PA: More Charter Shenanigans in Harrisburg

On May 7, a group of four bills related to charter schools suddenly popped up, referred to the House education committee in the state capitol. Surprise! Let's take a look:

HB 355: 

This bill is supposed to strengthen the "ethical requirements" for charter schools (including cybers). It sets requirements for annual independent financial audits and puts limits on how much money charters can hold in unassigned fund balances (just parked in the bank); public schools also have a limit on fund balances. And there are new requirements for some financial transparency between the charter and the local district.

There are also some advertising limits. For instance, charters can no longer advertise themselves as "free" but must acknowledge that they are paid with taxpayer dollars. There is some language tightening rules  on self-dealing and nepotism and financial disclosures for charter bosses.

Other than a section that deliberately blurs the line between public and charter schools, this is a pretty good bill.

HB 356:

This bill focuses on facilities. It gives charters the right of first refusal for purchase or lease of any unused district facilities. It requires public schools to provide testing locations for charters. And  charters can use religious facilities if they keep the religious stuff covered up or out of sight.

It also allows charters to expand to multiple locations within the authorizing district-- this used to require district approval, but would no longer do so.

HB 357:

This bill is intended to "improve" the chartering process by creating a standard charter application form and "improving" the student enrollment process. It also gives families with multiple students in the same cyber charter to opt out of having multiple computers (because cybers need one more way to make a few more bucks).

The bill lays out some of the specifics that the charter application form should include-- things like how the trustees will be selected and an organizational chart for the school and evidence that the management company has done some work before. But it also makes it clear that local school districts may not fiddle with, alter, or go beyond the state's official form, thereby stripping them of a b it more power over local education and taxation.

And the bill includes a requirement for a standard student application.  The unified application form is usually a red flag.

HB 358:

This bill would allow charters to offer dual enrollment with any college willing to enter into such a deal.

Each of the bills has a group of co-sponsors, though the proposer of record is different for each one. Despite the different names on each of the bills, each bill's memo concludes with this same language:

The reforms embodied in my legislation is part of a legislative package of four bills critical to improving and strengthening our laws related to charter schools, which was groundbreaking upon its enactment in 1997 but has become outdated over time. We must make these reforms now in order to maintain charter, regional charter and cyber charter schools as a strong, quality school choice option for the Commonwealth's children and families.

If that sounds odd, it's because whoever wrote this butchered subject-verb agreement. But don't let that distract you from the assumption that charters are strong, quality schools. Cyber charters in particular are expensive failures, stripping districts of money while producing lousy results.

HB 355 provides some useful reform. The other three bills are an attempt to expand the reach of charters in Pennsylvania.

If you are in PA, you need to speak up-- and quickly. The House education committee will be considering these bills on Monday, 13. Did I mention that they only just turned up three days ago?  So check out the list of members and shoot off an email or even a phone call before Monday 11:30 AM.

Update: All four bills passed the committee vote.

What She Taught Me

I've written about Miss Gause before. She was my elementary school vocal music teacher, and she had a critical effect on me in two major ways.

First, she was fairly relentless in confronting the Monotone Boys I'm-Too-Cool-To-Sing Chorus in the back of the room. She harangued us into listening to pitches and more or less matching them. Now, in my school students took a listening aptitude test in fourth and fifth grade to determine if we were eligible to study an instrument. I flunked in fourth grade and passed in fifth; the difference was Miss Gause. It is not humanly possible to imagine what my life would have been like if I hadn't played an instrument.

Second, she paddled me (it was the sixties). I was in the back of the room performing what I was certain was a hilarious imitation of her conducting technique. She failed to grasp my comic genius, and I received a fairly fierce paddling, there, in front of the class, so that it was painful, and embarrassing, plus I had to keep from showing how much it hurt.

The paddling itself was not terribly influential. But what stuck with me was what came next, which was nothing. She didn't treat me any worse because i had screwed up. I was not forever after branded a Bad Kid. I misbehaved, I received a consequence, and then the incident was over and done. For me, it was the beginning of understanding that "I disagree with you" or "I think you've done wrong" were not synonymous with "I hate you" or "You are a terrible human being."

I carried that into my classroom, and always tried to keep "No, that's wrong" and "I need you to knock that off right now" separate from "You suck" or "I want you to get off the planet." I was pretty explicit about it, too, because I wanted students to be able to hear the difference between assessing the quality of a piece of writing and judging someone's right to take up space on the planet. I think the world would be a better place if we could all approach disagreement without considering it a referendum on a person's right to exist.

So in some fairly important ways, I am who I am because of Miss Gause. And, in retrospect, I think she offers another important lesson of Teacher Appreciation Week.

We all know versions of the Very Heartwarming Story of a Very Special Teacher, the teacher who finds a special connection with a student or sees something in that student that she nourishes and grows, the teacher who goes the extra mile to create a transformative bond with a student.

But I have to tell you this about Miss Gause-- she was not that teacher. We had no special bond. I didn't stay in touch when I went to high school. She didn't send me little notes. While I was in her class, she did her job-- I don't think any extra miles were involved. And yet.

As a teacher, it's easy to measure yourself against those heroic super teachers, like the awesome teachers on tv (who apparently only teach one class a day) who touch hearts and lift lives and just generally make us feel as if we're not quite up to that super standard. And yet.

It's one of the oddities of teaching. Every day that you step into a classroom, something you say or do will have a huge effect on some student. But you will never know ahead of time what it is you're going to do. You may not even recognize it when it's happening; retirement shook loose a lot of old students with "That one time you said X really affected me" stories, and in many cases, I had absolutely no memory of that really important moment that they remember.

If you are teaching, you are literally accomplishing more than you know. Your challenge is to make every moment of every day count. There are certainly moments of high drama and shattering success in teaching, but there is also a steady dailiness to the work that comes with a focus on trees while the forest fades into the background. But if you are a teacher, you are planting that forest, whether you can see its full shape or not. Know that what you do changes things.

Years and years later, I let Miss Gause know some of what she had done for me. If you're a teacher, I hope that this week someone does the same for you. And I hope that everyone does the same for a teacher who mattered.

Knewton, A Big Name in Big Data, Bites The Dust

Adaptive learning. Computer-enhanced psychometrics. Personalized learning via computer. Knewton was going to do it all. Now it's being sold for parts.

Knewton started in 2008, launched by Jose Ferreira. By 2012, Ferreira led the ed tech pack in overpromising that sounded both improbable and creepy. In a Forbes interview piece, Ferreira described Knewton as "what could become the world’s most valuable repository of the ways people learn." Knewton could make this claim because it "builds its software into online classes that watch students’ every move: scores, speed, accuracy, delays, keystrokes, click-streams and drop-offs." How does this work?

Students go at their own pace, and the software continuously adapts to challenge and cajole them to learn based on their individual learning style. As individual students are correlated to the behaviors of thousands of other students, Knewton can make between 5 million and 10 million refinements to its data model every day.

This guy.

You will be unsurprised to learn that founder/CEO Ferreira has no real background in education. He has a BA from Carleton College and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He worked for Kaplan for a few years, then went into the money biz, first as a derivatives trader for Goldman Sachs and later working venture capital for Draper Atlantic. In between he was strategist for the John Kerry campaign; that may be because he's John Kerry's nephew. From venture capital, it was a quick step to Knewton.

It raises one question that I don't have an answer for. Ferreira obviously had nothing to do with the actual creation of the software that was Knewton's heart and soul. Whose work was Knewton? A puzzle for another day.

Ferreira had a gift for the colorful claim. In the Forbes article, we find the suggestion that "it will know what kids will get on the SAT, so they won’t have to take it." When he appeared at the White House's 2012 Datapalooza (the real name of a real thing), he claimed that Knewton would be able to tell students what they should eat for breakfast in order to get a good test score that day. In 2015, he told NPR, "We think of it like a robot tutor in the sky that can semi-read your mind and figure out what your strengths and weaknesses are, down to the percentile." Their adaptive learning technology was going to end up in "every classroom in the country." It would customize educational content "down to the atomic concept level" and would not just be personalized, but "hyper-personalized."

The Knewton story is the story of yet another "innovative,"  "game-changing," "trailblazing," education technodisruptor that was given tons of breathless press-- it was, I kid you not, going to "solve the global education crisis." At Davos, Knewton was going to "take education by storm." Not a single writer or reporter paused for even a second to ask if this weren't all a bunch of bullshit.  (Michael Feldstein caused an online uproar by saying re the NPR piece that Ferreira was selling snake oil.) And the investors lined up to throw money at Knewton. From 2012:

In October Knewton raised $33 million from Pearson and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, reportedly at a valuation north of $150 million. The company had already raised $21 million from venture firms such as Accel Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners and First Mark. Says Thiel, an impassioned advocate for shaking up the college model: “We like companies that have breakthrough technologies but not disruptive technologies, which typically don’t work. Knewton tries to make the existing system better with a very powerful tool.”

Knewton partnered with several publishers, most notably the behemoth Pearson, once heavily committed to a digital ocean of learning, but more recently backing away from that sea.

People who actually know education have been unconvinced all along by thee over-promising and underperforming of Big Data and adaptive learning (when you have a few minutes, go ahead and read everything that Audrey Watters ever wrote).  But it has taken a while for thee wind to leave Knewton's sails.

Knewton tried a little side step and set aside its dreams of Big Brothering the world to become a player in higher education. In 2016, Ferreira stepped down, and the new focus became selling digital courseware to the higher ed market. That, apparently, has not worked out for them. The purchase price has not been divulged, but analysts think it's far below the $180 million in venture capital sunk into the company.

So another big time adaptive learning personalized learning company has promised big and failed to deliver.

As for Ferreira, don't worry. After he was out the door at Knewton, he was on to another start-up. He co-founded BakPax with two other guys who have no background in education. Did Ferreira learn anything about making audacious promises you can't back up? Well, here's what BakPax says it's about:

Bakpax reads handwriting and grades assignments for you. It gives you deeper insight into class performance and gives your students immediate feedback.

Sigh. You give the BackPax server your answer key, then you-- or your students-- take a picture of student papers with your phone and BakPax grades it. Right now it's free. At least, I guess, it doesn't pretend it can grade essays. In the meantime, other purveyors of personalized [sic] adaptive data mining learning stuff could learn a lesson from all this-- something about trying to stage an education revolution when you mostly just know about investing and data. They could learn a lesson. I'm betting they won 't.

Maine Dumps Test-Centered Teacher Evaluation

Maine has broken with the status quo of test-centered accountability for teachers.

Beginning with No Child Left Behind, public schools have committed to test-centered accountability, using student results on a single standardized math and reading test to drive assessment of districts, schools and ultimately teachers. For years, the prevailing definition of a good teacher in this country has been one whose students score well on that standardized test.

The problems with this approach are legion. Schools have narrowed their focus and their curriculum to focus on tested subjects. States have developed bizarre assessment systems in which teachers of non-tested subjects might be evaluated based on the test scores of students they never taught. Nor has any convincing evidence ever emerged that raising a student's test scores improves her lot later in life. After a generation, the promised improvement in US education that test-centered accountability was supposed to drive simply hasn't arrived; NAEP scores ("the nation's report card") have not budged significantly in all this time, nor have colleges announced that their freshman classes are now the best they've ever seen. Using standardized test scores to evaluate teachers has not fixed anything, and it has made things worse in many cases by pushing schools to focus on test taking skills instead of a broad and deep education for all students.

Now Maine has taken a step away from this with LD 92 (to see the full affect, look also at the amendments). The bill removes any requirement to base teacher evaluation on test results. Maybe even more importantly, it requires districts to form a committee to regularly review and revise their evaluation process. This may seem like common sense, but teacher evaluation systems are historically taken out of the box and used without any subsequent discussion of how well they are actually working.

Maine's law also requires that a majority of that committee be teachers. Some critics may argue that giving teachers a voice in teacher oversight is a mistake, but I'd argue that aside from parents and students, nobody has a greater interest in improving a struggling teacher than the other teachers who have to work with her.

Teacher evaluation has never been easy. All good teachers do not look the same, and no good teachers are good for all students. Any system must be flexible and nuanced, but the overwhelming pressure exerted by everyone from overworked principals to bureaucrats who want easily-crunched data is for a system that is a simple cut-and-dried checklist. Madeline Hunter and Charlotte Danielson are two big names in teacher instruction models; their work has been debated and argued, but both have been surprised to find it reduced to simple evaluation checklists that have frustrated and angered teachers over the years.

And like all evaluation, teacher evaluation must have a specific purpose. Do you want to find weak teachers and help them get better, or do you want to identify them so you can fire them? Do you want to identify areas of improvement for the entire staff? Do you want to be able to compare teachers within a building, within a system, or within a state? Do you want to identify your exemplary teachers in order to reward them, or in order to enlist them as trainers? Each of these answers changes how the evaluation system is set up, and how teachers will react to it.

All of this means that much of the hard work lies ahead for Maine. That's okay. When challenged on the toxic results and general ineffectiveness of test-centered accountability, testocrats often reply, "Well, then, what do you want to do instead." That's not a legitimate answer. If I collapse on the sidewalk and someone runs up with a chainsaw and yells, "Step aside. I'm going to cut off his legs!" I don't need to have a better treatment to propose in order to know that sidewalk chainsaw amputation should not be happening. Every state should understand that test-centered teacher evaluation is not helpful, actually harmful, and should not be happening. Finding an alternative will not be easy, but getting rid of the toxic, ineffective, test-centered method is a necessary first step. Let the guy with the chainsaw step aside so that a real doctor can get through.

Originally posted at Forbes    

Jeanne Allen's Charter Murder Mystery

Nobody represents the angry anti-public school side of reform better than Jeanne Allen. She's the founder, president, and chief spokesperson for the Center for Education reform. She graduated from Dickerson with a degree in political science, then moved on to study political philosophy at the Catholic University of America. She was the "youngest political appointee to serve at the pleasure of the president, Ronald Reagan, at the US Department of Education, then became the ed policy chief at the Heritage Foundation." She earned an Educational Entrepreneurship masters at University of Pennsylvania in a program that offers what I once called "a degree in soulless profiteering." She announced her intention to step out of the president role in 2013, but no successor was named and apparently, she stayed right in place.

CER is packed with charter groups, charter operators, and investor groups from their board to the advisors to their contributors. Oddly enough, the smallest group is The Team. 

Allen is an expert lobbyist and advocate. She knows politics and business. She bills herself as "one of the nation’s most accomplished and relentless advocates for education reform, and a recognized expert, speaker and author in the field." She has no background or experience in actual educating. But she does know how to brand herself. If you want to see her in action, you can watch this 2012 clip, but chances are that by the time she says, "You can't have parent power and have teacher union power" and says "teacher union" with the same tone of voice one would use for "rotting cockroach carcasses," you will want to say unkind things to her. 

She's pretty intensely committed. It took her about fifteen minutes to get over her initial antipathy toward the Trump administration, and her analysis of the GOP's 2018 losses was that they weren't reform enough. She went to bat for cyber charters when even folks in the charter sector were slamming them. And she called for a full Reagan on the LAUSD teacher strike earlier this year-- just fire 'em all. And with all that, she can be mighty touchy; when the documentary Backpack Full of Cash had the audacity to quote her accurately, she was most put out.

Allen's voice turns up many places; this week, she's in the pages of the Post and Courier of South Carolina posing a bit of a murder mystery-- Who is killing charter schools? And the answer is-- well, it's not clear what the answer is, actually.

She's jumping off from the teacher walkouts in South Carolina last week, but she really wants us to understand that the teachers union is not the murderer-- even though, in her telling, they really really want everyone to believe that they are that powerful. Not for the first time, it occurs to me that Allen may not love school reform half as much as she hates teachers and their unions. But here's the start of her detective work:

Earlier in the year, teachers went on strike in Los Angeles, Denver, West Virginia and other areas. The teachers’ narratives say they strike for higher pay and lower class sizes, winning victories for children against all odds.

But the real story isn’t so pretty in many places: It’s a tale of politicians working to kill charter schools, sacrifice opportunity for their students and hurt children’s education, just as they’ve done for decades.

As Exhibit A, she is going to offer her own unique retelling of the West Virginia strike. She says that teachers last year protested salaries and health care costs, "this year they protested a bill that would allow the first charter schools to open in the state." That is correct in the same sense that if I send back a salad that comes topped with raw liver and rancid cheese, I am sending back a dish that contained lettuce. West Virginia teachers struck for five demands, including the end of certain union-busting bills and no charter expansion. A year later, the legislature placed a bet that teachers wanted their raises and health care badly enough to give in on a radical expansion of choice ideas-- not just charters, but super vouchers. They lost the bet. Allen says that union officials crowed about the victory, but it's worth remembering that the West Virginia strike was a wildcat strike.

But Allen's point is that teachers did not murder charters in West Virginia, no matter how much they want to take credit. No, she says, the bill was never going to pass. The GOP has long had control, but "the powers that be in the Mountain State just have no interest in creating educational opportunities for the students of their state."

Here's where Allen's detecting runs into trouble-- every good murder mystery fan knows we need to establish opportunity and motive. But Allen's singular vision is so tunnel bound that she can never imagine any reason for people to disagree with her except that they are evil and stupid. If I were someone who wanted to sell charters to WV, and they weren't selling, I might ask why not, find out the concerns, try to address them. Could it be that in a largely rural not-very-wealthy state, folks are worried about the impact of charters on local school budgets? Could it be that they've seen nothing happening in nearby charter-friendly states to make them say, "Yeah, that looks like a good thing to do."

But Allen's not interested in digging. WV test scores are low. Unions and politicians agree, for some reason, that nothing needs to change. And yet there have been two strikes over this stuff-- what, did the union and legislature get together and say, "Let's just stage a whole strike thing to throw Jeanne Allen off the scent"?

"Teachers unions take credit for killing charter schools like politicians take credit for grain growing," says Allen, which means that, I guess, the death of charter schools is a normal, natural process? Unions, she says, want to pretend to be powerful so they can keep deluding their dues-paying members, because desperation post-Janus and fear of parents hungry for change, which means, I guess, that the change-hungry parents in WV don't vote?

We're still hunting for a motive and a murderer. Politicians, she says, are always happy to kill innovative education programs and point the finger at organized labor. Are they? Really? Politicians just sit there and say, "Yeah, that looks like an education innovation, so I say kill it right away." Why do they do this?

But those teachers (who didn't murder the charters, but let's talk about why they want to murder charters) strike despite the research Allen's group has collected showing that charter schools boost math proficiency. No link to that research, nor the research claiming that Oakland charters are magical. It probably wasn't either of these two, but let's get serious-- nobody at this stage of the game can seriously claim that there's research showing a clear, consistent, universal charter advantage.

Oh, and also, those teachers are hurting kids by striking because strikes have a "proven negative impact" on education. So does the long-term degradation of the public education system.

So you have to keep an eye on those unions, who are in no way powerful enough to kill charters, but boy do they wish they could, so watch them, and learn from the union in West Virginia even though-- twist!!-- there is no teachers union in South Carolina. Still, now that advocates (polite term for lobbyists) are pushing for charters and choice, "some intrenched interests are pushing back-- both in union halls and state capitols nationwide." Except not in South Carolina, where she just told us there are no unions and so, presumably, no union halls.

So who is killing charter schools? Definitely not the teachers. Probably the politicians, except we haven't come up with a single idea about what their motive would be, and since virtually every reform goal has been achieved politically over the last twenty years-- well, of Common Core, charters, or vouchers, name a single reform policy that was pushed by an actual grass roots popular demand. All are the result of "advocates" and stacks of "advocacy bucks" and well-connected corporate backers and, in places like Florida, self-serving politicians.

Who is killing charter schools? Jeanne Allen has no idea. It's certainly not the drip-drip-drip of daily news about charter failure, fraud or waste. It's certainly not the growing number of local public school districts that are learning about how many resources they lose to charters, or the taxpayers who discover that choice policies also rob them of their voice. It's certainly not the growing number of people who believed the charter hype and have now learned better. It couldn't have anything to do with people who have a serious and sincere concern about education in this country who disagree with Jeanne Allen about the virtues of choice and charters.

No, it must be some dark conspiracy. The solution. in Jeanne Allen's world, is for all the freedom loving parents to rise up and demand elected representatives who bring charters to life. But if she can't solve a simple murder mystery, I'm not sure how she'll ever figure out what happened to the vast groundswell of charter and choice support that still hasn't arrived.



 

The Problem With Tax Credit Scholarships

The classic talking point for tax credit scholarships (yet another type of voucher) is that they don't actually take money away from public education. This is technically correct because the money never actually gets into the government's hands; instead of paying taxes, the contributor hands the money to their favorite charter or private school and gets credit for paying taxes.

So does that take money away from education? Of course.

Let's imagine a neighborhood in North Egg with ten households. Out of those households, there are five children who spend every Saturday cleaning up the neighborhood. The families, many of whom include folks who work on Saturday, decide that the kids need something to eat for lunch, so the ten households create a Saturday Lunch Fund, and every family commits to chip in two bucks to the fund. Mrs. McSam handles the collecting of the money, and uses it to buy the workers a couple of pizza, some drinks, and a few extras to go with.

This system works for a while. Some Saturdays the pizza's not very good, and sometimes the dessert item is some pretty good ice cream and other times it's some kind of packaged processed junk. But for the most part, the basic needs of the workers are met.

Then one of the families says, "We actually take our nephew from a South Egg out to lunch every Saturday. Could you just count the money we spend on him toward our contribution for the Saturday Lunch Fund?"

"I don't see why not," says Mrs. McSam. "It's not like you're taking money out of the fund."

Two other families say, "We don't actually have any kids. But we do buy organic kelp for our church youth group snacks on Sunday. Can we just count that toward our Saturday Lunch Fund contribution?"

"I don't see why not," says Mrs. McSam. "It's not like you're taking money out of the fund."

Two other families say, "Pizza is so unhealthy. We are giving money to support an  all-vegan food truck that operates over in Southeast Egg. Please count that as our contribution to the Saturday Lunch Fund."

"I don't see why not," says Mrs. McSam. "It's not like you're taking money out of the fund."

One of the parents says, "We're actually going to start taking Junior to TGI Fridays on Saturday during her break. Just count that toward our contribution. It's only fair. And of course any of the other parents who want to spend their two dollars for a meal for their kid at TGI Fridays can do so, too." (Spoiler alert: You can't get a two dollar meal at TGI Fridays).

"I don't see why not," says Mrs. McSam. "It's not like you're taking money out of the fund."

Says another household, "We think breakfast is the most important meal of the day, so we'd like to buy a box of cereal and have that count for our contribution to the Saturday Lunch Fund. "

"I don't see why not," says Mrs. McSam. "It's not like you're taking money out of the fund."

At this point, only three households are actually paying into the fund, which has a whopping six dollars available every Saturday to buy lunch for the kids. Nobody ever took a cent out of the fund, but now getting a decent lunch for the workers means either raising everyone's contribution, which will have limited usefulness as long as they can have their credits. The alternative is a to try to meet the workers' needs with a meager supply of cheap lunch supplies.

So when somebody (like, say, the Secretary of Education) tried to argue that this type of voucher doesn't take anything away from public education, understand that they are, at best, twisting the truth or, at worst, lying.

ICYMI: May Day Edition (5/5)

Read, read, read. Share, share, share.

It's Not Like You Weren't Warned 

Dad Gone Wild gives us a look on the ground at the messes in Tennessee and Memphis

Betsy DeVos Has No Idea Who Alexander Hamilton Is 

A lesson for DeVos on Hamilton's place in US history and why he is not her BFF

The F-Bomb in Texas    

A new problem on the STAAR test.

Charter School Controversy in Rural Alabama

So many of the problems with the charter biz are right here in this tale of an Alabama charter.

Zuck turned American Classrooms into Nonconsensual Laboratories

Cory Doctorrow's brutal take on Summit Learning

Lawmaker's Role in Unusual Charter Arrangement  

One more wretched story from Florida, where apparently nothing qualifies as conflict of interest.

The Best School Innovation Would Be More People 

Steven Singer has some thoughts about what would actually help.

Newark Charter Schools Complaint     

The complaint is that the system didn't send them as many students as they asked for. Who does the choosing in school choice?

Why Teens Don't Talk To Us

Good insights and practical advice about how to connect personally a bit better with the teens in your classroom.

Florida's Charter Sector Is a Real Mess 

Carol Burris takes a look a just how much of a mess (spoiler alert: a huge one).