techniques for controlling which students they serve. It begins with advertising, which signals which students are most likely to feel like the school is a good fit for them. Charters are not required to provide programs that meet all special needs; they don't necessarily turn those students down, but if a school tells you that they do not offer the program that your child needs, will you really enroll there? And while lotteries are supposed to select students randomly, lotteries themselves often require committed parents willing to work their way through the paperwork and bureaucracy, so that the system allows parents to self-select for providing the kind of support and commitment that makes students more successful.

Once the student is in the school, there are a variety of ways to nudge the child out. We've seen the "Got To Go" list at Success Academy;  families can be nudged out with repeated suspensions and disciplinary action.

Charter supporters note that some public schools, such as magnet or special program schools, do not accept all students either, and that is true. However, even if the child is not selected for the magnet school, the district is still responsible for that child's education and will enroll her elsewhere. If a student has severe special needs that the district cannot meet in house, the district must still assume financial responsibility for providing the child with an education at some specialized facility.

When students walk out the door of a charter school, they cease to be the charter's responsibility. But as long as a student lives within the public school's designated area, that student is the district's responsibility.

Local Control

Public schools answer to the public. They are run by elected school boards who must meet and take action in public. Charter advocates have expressed frustration with this system and even suggest that school boards be done away with. Many public systems have been attacked on this front, with their school boards thrust aside by state takeover or a switch to mayoral control. Such changes make those systems less public, and often are a step toward converting public schools to charters.

Charter schools could be operated by a locally elected board, but they almost never are. Instead, charter schools are owned and operated by private individuals or boards, sometimes located far away from the school itself. Sometimes control of the charter is separated from the community by a series of managerial handoffs--Group X technically owns and operates the charter, but they hire Corporation Y to actually run the school.

When municipal assets like water systems and parking facilities are handed off to private companies to run, we call it by its name--privatization. Turning a school over to a private company to own and operate is no different.

Why Bother?

Why do charter schools and their boosters insist on using the term "public"? Here's what Todd Ziebarth, senior vice president at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, told Emma Brown of the Washington Post as he argued that charters are public schools.

And it’s a term that matters, he said: Americans have high regard for the importance of public education, and private schools carry connotations of exclusivity that don’t apply to charters.

In other words, "public" carries a host of connotations that are important for marketing purposes. Brown was interviewing Ziebarth in 2016 for his reaction to the National Labor Relations Board ruling that charters are private corporations.

We can talk another day about whether charter schools are helping or hurting, whether they're good policy or bad. What we should not need to discuss is whether or not they are public.

Originally posted at Forbes.