Maybe We Should Talk About College Readiness Again

College and career ready. College and career ready. College and career ready.

How long have we been reading and listening to that magical phrase, quietly at first and now omnipresent as the euphemism of choice for people who no longer dare say "Common Core."

It is a hollow phrase, completely empty of meaning. It never, ever, comes with a list, description, or quantification of what "college ready" actually looks like. No mystery there-- we don't know.

But then, few education policy mavens have ever tried to figure out, really, what college ready means,. and mostly they weren't even tryin. Instead, the phrase has been employed to give weight to the Big Standardized Test. "Students didn't score as well on the BS Test as we wanted them to," is not terribly compelling-- but run around hollering, "OMGZ! 63% of our students are not ready for college!!" and you can draw a crowd and get some money moving around in support of whatever test-driven idea you're selling this week.

But "scored higher than the cut score on the PARCC" is not the same as "college ready." How could any single measure tell us that? What single measure would tell us that one student is ready to attend as pre-law at Yale and another student is ready to attend Julliard to study music and another student is ready to attend East South Dakota Community College to get a history teaching certificate and another student is working on her welding certifications. What one instrument could possibly measure the readiness of students for an infinite variety of Next Steps?

But reformsters keep telling us that test scores measure college readiness, even as we all know that test scores closely correlate to family socio-economic background, that tests mostly measure how much money--

Oh.

Oh, okay.

Perhaps I've been too hard on the BS Test. Perhaps it is giving us the best measure of one quality that does indicate college readiness-- your parents' bank account.

It took about five minutes for people to recognize that the great Aunt Becky college bribery scandal was not so much a wild outlier as simply an extreme version of what already happens. SAT and ACT scores padded by hugely expensive test coaches. Legacy entries.  Generous donations to the university. George W. Bush. Jared Kushner.

Look, we have very little idea what makes a student ready for college. We know the larger outlines. A decent command of a body knowledge in her chosen field. Enough maturity to self-regulate (as I told my students for years, most of my former students who flunked out did so not because of academic issues, but because the freedom to drink till 2 AM, sleep till 2 PM, skip half the classes and half the assignments was too much for them-- though we all know privileged folks who did all that in college and still grabbed a diploma). Some half-decent writing skills. Actual interest in learning more stuff. Enough money to be able to get through. All of that, more or less, matters. And enough money and privilege can substitute for any or all of those qualities. And the Big Standardized Test measures none of them.

There is overlap between the Cult of the Test and Credentialists. Credentialists believe in the Piece of Paper. You go to college to get your Big Boy Credentials, so it stands to reason that you show readiness by getting a High School Credential, and they didn't think a high school held up for that job, so let's invent a new high school credential. The problem of Credentialism is, of course, that you come to value the Piece of Paper (or, in their dreams, the digital micro-credential) that you stop thinking about what the Piece of Paper is supposed to represent. It stops being a symbol for the thing, and becomes thing itself. And if the point is to get a credential, a Piece of Paper-- well, there are lots of ways to do that, including having Mom and Dad buy one for you.

After all, a framed diploma hangs just as well on the wall of someone who actually learned something as it does on the wall of an uneducated credentialed dope. You can always pretend that your credentials mean whatever you want them to mean.

We need to stop pretending. We need to stop pretending that all colleges operate as full-time meritocracies. We need to stop pretending that college disrupts our socio-economic class structure, when mostly it just reinforces it (and while we're at it, we can stop pretending that Affirmative Action is somehow disrupting the imaginary meritocracy). We need to stop pretending that we know what "college ready" means, and we REALLY need to stop pretending that we know how to measure it.

We need to stop using the phrase "college and career ready" as if we're talking anything except the score on a single multiple-choice narrow-focus standardized test.

OH: Beating Back School Takeovers

If there is any benefit at all to the complete hash of the takeover of Lorain  City Schools, it's that it has brought renewed attention to Ohio's terrible takeover law and renewed energy to attempts to bust that law.

There are actually two proposals floating around currently, both bipartisan. State Reps. Kent Smith, D-Euclid, and Steve Hambley, R-Brunswick, announced House Bill 127 this week. The bill calls for a moratorium on all school takeovers. The bill would not roll back the three takeovers already under way (Youngstown, Lorain, and East Cleveland). Hambly told the Chonicle:

At this point, untangling that knot’s a little bit more complicated, but I think the one thing I can say about our proposal is it doesn’t create any more victims.

Hambly says at this point the bill has disrupted not just schools, but the entire city, providing "three case studies on how not to help a community."

Meanwhile, Rep. Joe Miller, D-Amherst, and Rep. Don Jones, R-Freeport,  say they will be proposing a bill that will dissolve the Academic Distress Commissions that run the takeovers. Once again, the Chronicle is all over this story.

“We realize that when you move decision-making farther and farther away from students, the more likely you’re not going to be able to meet their needs,” Miller said Friday in a phone interview. “And there are a lot of things that go into that classroom than just children trying to score a certain test score.”

“Academic Distress Commissions have not only taken away school and community pride, but have proven to be unsuccessful in their mission,” Jones said.

The duo say that schools need more local control, not less.

One other factor that may help with this bipartisan push-- there are ten more school districts that will soon fall under the HB 70 ax, and one of them is Columbus. We'll see if legislators feel differently when the district under the gun is right up the street from their offices.

HB 70 passed under the shadiest of circumstances-- it was proposed as an amendment to another bill in the morning and passed by the Ohio Senate and House later that same day, and swiftly signed by Governor Kasich. The Ohio Supreme Court will hear a challenge to the bill's constitutionality this year.

If you live in Ohio, now is an excellent time to contact your elected representative

NY: Rochester, Mayoral Control, Vultures, and the Problems of Democracy.

It has been almost a decade since a mayoral school coup was a hot topic in Rochester. Mayor Robert Duffy wanted to implement NYC style mayoral control. There seemed to be support for the move; the superintendent even had a nifty portfolio plan whipped up and ready to go. But Andrew Cuomo tagged Duffy as his running mate for governor, and Duffy was out of Rochester politics about a year after he'd proposed the takeover. The Senate was moving on it, opponents were ready o file lawsuits, but the whole business just sort of languished.

Well, there's your problem.

Fast forward to last year. In August, Education Commissioner MaryEllen Alia sent a consultant to Rochester to talk to folks, assess the situation, and make recommendations. Jaime Aquino, Distinguished Educator (seriously, that's his title), had held leadership positions in NY, Denver, and Los Angeles before he arrived in Rochester to talk to many people and wsw`determine that-- well, the full report, issued in November 2018, was a brutal sixty pages. It's not pretty:

“That lack of stability in leadership really has an impact on the work that happens in school," Dr. Aquino said of the district having five superintendents in the past decade. "There is also, in the district, lack of a laser-like focus on student achievement. There’s not a lot of attention being paid to teaching and learning, and a lack of accountability in the system in terms of monitoring what goes on in the school and in the progress the kids are doing.”

The picture that emerges from the report is of fully-dysfunctional top-down leadership, starting with a dysfunctional board that is both splintered and prone to micro-management, and on to a central office with no vision, bouncing from "flavor of the month" to the "crisis du jour." The frequent turnover extends down through most leadership positions. The report also notes problems rooted in a "deep history of institutional racism" and that district is "crippled by a culture of fear and intimidation." Their only positives-- a good pre-K program and stakeholders who were brutally honest but had not given up hope. Aquino's report included a plan to move forward, and many school and community leaders had responses; notably, none of these argued that Aquino got it wrong.

Some folks had already been prepared to jump the gun; Governor Cuomo voiced support for mayoral control weeks before the report was even issued. In Rochester, it took about a couple of weeks after the report for the question of mayoral control to reappear, introduced, apparently, by a local tv station. At that point, Mayor Lovely Warren said, "Eh, we'll see."

That was last November. Just last month, the issue heated up again. Assemblyman David Gannt proposed two bills-- one to give the superintendent more power, and one for mayoral control. The teachers union president and the school board president argued against the idea. Mayor Warren hedged her bets, but said something has to happen. That was about a month ago.

On March 4, Warren said of the school woes, "Today it stops." She pointed out the obvious-- if the pre-K is turning out great results, what happens to them? Nobody knows. Warren doesn't think mayoral control is the way to go, and the civic leaders seem to agree with the commissioner that the district's plan lacks vision-- but nobody else seems to be articulating a vision, either. In the last week, the commissioner has signaled that she is unimpressed with Rochester schools' plan. An Action network petition went up opposing a takeover-- it has 91 signatures.

There is so much bad written about Rochester schools. It's not just the Aquino report. Or rather, the report is backed up by horrible statistics. Extreme segregation. Extreme poverty. Dysfunctional leadership. Terrible graduation rates (just barely over 50%). Over a dozen schools failing by the state measure.

The city has sifted through many possible governance solutions, though it seems that any solution that includes the white suburbs or directly addressing segregation is off the table. Forced closings of some schools didn't accomplish anything. The Democrat & Chronicle declared the schools the worst in America, and launched their own school rescue program called Time To Educate (motto: Something. Must. Change.)

And there's another player on the field. Meet ROC the Future.

ROC the Future is a "collaborative community-wide initiative" that wants "to promote alignment and focus community resources to improve the academic achievement of children in the City of Rochester." It's a collection of local leaders and organizations that are out to set the district straight. Their lack of faith is evident; RTF has recently reached out to the NY Commissioner, going over the school district's head. "Engage us in your decisions," say the Mayor and RTF.

If this model of local movers and shakers stepping in to put themselves in charge of local education seems familiar (see also "Mind Trust"), that's because RTF isn't an entirely local operation. RTF is part of the StriveTogether network. StriveTogether is all about the cradle to career pipeline, data driven decisions, and a host of highly prescriptive education ideas. It is yet another organization headed up by folks who have no education background; StriveTogether CEO Jennifer Blatz was an admissions officer before she went to work at KnowledgeWorks-- and yes, StriveTogether is part of the KnowledgeWorks universe. KnowledgeWorks has been around for two decades, riding the Gates ed reform gravy train to wherever it was running; currently KnowledgeWorks is all about personalized learning (a preferred path to privatization these days).

This is not particularly surprising. Where you find a school system in trouble and vulnerable, you find reformsters hoping to cash in.

And make no mistake-- Rochester's schools are definitely struggling. The question here is not if there is a problem, but what the solution might be.

Rochester likes to speculate about mayoral control, but when proponents of mayoral control want to make their case, their arguments invariably focus on what is wrong with the district, and not what mayoral control could do to fix it. The school board is too mired in politics? How does subordinating them to another political office fix that?

Rochester, at least from out here in the cheap seats, seems to encompass almost all the issues of education. An institution with long baked-in systemic racism. A lack of functional leadership that pumps toxicity into the system, leading to more leadership problems (like the inability to hang onto a superintendent for more than a year or two). A host of backseat drivers trying to grab the wheel on this careening bus. And I am not even going to start into the stresses on the system by charter schools in Rochester.

And, it has to be acknowledged, a system that stands as a rebuke to those of us who champion local democratic control, because (again, from the cheap seats) it certainly seems that local democratic control is not working. It is a reminder (as if we needed any more reminder than the orange-skinned grifter in the White House) that democracy is not magical.

What could help? Well, not mayoral control, which remains a really lousy idea. There isn't a reason in the world to believe that the mayor of the city knows enough about education to run a school system, and nothing in the history of mayoral takeovers to suggest that it's an idea that can work well. State takeovers are predicated on the notion that somebody in the state capital knows more about how to run a school well than professional educators. And both of these solutions require a whole community to be stripped of their voting rights, which ought to be cause for alarm-- particularly when the people being stripped of their vote are brown and black and poor. Building up the charter sector under current law just strips the public school of the resources they need to shape up. And while all this rages on, the vultures circle, smelling an opportunity to profit by a community's crisis.

The root problem is the same problem that plagues business and politics-- how do you fix an institution when people hold key positions who are not fit, by reason of either temperament, ability, or morality, to hold those positions? It would be nice to be able to appeal some higher authority, but everywhere we look, all we see are other human beings. The real solution is for the board to stop being horrible, or for the electorate to stop electing horrible board members. The solution is for a non-horrible board to hire a qualified superintendent and back her up, empower her, and let her do her job- and for the concerned movers and shakers of the city to do the same. Or, if the state decides they want to solve the issue with charter schools, then the solution is for the state to pump in the kind of extra money needed to effectively operate multiple school systems, and not make them fight over the money that isn't even enough to operate one system well. The state could also help by releasing schools from the tyranny of high stakes testing, so that Rochester can focus on the educational issues that matter instead of wasting too much time and effort chasing test scores.

It's easy when a system is this far in the weeds to amble up, point at the bus parked on its side amongst the corn stalks and observe, "Well, see. There's your problem. Your bus should be on its wheels, over on the pavement." But the painful specifics of getting there are difficult and challenging and not always obvious in their solutions. When it comes to education, amateurs always think they know the answer, and the worse the problems, the more plentiful and certain the amateurs become. But educational amateurs and politicians and reformster groups with binders full of prescriptive programs are not going to save Rochester City Schools.

We should all watch to see what happens next.

Gigging, Progress, and the Unmaking of American Work

This is not really about education, and it is totally about education.

Over at The Nation, Malcolm Harris has written a review of Sarah Kessler's Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work. It's a thoughtful and worthwhile read, even if you decide not to tackle the entire book.

Harris opens with the cautionary tale of failed start-up Webvan, and notes the lessons that the founder Peter Relan gleaned from their collapse:

The first problem, he wrote, was customer targeting. Webvan’s strategy was to offer “the quality and selection of Whole Foods, the pricing of Safeway, and the convenience of home delivery,” a combination that attracted working- and middle-class shoppers. What it should have been doing instead, Relan concluded, was “providing a luxury” to a smaller, richer customer base. Second, he wrote, the company shouldn’t have invested in all that infrastructure. Webvan built cutting-edge distribution systems from scratch: giant networks of new algorithms, miles of conveyor belts, fleets of custom trucks with PalmPilot-wielding delivery drivers. At its peak, Webvan had a billion-dollar contract with the construction firm Bechtel for new distribution facilities around the country. Relan named Instacart and Postmates as lean start-ups that were learning from Webvan’s failure.

Look at my flexible income!

Webvan is a signpost from another era (twenty whole years ago) when the idea was that techno-companies would make life better for everyone, workers included. Now, says Harris, Americans have given up on the idea that "progress should improve everyone's life." Every step forward benefits only a few and costs someone, somewhere.

Progress is especially costly for workers, and Kessler tells the stories from the workers point of view. This, via Harris, offers some troubling insights. For instance, all that creative innovative thought that's supposed be a critical skill in the 21st century? Turns out that's important because companies find it efficient and inexpensive to leave their gigployees to solve their own problems. That saves money, because it shifts both the problems of management and the costs of running the business to the gigployees. Imagine if Uber had to maintain its own fleet of cars and had to provide every driver with a communications device-- but, no-- if you want to drive for Uber, coming up with the basic equipment is your problem, not theirs. And if it seems hard to make enough money at the proffered rates, it's up to the gigployee to figure out how to streamline.

And this:

But instead of using technology to reduce the role of labor in production through automation and cybernetics, they perform what is essentially arbitrage with human life. If Person A’s time is worth $50 an hour on the market, and Person B’s time is only worth $10, Person A should have a strong incentive to hire Person B to perform life’s unpleasant tasks. This kind of shallow thinking is what current Silicon Valley fortunes are made of....

In a perfectly efficient world, people would be served by others to the exact degree that the market values their time more—and in the 21st century, the market doesn’t value most people’s time that highly.

In other words, some people really are worth less than others (and Kessler doesn't fail to notice that many of those less worthy people are women), and they should be serving the more valuable folks. Ride share companies, says Harris, didn't reinvent the bus-- they reinvented the servant.

Flexibility? Gig economy fans say that workers seek out gigs because they love the flexibility. This, says Kessler, is baloney:

...the truth is that they seek it out because it’s all that’s left for them. “I haven’t really met many people in general who don’t value stability and safety,” Kessler writes. The “flexibility” is imposed, and workers do the best they can to adjust.

This has echoes of the complaint that workers need to be freed from unionized rules and restraints because they crave flexibility, a criticism almost exclusively expressed by the people in charge and never by those who actually do the work.

There's another implication here. Some industries have been slow to innovate because they can still get away with treating employees so poorly.

It's depressing picture. As Americans, we're used to the notion that progress should be a rising tide that lifts all boats, but according to Kessler, that's not where we are at all. Progress makes life better for some, and for the rest of us, not so much.

I said at the outset that this is not about education, exactly, except of course that much of this is recognizable. Teaching as part of the gig economy is still a dream for some, with classes taught on a hired temp basis, paid for with education savings account vouchers, and the real money in education being siphoned off by the people who stand between the user and the vendor. What we are repeatedly sold as "progress" for education is bad for teachers, but such criticism is dismissed as carping by people who put adult concerns ahead of students. Except that what's sold as "progress" is also bad for students as well. But it's good for people who want to make money, and good for people who don't want to pay money into the education system. Now if only we could bust those unions so that teachers weren't restricted by all those rules standing in the way of flexibility.

One last education note here-- don't forget that Betsy DeVos thinks that education ought to be like Uber. The model broken down by this book is the model that many of our education reformsters want to follow.

Bug-In-Ear Coaching: Why Is This Still A Thing?

You're a young teacher, working hard to get the hang of running a classroom, sequencing instruction, monitoring a roomful of students, tracking the clock, and otherwise managing your role as educational Boss Of The Room. It reminds you of when you first started driving, and it was taxing just to carefully monitor everything that needed to be monitored. Your hands are full and your brain is just this far from overloading.

Clearly what you need more than anything else is a voice in your ear offering back seat driving while you are trying to do your job.

Excellent. Do your anticipatory set, then dance for me.

Somehow bug-in-ear coaching continues to be a thing. EdWeek wrote this puffy promotional piece for the practice just last month. But the practice has been around for a while. Here's an extensive piece of happy talk about it back in 2011-- and it cites sources going back to 1994. The writers at least have the sense to acknowledge that "the virtual coach's role can quickly deteriorate into a Big Brother or a nagging mother." Well, yes. They also advise to keep things short, maybe just using key words.

Coaches advocating for this approach insist that teachers love it, which is not exactly a shocker. It's younger teachers or struggling teachers who are mostly likely to have the bug-ear thrust upon them and who are also least likely to say, "Are you kidding me?" But if you want to read an account of someone who went through it and hated it, here's a piece from Ann Berard, a former charter teacher who decided that she did not want to be "just like Tom Brady."

The students were also perplexed by my new earpiece accessory. "Um, Miss, what’s that in your ear?" they asked. I looked over to the three adults in the far back corner of the room for my scripted answer. "Tell them you are like Tom Brady. Tom Brady wears an earpiece to be coached remotely and so do you," was the response. I never would have said that, and mumbled instead: "But I’m not Tom Brady. No, I’m not Tom Brady." The students, who could hear me, but not what I was hearing through my earpiece, were more confused than ever. At which point I explained to them that I was being trained by the people in the corner who were telling me what to say via their walkie talkie. I’m all for transparency and simple answers to simple questions.

Berard's experience contains some commonly noted features of this type of coaching, most notably the comparison to pro football coaching. However, the new model now calls for the coach not to be in the back of the room, but somewhere else entirely, watching via video camera. Because nothing gives you a real sense of the classroom better than a little monitor cam mounted like some sort of security camera in the corner.

This stuff has also apparently caught on in the UK, where "just like Tom Brady" must not seem quite as compelling, but where officials insist that, unlike in the US, the system is under the control of the teacher and not used as a means of instructing teachers "how to behave in the classroom."

The Big Kahunas of voice-in-your-head coaching is a company called CT3 (The Center for Transformative Teacher Training). CT3 has two co-founders. Co-founder Kristyn Klei Borrero is also CEO. Borrero did at least start out with an education degree from Miami (1995). Borrero was a principal at age 27 and running turnaround charter schools in Oakland and Palo Alto, California. She was also a honcho at Aspire charters in California, the charter chain set up by Don Shalvey (Gates Foundation) and Reed "Elected School Boards Suck" Hastings (Netflix). Aspire is also in the Build Your Own Teachers business.

The other co-founder's name is familiar to most teachers Of A Certain Age. Lee Canter made a name for himself on the professional development circuit with Assertive Discipline, an approach based on taking control of your classroom. But for CT3 Cantor has also developed the No-Nonsense Nurturer program and the Real-Time Coaching model. Both NNN and RTC are registered trademarks, because there's no point in repackaging well-worn materials with a little twist unless you can call it proprietary information.

CT3 was focused on micromanaging teachers to implement CT3's ideas about how a teacher is supposed to teach (here's an account from a coach learning the coaching biz). That gets us to the heart of why bug-eared coaching is a bad idea. When I have "coached" student teachers, I've always been crystal clear about one thing, and they all get this same speech-- "I'm not here to get you to teach like me. You have to figure out how to teach like you."  Teaching is highly personal, and if you pursue it as a career, you will be immersed in it your whole life. That makes it far too exhausting to teach as anyone other than your own authentic self.  Teaching is also a job of relationship, and the first rule of relationships is that you have to show up, which means the authentic you and not some part your trying to act out to placate the voices in your head.

Are there aspects of teaching that are universal, or rough corners of your authentic self that need to be knocked off before you take over a classroom? Sure. And bug-eared coaching fans say that the instant real-time correction is good because it keeps proto-teachers from practicing something the wrong way. I get their point, but I disagree. Nothing drives home a lesson about "Do not do that" better than a bad student reaction. There's no use in steering a newby away from a baddish idea so that she can later wonder, "Ah, how bad could that have been."

Of course, much of this micro-managing is not about avoiding bad classroom outcomes as much as it's about forcing teachers to conform to the proscribed model of the charter or public school administrator involved. (Mostly, it's charters. Time after time, the happy talk article about "Coaching is so great because it helps us get teachers to do exactly what we want them to" is from a charter school.)  Here's my two cents of advice for any young teacher who finds herself in a school with bosses who want to tell her exactly, precisely how to do her job-- get out. Get out now. 

Does it work? Well, we don't really have a definition of "works," do we. The EdWeek piece says a "growing body of evidence" says yes-- but then it links to the 2011 article which is heavy on "this is what we do" and tenuously light on "here's the evidence." I'm not going to say that I can't ever imagine any situation or teachers for whom it could work, used in certain ways. But I will say that it seems like a terrible idea, that it is often found in conjunction with truly terrible ideas about how to teach (No Nonsense Nurturing deserves its own extended rant), that it is dehumanizing and demeaning and that there are far better ways to help someone perfect their craft. Sit in their classroom, like a real person. Watch them, like a real person. And after the lesson is over, have a conversation with them, like a real person. Because of course when the voice is chirping in your ear, there is no opportunity for conversation or discussion, no chance for the teacher to say "But here was my thinking..." or "But I really wanted to..." Ear-bug coaching is dictation, boss to plebe, not a conversation of equal human professionals. Proponents are going to say, "And that's why we recommend a follow-up conference between teacher and coach afterwards," and I'm going to say, "Just have that conference and skip the remote control ear bossing part." 

There are many bad ideas that won't die stomping around the education space. This is not one of the baddest or biggest, but it's definitely due to be done. 

ICYMI: Actually Nice Out Edition (3/10)

Here's an assortment of goodies to read from last week. I know I say this all the time, but it takes readers to make a piece of writing spread. So always share what you think needs to be shared. Everyone can amplify the important voices, and these days that is super-important.

Winning At Any Cost  

Arkansas gives prize money to its top schools. How far did the charter Haas Hall Academy go to stay on top? Too far, by quite a bit. This is a pretty appalling story.

Cybercharters Widespread Reports of Trouble

This is not exactly a new resource, but I discovered it for the first time this week and it deserves a bookmark. EdWeek has collected numerous reports, sorted state by state, of cybercharter problems.

People Who Regulate Charters Make Millions From Them

This time we go to Utah, where a television news department has discovered that lawmakers writing charter regulations also have a financial stake in the charter industry.

Diverting Funds From Public Schools Hurts The Community

An op-ed in the Palm Beach Post argues that Florida's choice programs are not good for public education.

Lies You Have Been Told About Education Technology

A good set of rebuttals for the "Oh, but you must" crowd.

Strange Things Happening in Newark

In Newark, the state is losing control of the local school system, leading to an assortment of odd other shenanigans. Bob Braun is covering it all.

Jonathan Sackler’s Bouncer Foundation: Opioid-Funded Ed Reform

The same family that brought us the opioid problem is also working on charters. The indispensable Mercedes Schneider has been working it all out, and she shows her work.

The Bible Bill

Oh, Florida. A new bill proposes Bible courses in every school. One teacher imagines how the course might not live up to its sponsor's hopes.

What Do Americans Think Schooling Is Supposed To Do?   

We could simplify this is you just promised to read Nancy Flanagan every week.

Arizona Charter Parents Have Nowhere To Turn  

What can you do when you have objections to how your child's charter school is run? Nothing at all.

TX: Charters Don't Want To Serve All Students

The  charter school pitch often focuses on the idea that all students deserve choices, that families should be able to explore options.

Here's the CEO of KIPP Texas, speaking about the big Texas KIPP merger:

We realized our organizations wanted to improve student success across the state and we wanted to create an environment to serve more KIPPsters.

And here's Starlee Coleman, CEO of the Texas Charter School Association (as well as co-founder of SchoolForward, a choice PR firm; policy advisor at the State Policy Network; VP of Communications, National Alliance for Public [sic] Charter Schools; and various high-level positions with the Goldwater Institute), just last fall:

Don’t you deserve the chance to explore a variety of options, just like you have when making other decisions that impact your family’s future?

It turns out that when Coleman says "you," she doesn't actually mean "you everybody." Only certain select "you."

Here she is earlier this week, arguing against a "bad idea" that has "taken root" in the legislature. What is the bad idea? What is she railing against as a threat to charter schools in Texas?

A proposal that charter schools should have to accept all students.

Charter schools in Texas have some pretty cushy deals. For instance, in Austin, charters actually get $1740 more per students than the public system. And charters also have a fun item in Texas law-- they do not have to accept any student who has a record of disciplinary issues.

To read Coleman's piece, one would think we're talking about young felons with a rap sheet a mile long. The restriction is there, she says, because charters don't get the money needed to create special facilities to handle "violent students" (she uses the word "violent" four times in her short op-ed). She wants you to know that 76,000 public school students were in trouble for criminal behavior last year. And if you aren't scared enough yet:

Aggravated robbery happened at 41 traditional public schools last year. It happened on zero charter campuses. "Indecency with a child" happened on 78 traditional public school campuses last year. It happened on zero charter campuses. Aggravated assault of a district employee happened on 53 traditional public school campuses last year. It happened on one charter campus. Gang violence: 95 traditional public school campuses, one charter campus. Guns: 168 traditional public school campuses, five charter campuses.

Is this an argument against the proposed law change, or a sales pitch for charter schools (send your chid here to be safe from Those Peoples' children). Probably both, but as the sponsor of the bill, Rep. Gina Hinojosa points out, it's not entirely accurate, either.

Many charter schools take advantage of state law that allows them to exclude students from enrollment because of any disciplinary history — even visits to the principal’s office. As a result, unlike our public schools, which are required to educate all kids, charter schools can exclude students. Many of the largest charter schools, such as Harmony, Uplift Education, Southwest Key (Promesa) and International Leadership, ask about student disciplinary history on their admission applications. Not only does this practice allow these charters to screen out students, it has a chilling effect on those who might apply.

So if your child has ever so much as been sent to the office for smirking or written up for gum chewing, the charter has a free pass to reject your student.

The ban on disciplinary issues is, really, kind of genius. It sounds reasonable (school safety, you know), but which students are over-represented in school discipline issues? Children of color and children with special needs-- and there's a study to show that's just as true in Texas. So Texas charters get a free pass to discriminate based on special needs and even race without having to say so out loud.

So Texas charters get more money to educate a cherry-picked student body, while the public school gets to educate the students that the charters reject with even less money to do the job. Some examples:

For example, in Austin, students in special education account for 8.3 percent of KIPP College Prep Charter's population. Just down the road at Webb Middle School, the special education population is 19.2 percent — more than double the KIPP number. In Houston, Worthing High, a school that has received media attention for overcoming state testing challenges, is located just six minutes from KIPP Sunnyside. Yet, Worthing's special education population is almost double that at KIPP Sunnyside.

Meanwhile, Coleman says that sure those violent young felons deserve a chance to turn their lives around, but for the safety of charter students, those violent young felons should stay in public schools that have the facilities to handle drug dealers and, presumably, gum chewers.

There's a big discussion to be had here, and God bless Hinojosa for forcing the legislature to have it. But there is also a big, clear, Texas-sized takeaway-- when Texas charters say that every family deserves a choice, that every child should have an opportunity to attend a charter, they are lying. They have no desire to open their door to all students and no intention of doing so unless forced to by law. In Texas (as elsewhere), school choice means that charter schools get to choose which students they want to serve. Whether this bill succeeds or fails, Hinojosa will have exposed Texas charters as the liars they are.