MO: Bipartisan Fight Against Charter Expansion

Rep. Rebecca Roeber (R) of Lee's Summit, Missouri has proposed a bill to expand charter reach; the state has basically confined charter schools to the Kansas City and St. Louis districts. But response to the bill has not been exactly a slam dunk.

The bill would allow charters to open in communities of greater than 30,000 people or an accredited-without-provisions school district. The feelings about the bill are tight enough that both sides were feeling cautiously optimistic.

Roeber is a former public teacher (and seventeen years in the classroom, not some TFA two-year temp). Her voting record is-- well, she tried to expand charters in 2017, voted against the authority of local government to set minimum wage, voted to keep language that says marriage is only between a man and a woman (but voted against closing the loophole that allows a sexual predator to avoid criminal charges by marrying their teenaged victims), and voted for Right-to-Work in the state. She appears to be married to Barefoot Rick, a well-known barefoot runner and Christian speaker. Nine days ago she was left in serious condition after the car she was driving crossed the center line and hit another head on.

Roeber's position on charters has been pretty simple:

This idea about how education works is not reflected by reality, and lots of Missourians know it. Editorials have suggested that charters need to work better before any expansion is considered. In fact, an encouraging number of folks get exactly why charter expansion is a bad idea. The head of the Missouri School Boards Association notes that school districts are governed by elected school board members who live in the district and pay taxes there. Charter schools should operate under the same regulations, he said. “They receive public dollars, but they are not accountable to taxpayers like traditional schools." He's not alone:

David Sciarra, executive director of the Education Law Center, a nonprofit think tank for school funding equity, said Missouri’s charter law is extremely weak and in urgent need of overhaul. He suggested that lawmakers appoint independent experts to conduct a thorough examination of the existing charter program.

“The state has to get it right,” he said.

Other legislators have tried to blunt some of the problems with the bill:

Sen. Lauren Arthur, D-Clay County, proposed an amendment Tuesday to allow voters at school board elections to “approve the operation of the charter school in the district.”

“We’re saying that a charter school opening in a school district will have an impact on that district, and if you’re someone that lives in that area ... I think there is a good reason for you to have some say on whether or not a charter school would open in your district,” Arthur said.

Another legislator tried to remove the open enrollment portion of the bill.

Then Tuesday of this week, the bill hit another roadblock-- an honest-to-goodness bipartisan filibuster. Sen. Doug Libla, R-Poplar Bluff, filibustered for over two hours Tuesday. He focused on the success rate of Missouri’s charter schools and the costs taxpayers would pay for failed charter schools. And he was joined by an assortment of legislators from both parties.

According to the Missouri Department of Education, only 67% of Missouri's charter schools have stayed open. For charter proponents this is, of course, a feature and not a bug-- the invisible hand of the market is supposed to be opening and shutting schools left and right, and that is supposed to be a good thing. Yet it leaves students hanging, sometimes mid-year, and it leaves taxpayers footing the bill for schools that don't even exist any more, like having to make payments on a car that your teenaged child wrapped around a tree and totaled.

Missouri's charters don't do a great job and cost taxpayers a bunch of money. Expansion under this bill would also involve stripping local voters and taxpayers of any voice in what happens with charters in their area.

At the moment the bill appears to still just sort of sitting there. It's a good reminder that education issues have ceased to be clearly GOP or Democratic-- the question is, do you support public education for all, or not? Missourians who care about public education and local control might want to call their elected representatives and voice an opinion here.

College Board's AP Rate Hike Backlash

The College Board, the company behind the dreaded SAT and popular AP courses has made changes to the registration for the AP exams. AP courses and the exams that go with them are supposed to provide students with a leg up on college applications. Though the changes, which amount to an increase in cost, were announced over a month ago, they now add to the conversation the nation is suddenly having about the college admissions process.

The new policy (to be implemented next school year) calls for students to register in November for the AP test. But in November, students are barely one quarter of the way through the AP course; they might not yet be certain they'll take the test in May. Additionally, AP tests are only accepted by certain schools; a sufficiently high score (as determined by the college) may be good for a credit, or simply serve as a placement test. However, AP credits are often not counted in the student's major. All this means that for a high school senior to accurately gauge the utility of an AP test, she needs to know what college she will attend and what her major will be. Many high school seniors will have none of that information in November. Yet under the new policy, the College Board will charge them a $40 late fee if they register after November, and a $40 cancellation fee if they register and then decide not to take the test.

This certainly looks like a financial windfall for the College Board, particularly when one considers that data collected from high school seniors in the fall would be a valuable commodity. And the move is generating plenty of controversy.

Jennifer Wander, a high school counselor in New Richmond, Wisconsin, has started a change.org petition in opposition to the changes "that will make things even more expensive and stressful for students, especially low-income students." Eight weeks ago it had 2,700 signatures; at this moment, there are over 116,000.

Also fueling opposition is a company called Total Registration, a company that offers school services to manage their registrations for a variety of exams, including the AP tests. And they have been aggressively circulating data that contradicts the rosy picture painted by the College Board.

In particular, the College Board says that when students register in the fall, they do better on the tests, and that it's "best practice" at many schools. There are several problems here. First is the confusion of correlation and causation; one would expect that students who are more confident about their own abilities would register in the fall and would achieve better scores. Next, the phrase "best practice" is a vague one--are these schools requiring fall registration, or simply recommending it. If it's the latter, then see my previous point. And, as Total Registration points out, if it's already common practice, why bother attaching fees to it.

Total Registration also took a look at numbers from a College Board pilot program for the new policy (data since removed from the College Board website) which shows that fall registration in fact increases the failure rate for low-income students. A College Board spokesperson has since responded to Inside Higher Ed, saying that "these false statements are a reckless and futile attempt to thwart the College Board's efforts to launch the new AP model" and that certain companies were looking after their own interests and not the concerns of students. And while it's true that Total Registration does have a dog in this fight, why doesn't the College Board simply show where the arguments are factually incorrect?

Instead of hard data, the College Board has leaned on fuzzier arguments, saying that students who register in the fall will be more "engaged" and "less likely to give up when faced with challenges." Is there is any evidence that engagement and grit lead to higher AP scores, the College Board doesn't offer it.

It's also curious that the cancellation fee and the late penalty are exactly the same. It's almost as if $40 was developed as a price point that the market could bear, and not as a response to the actual costs involved in accommodating a late registration or cancellation.

Then there's this exchange from the Inside Higher Ed article:

"The spokeswoman also denied that the College Board is making the changes to make money. Rather, she said, the College Board is producing many new AP materials to help students succeed."

This may seem like a non sequitur, but the College Board's argument is that producing the new materials will be so costly that they will actually "reduce operating income." One tries to imagine the meeting in which some College Board executive says, "Since we're going to be taking in this extra revenue, I think we should budget more than that for the test prep materials."

That seems like either a poor business decision or an unlikely one, and the College Board is a business. They maintain a not-for-profit status; however, in 2017 they made in excess of $200 million and are sitting on $1.1 billion in cash and investments. There's nothing evil or nefarious about making money, but it is problematic when the bottom line is placed ahead of the interests of students. AP courses have always maintained a delicate balance between college-style teaching and plain old test prep. If the College Board has, as it says, a desire to "boost the learning culture in AP classrooms," making the test loom larger hardly seems like the way to do it. And by adding to the cost of taking the test, the College Board runs the risk of being one more factor that gives an extra advantage to the children of wealthy families.

Updated from original post at Forbes

MT: Meat Widgets And Personalized Learning

In Montana, the connection between Personalized [sic] Learning and vocational training has been made pretty explicit.

There, some leaders are throwing support to PL not because it would be good for students or would solve educational problems, but because it would solve workforce development problems.

Solving workforce shortages one widget at a time.

State Rep. Llew Jones, R-Conrad, recently showed off one of the state's PL systems to fellow legislators:

“We know in the state we have a huge shortage in the workforce. We have a hole, both in meeting our workforce needs and in servicing our students,” Jones said. “We have about 12,000 kids graduate per year. About 7,000 of them go onto a four-year college — and we have good four year programs — but 5,000 are where? We can’t tell you. Schools can’t tell you.”

Ten-- count 'em, ten-- bills have been introduced to push the model across the state. Legislators are also "aiming to remove barriers in the public school system in order to encourage students to seek professional opportunities while they’re in school and to fill community worker needs."

This focus on "advanced opportunities" is a big part of the push, and the PL being emphasized here speaks very little about personalizing to the student's style or interests, and seems mostly focused on letting students set their own pace so that they can rip right through what passes for their education so they can get right out there and start being somebody's useful meat widget as soon as possible. This one of the worst versions of Personalized [sic] Learning-- a way to use a computer to speed a student through a checklist version of "education," because dammit those employers have jobs to fill right away.

I'm not going to pretend there isn't some careful balance to maintain here-- if your school consistently turns out students who are incapable of landing a job, that's not a good sign. But the primary focus of K-12 education should never, ever be vocational training. K-12 is about building skills, amassing knowledge, helping students become more themselves, more fully human in the world. Yes, being able to support yourself is part of that, but so is being a good citizen, a good voter and taxpayer, a good parent and partner, and just generally a person who's able to navigate the world outside of the workplace.

So statements like this one tend to make me nervous:

These bills aren’t just trying to encourage a re-structure of Montana's educational system, but they’re also attempting to fill a statewide labor shortage.

Students and schools do not exist to fill labor shortages. And if you told any parents from the ritzier part of town, "Oh, yes. Our school will do an excellent job of preparing Junior to fill our labor shortage," those parents would have Junior enrolled in a private school by the end of the day.

Oh, and computerized Personalized [sic] Learning is an excellent edutechnique because, Rep. Jones notes, the workman's tool of today is not a wrench, but a computer. So let's train those little meat widgets on computer and they'll be that much better-prepared for their future bosses!

This is Personalized [sic] Learning at its worst-- to mass produce workers like toaster as quickly as possible and in the process shrink education to a narrow, meager version of what a full education was supposed to be. Shame on the Montana legislators who plan to cheat their students this way.

Accountability Beyond the Bubble

Accountability has always been an educational buzzword, and the modern reformy era has put accountability on a high, if somewhat cockeyed pedestal. Testing? Not testing? Running test scores through models soaked in magic VAM sauce? Regular school visits, inspections and audits? Administrators and school boards that actually pay attention? A big fat stack of state and federal regulations and reports thereon? So many fun things are on the table these days.

But as with many reformy subjects, what's really being discussed is accountability for large, urban districts. Those districts face a unique set of challenges, all of which boil down to these districts just being too damn big.

That gets us models like "Filling out a bunch of paperwork that may or may not have any connection to reality" (spoiler alert-- it's "not") or "Creating and administering instruments that purport to measure something that is alleged to be a proxy for the thing we really want to measure" (spoiler alert-- it doesn't). This gets us highly politicized grandstanding as well as representative bodies that may or may not truly represent poor and powerless neighborhoods-- the very neighborhoods that need schools that have strong and responsive support.

There's a good accountability model you can find out here in rural spaces and small towns. It's the living in the community you serve model.

I taught in a small town for almost forty years; in fact, I taught at the same school from which I graduated. I live in the town, a smallish place with a steady drain on our population, but not many new folks moving into town. I cannot take a step without encountering a former classmate, student, student's parent, or student's offspring.

This has always meant a special level of accountability. If I assigned something that folks disagreed with, I could hear about it at church, in the grocery store, at a restaurant. My life in the classroom followed me immediately into the community. And I had steady long-term feedback; I knew that certain assignments were effective because students were talking to me about them ten years later. I knew that if I did it in my classroom, I should be prepared to explain it out in the world.

This is not always a comfortable model; a divorced male teacher can generate lots of stories in a small town, and when you're the president of a striking union, there is zero insulation between you and the taxpaying public. Not everyone can handle it; lots of teachers make it a point to live outside of the community where they won't have to run into students and faculty. I think that's a mistake. Many of our administrators over the past few decades have lived outside the district and it is bad for school-community relations.

A friend once told me that in management school he was told that company officials should live at least fifty miles away from the facility they supervise, so that they can make purely business decisions without thinking of their workers as, you know, real people. That strikes me as completely wrong for schools (well, businesses, too, but that's another conversation). A school should be tied to the community it serves; administrators and teachers should be familiar names and faces, just like local elected officials and community pillars. If your position is that you just want to do your job and go home, you are not someone I prefer to have teach my child. I want someone who's invested. There is no better guarantee of accountability than invested. After all-- that's the whole point of attaching high stakes to things like tests, so that teachers will feel invested in test scores. But an investment in numbers that's been forced on you is nothing like an investment in human beings and community that you make voluntarily because, well, you are a human being and you live in a community.

And if you're thinking this model is impossible for schools in big urban areas, look at this piece from a school administrator who, among other things, had her staff take regular walks through the neighborhood.

Yes, there are levels of accountability that this model might not manage. It won't fix everything and won't stop all the bad actors. But do not underestimate the power of having to stand face to face with the people whose lives your decisions effect, especially if these are people with whom you already share relationships and connections of community.

DeVos, Class Size, and the Reformistan Bubble

I almost feel sorry for Betsy DeVos. Her two big news breaks this week are not entirely her fault.

First, there's the Special Olympics fiasco. It appears that the budget office made the hugely unpopular cut, and DeVos stood by it like a good soldier, right until Donald Trump threw her under the bus and canceled the cuts (that were never going to get past Congress). But now DeVos is the one who gets to carry that policy albatross around her neck, right next to her grizzly-shooting merit badge, even though she did previously, in fact, give Special Olympics her own salary.

Okay, but that's the last time I'm going under that bus for you.

Then there's the business of students benefitting from higher class sizes. Make no mistake-- this was awful and stupid and just all-around bad (though by no means the worst thing to come out of her mouth at the hearings). But it's not really fair to hang this one on DeVos-- the idea of the super-teacher crammed into a room with a gazillion students has been on reformsters' preferred policy list for at least a decade.

I wrote about this almost exactly four years ago ("Super Sardinemasters: Paying More To Teach More"), then as now leaning on the work of Leonie Haimson at Class Size Matters.

The big class with a great teacher idea seems to have made its public mainstream debut in a 2010 Bill Gates speech to the CCSSO. Not surprisingly, Arne Duncan was shortly thereafter talking it up.

We spent billions of dollars to reduce class size,” Duncan told ABC’s Andrea Mitchell in 2011, when we could instead give teachers higher salaries in exchange for larger classrooms, thereby attracting much more talented teachers.

That was back in 2011, and as near as Haimson can tell, nobody ever actually tried to do it. Broad "graduate" (can you graduate from a fake superintendent training program?) John Covington was going to give it a try in Kansas City Schools, but instead resigned and went to Michigan to work for EAA which played with using computers as a way to shoehorn many many students into single classrooms.

I was writing back in 2015 because no less than Georgetown University's Edunomics Lab had put out a paper supporting this nonsense by Marguerite Roza and Amanda Warco. The paper was almost honest about the problem it was trying to solve-- how can you pay teachers more without raising your payroll costs? Easy peasy-- fire all your bad teachers and give their salaries, and their students, to your remaining super-teachers.

The hook from which any such proposal hangs is the assertion that great teaching matters more than small class size, but even in the Edunomics paper, that's a shaky hook indeed. The "research" cited includes "research" like a paper from the Fordham Institute and research that "modeled the effects"-- in other words, not actual research on the actual stuff we're talking about. The critical point it completely ignores is the degree to which great teaching depends on class size.

Edunomics also has to tap dance around preferences. Parents prefer smaller classes; that's unequivocally true, but Rozas and her co-author try to get past that by citing research that says parents would prefer a 27-student class with a great teacher to a 22-student class with a random  teacher. This ignores a great many things, not the least of which is that in many districts, a 27-student class would represent far smaller class-size than most teachers and students are currently dealing with.

There's also some useless research suggesting that a majority of teachers would rather have a $5K bonus than two fewer students in class. This research comes from Dan Goldhaber, Michael DeArmond and Scott Deburgomaster, “Teacher Attitudes About Compensation Reform: Implications for Reform Implementation,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Vol. 64, No. 3 (April 2011) and we could spend some time trying to evaluate its bona fides, but really, who cares? We aren't talking about two students-- we're talking about enough students to significantly cut the teaching staff. This is like trying to argue that because you like having your back scratched with a one of those little backscratchers, you would undoubtedly like to be impaled with a rake.

But Roza has made a career out of this. She went to work for the Gates Foundation back in 2010. She's been cranking out work for EducationNext, as well as turning up with CRPE and Harvard and FutureEd.

My point is this-- it is not unlikely that DeVos has, over her years in the reformster biz, encountered something passing itself off as research to support this idea. She is certainly not the first person to say it out loud.

Her doing so points to many things, in particular the reformistan bubble, which has been built from Day One without any actual educators inside it. Instead, the bubble is populated by rich people, people who want rich people's money, people who think they have great ideas about education, and even people who sincerely want to make education better. The bubble does not include people who can turn to an Arne Duncan or a Betsy DeVos or a Bill Gates and say, "Based on my years of experience in a classroom, I'd have to say that idea is ridiculous bullshit."

In fact, the bubble includes an entire buffer system that stands ready to reject anyone calling bullshit, primarily by dismissing all attempts to defend public education as simply a ploy by the unions to gather money and power.

There are a tiny handful of people within the bubble who will occasionally act as bullshit detectors, but they are not enough. The ed reform movement has gathered power and money and has set up a parallel education system even as it has managed to capture leadership roles within public education, but the ed reform movement still lacks what it has always lacked-- actual teachers and experienced educators who know what the hell they're talking about.

The shock and scandal and outrage is not that DeVos would offer up this class size bullshit on the Hill, but that she stands on top of a whole pile of educational amateurs who have been pushing this bullshit for at least a decade, despite the mountain of evidence and the actual teachers who speak against it. The biggest scandal is not that an agent of ed reform like DeVos would say something this dumb, but that she could be part of a larger machine that eats dumb for breakfast and then spits dumb back out for the rest of the day, for a decade, without ever listening to a dissenting voice. It's one thing to be ignorant, but to be willfully, deliberately stubbornly ignorant and to take pride in that ignorance, to actively preserve that ignorance like it's a precious flower and not a dried cow patty-- that's just inexcusable.

It's worth remembering that, with the exception of her stand on civil rights, there really isn't much going on with DeVos that would have disqualified her from the Obama-era USED leadership spot. If we focus strictly on her, we're letting a whole lot of people inside that bubble off the hook.

ICYMI: Snowy Relapse Edition (3/31)

The weather outside is, in fact, frightful. So here's a list of things to read inside today.

Teen Boys Ranked Their Female Classmates Based On Looks, And The Girls Weren't Having It

It's a great story, in part because it's about working the issue out, not just getting somebody in trouble.

Small District Reaps Big Profits With Chart Fees

There are a lot of things wrong with California's charter system; here's an explainer for one of them. Are you a small district with money problems? Become a popular charter authorizer and you can make a bundle.

The Digital Expansion of the Mind Gone Wrong

Daniel Willingham looks at three areas where technology was going to make education so much better-- and why none of them lived up to the hype.

Experts Call for an End To Online Preschool

Please.

NJ Tax Money Disappearing Into Charters

A look at charter fraud and waste in the Garden State.

Six School Voucher Myths

A quick debunking of some common voucher talking points.

Trump, DeVos. Special Olympics

The NYT breaks down the wheels within wheels of this massive cluster


Betsy DeVos Told Us Her Real Plan


All Special Olympics and class sizes, Nancy Bailey picks out the most concerning DeVosian quote that tells us what she wants to do.

The Single Most Telling Sentence

If Bailey tells us what DeVos wants to do, Valerie Strauss picks out the sentence that explains why she wants to do it. This is probably my top DeVos hot take of the week.

School Freedom Plans Aren't About Schools Or Education

Leon Galis with a pretty good explanation of why some reformsters and public ed defenders don't seem to be on the same planet.

A Parkland Teacher Speaks Out   

One of the most shameful failures of any school system-- public, private or charter. A teacher talks about the follow-up failure after the murders. I'm sorry I have to send you to the 74 to read this, but schools have to do better.

Don't Cry Over the Death of Arizona's Charter Reform Bill. It Was a Joke.

Well, that's disappointing.  

Charter Schools Are Closing, But DeVos Wants More  

USA Today ran this piece, and it doesn't even include a quote from Mike Petrilli.

How One Couple Made Charter Millions

If you want a specific example of how California's lax charter oversight allows fraud, waste and profiteering, here's a perfect example from the LA Times.

Is CTE Good News Or Bad News

In the last two decades of education reform, a great deal of emphasis has been put on sending high school graduates to college. President Obama in his 2009 State of the Union address proclaimed that by 2020 America would "once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world" (though he hedged that a bit by later saying simply that everyone would need some kind of post high school education.) We've repeatedly used college enrollment and completion as a measure of K-12 success. While the modern reform movement paid lip service to "college and career," policies have always suggested that college is the superior part of that team.

Now it is finally occurring to some folks that A) college is not necessarily the best choice for all students and B) the world needs people who do what Mike Rowe always called the jobs "that make civilized life possible for the rest of us." Done well, new studies show, it can boost both academics and wages for students. It might even help solve the mystery of the missing non-college educated male workers. And so Career and Technical Education (CTE) is coming back into its own.

This movement does not come without some concerns. Mishandled CTE can end up replacing a full education with simple vocational training, reducing public education to a provider of free meat widgets for selected employers, but opening up a limited future for the students who receive the narrow education. CTE programs are most effective when schools partner with relevant industries, but that partnership can't be one-sided, with schools subordinated to HR departments. Badly mishandled CTE can also become a dumping ground for "problem" students, a type of education that some students are encouraged to "settle for" by adults who have decided that the student just isn't smart enough or good enough for college education.

In short, CTE reflects our own culture's conflicted feelings about blue collar workers. On the one hand, we venerate the idea of hard work and getting one's hands dirty during an honest day's work. On the other hand, we tend to assume that someone sitting behind a desk making a six figure income must have some stellar qualities that the hard-working blue collar guy does not.

CTE as a dumping ground for system-rejected students where they can be fashioned into fodder for dead-end employers is a bad, bad idea. Fortunately, because CTE is not a new idea, there are many schools that can show how to do it properly.

I had the good fortune to work in a district that was part of a seven-district consortium operating a CTE school (called vocational-technical for many years, now called a Technology Center) that has been in business for around 50 years. Many of my students over the years attended that school, and it served them well. Here are some of the ways that school does CTE right.

Students attend the Tech Center for half a day; the other half of the day they attend their "home" school. This insures that in addition to the technical education they receive at their shop, they get the same core of academics that all our students study. They don't have to give up their full high school education to get their technical training.

The Tech Center is not a dumping ground. In fact, students who don't maintain good academic standing at their home school lose the privilege of attending at the Tech Center.

The Tech Center is staffed by people who really know their fields, and so the programs have a good reputation for providing students who are well-trained not just in the particulars of their field, but in the work ethics of them. And the learning is hands on. The construction students build a house. The auto body students work on cars that have been brought in for service. Welding students work toward their certification. Students graduate from the program educated and employable.

The experience is not seamless. Within the school, there are people who look down on tech students just as their are people in the world who look down on blue collar workers. And tech students themselves have to navigate the contrasts between two different systems; in the morning, a student may be trusted to operate heavy machinery outdoors, and in the afternoon, that same student has to sit in a desk indoors and ask permission to pee.

But it's a system that by and large works and serves students and employers well. It's not cheap, and it's not easy to set up. It is certainly not setting up a "vocational ed" room in some back hall where students are sent when the school doesn't want to deal with them any more. If CTE is coming to your school district, it could be good news or bad. The trick, as with many education programs, is to look at the specifics and make sure that the program is going to be done right.

Originally posted at Forbes (where it was picked up by Mike Rowe, and don't think that didn't make my day.)