A Spectacular Charter Scam

You may skimmed past reports of the San Diego indictment of charter scam artists thinking, "Ah, just another charter fraud story." But this $50 million scam is worth a closer look because it highlights several of the problems with modern charters.

The scammers were led by Sean McManu and Jason Schrock. McManus is Australian, but as various other operators have shown (particularly the infamous Gulen chain), there's no real barrier to non-Americans getting into the business of owning and operating US schools. The indictment of eleven defendants runs to 235 pages, and is the result of a year's worth of investigation.

The San Diego Union Tribune has been digging through the indictment, and though the business has been widely covered, their reporters, Morgan Cook and Kristen Taketa, have done an exceptional job of picking apart the details. Most of the following details are taken from their account.

McManus was already in the charter biz when he teamed up with Schrock in 2016 to kick the scam off with a perfectly legal maneuver-- buying a couple of cyber charter schools. This is one of those features of charters that distinguishes them from public schools-- they can completely change owners and operators. In fact, in 2017, McManus sold off another cyber charter operation, which was soon in the process of tying to take over yet an other school.

McManus and Schrock took the two schools and changed the names-- several times, in fact. It's a novel feature of charters. You can stay with one school even as it changes hands to completely different operators, or you can think your changing schools when you're actually jumping right back into the same school. The other side effect of all these shenanigans is that parents who want to do their due diligence and check out a school before enrolling can't really do so because repeated name changes and mergers and acquisitions obscure the trail.

The "new" schools started  a summer program that-- well, lied. It claimed more days of operation than it actually pulled off. Worse, it started using a network of youth programs and coaches to buy contact information for students, then used that information to create bogus enrollment, collecting payment for students who never actually enrolled in the program and others who were enrolled, but didn't actually do anything.

The pair also set up a group of 19 different cyber charters. This step required some authorizer shopping. In California, as in several states, an authorizer (in this case a school district) can greenlight a charter that operates in other districts entirely. Getting authorization from LAUSD can be difficult, but a tiny district like Dehesa Elementary School District are super-grateful for some extra income that is essentially free-- all they have to do is a little state paperwork.  Theoretically they are supposed to provide oversight, but in this set-up, they have a strong financial incentive not to kill the charter goose that is laying the budget-boosting golden eggs. Dehesa has 145 students of its own, but when counting students at all the charters it authorized, the total is over 8,000. Some reports put it as high as 20K.

That maybe why nobody was complaining, or noticing, as the pair set up a web of companies and proceeded to shuffle money around and back to McManus and Schrock. Those marketing and consulting companies let the pair hoover up a ton of taxpayer money. It's not clear from the reporting whether McManus an Schrock's schools were for-profit or not, but it doesn't matter. This is how you make money with a non-profit charter. The pair grabbed $50 million in just two years. Ka-ching.

The other indictees were involved in one part or another of this lucrative scam. Meanwhile, McManus has skipped town (and probably the continent). Some indictees have offered creative defenses. One defendant's lawyer reminded the newspaper that in this country, you're innocent until proven guilty. And then there's this:

“Charter School Experts often cannot agree on the meaning of these regulations,” wrote Chuck LaBella. “The full facts demonstrate an absence of any intention by Mr. Schmitt to violate any law.”

Meanwhile, a few thousand students are cheated out of a legitimate education.

The twitterverse rebuttal has been, "Oh, yeah. You're just focusing on charters. I'll bet we could public school scams just as bad." Maybe. But the oversight provided by a locally-elected board and mandated transparency of financial dealings would make it pretty damn hard. To pull off a scam of this magnitude, you need to wide-open barely-regulated low-oversight world of charters.

Teach for America: The Other Big Problem

Teach for America's most famously flawed premise is well known-- five weeks of training makes you qualified to teach in a classroom. It's an absurd premise that has been criticized and lampooned widely. It is followed closely in infamy by the notion that two years in a classroom are about providing the TFAer with an "experience," or a resume-builder so they have a better shot at that law or MBA program they're applying to. That premise has also been widely criticized.

There's another TFA premise that is less remarked on but is perhaps, in the long run, far worse. From the TFA website:

To change our country’s education system, we need leaders challenging conventional wisdom and the status quo, working for the long term from both inside and outside the school system. Once you become an alum of TFA, you’ll bring an invaluable perspective to any career field in working to create opportunity for students and communities nationwide.

This is the other TFA premise-- that two years in a classroom makes you qualified to run a school, or a school district, or a state education department. Two years in a classroom makes you qualified to be an education policy leader.

This is nuts.

First of all, two years in a classroom is nothing. For most folks it takes five to seven years to really get on your feet as a classroom teacher, to really have a solid sense of what you're doing (and you will never, ever, reach a point at which you don't have much more to learn about the work). The beginning two years are a challenge for anyone, and in the case of TFA, we're talking about the first two years of a person who only prepped for the job for five weeks! So they are starting out behind the average traditional new teacher. And if they are teaching in, say, a charter where they are surrounded primarily by other newbies, or being coached and led by TFA staff who are alumni who only have two years in the classroom-- well, the problems just compound. This is not the blind leading the blind-- this is the blind being led down a cliffside path into the Grand Canyon by a blind guide who is riding on a disabled Roombah.

Second, I will totally give a large number of TFAers in the classroom credit for good intentions. Yes, some have joined up specifically to beef up their grad school application or give themselves an "experience," but I believe that a significant number of TFAers entered the classroom hoping just what most traditional teachers hope-- that they could do good and make a corner of the world a little better.

But what the heck has to be going on in your head if, after two years of classroom teaching, you're thinking, "Yeah, I could totally run an entire school" or "I bet I could really fix this district if I were in charge" or "The education in this state would be so awesome if they put me in charge." I told almost every student teacher I worked with, every first-year teacher I ever mentored, "It's okay. If you don't cry at some point during this year, that just means you don't fully understand the situation." How bad does your grasp have to be, how deep in the grip of Dunning-Kruger do you have to be, to look at your tiny little sliver of just-getting-your-feet-wet experience and think that you are ready to run the show? This is a level of delusion I find truly scary.

And yet. Part of TFA's goal has always been to create the educational leaders who could turn the educational ship toward the course that their fully-amateur navigators had charted.

They've been successful. As a reminder, look at some of the alumni notables listed on TFA's Wikipedia page:

Mike Feinberg (Houston '92), KIPP Co-founder
Mike Johnston (Mississippi Delta '97), Colorado state senator
Kevin Huffman (Houston '92), Tennessee State Education Commissioner, April 2011 to January 2015
Michelle Rhee (Baltimore '92), Former Chancellor of District of Columbia Public Schools and founder of The New Teacher Project and StudentsFirst
Alec Ross (Baltimore '94), Senior Adviser for Innovation for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
John C. White (2010), Louisiana state superintendent of education since 2012

But there are plenty of lower-profile TFA alums out there. For instance, go to LittleSis and look through just some of the Teach for America alumni connections (while you're at it, look at who funds and runs TFA). There's a director of industry learning at McKinsey, a vice-president at the Boston Foundation, a guy who worked for NYC's ed department and now works in charter school development, the chief academic officer at National Heritage Academies, a partner at Learn Capital. TFA's own alumni page includes folks now working with The Mind Trust, KIPP, and the Walton Family Foundation. Oh yeah-- and Elizabeth Warren's senior education policy advisor.

Or consider the TFA Capitol Hill Fellows Program, one of the TFA initiatives that was designed to make sure that TFA has a voice in federal education policy.

The numbers are-- well, if we look at just, say, TFA in Memphis, we find there are 410 TFA alumni in town. 250 are in a classroom, 24 are school leaders, and 6 lead a school system. With two whole years in a classroom under their belts, they lead an entire system.

TFA's own national alum figures show that 34% are in a classroom and 84% "work in education or in fields that impact low-income communities"  which works out to half the TFAers believing that their two years in a low-income classroom qualifies them to do education or community work.

You can drill down and find the specific pictures anywhere in the country. What started me thinking about this was Lorain, Ohio, a story I've been following that involves a state-appointed all-powerful CEO. This is a guy with two years in a classroom, and yet he has since that time launched a charter school and served as a consultant for a major urban district before coming to Lorain to run the whole system. And he's hired "turnaround principals" who are also TFA products, who are taking over administration of entire buildings based on their two years as a beginning teacher in a classroom. And all of these folks don't need anybody to tell them anything because they are education experts.

This is nuts.

TFA's drive to plant its seeds everywhere is one persistent symptom of the early days of modern reform, back before when Reformsters figured out that badmouthing public school teachers was counterproductive. After all-- if a two-year classroom veteran makes a good principal or superintendent or state commissioner, why haven't more places reached out to recruit ten or fifteen or twenty year veterans of public school classrooms for leadership or policy positions (yes, teachers are allowed to rise to principal or superintendent positions, but the state capitol doesn't call very often). If two years in the classroom make you an education expert, then twenty years ought to make you a genius. Except, of course...

TFA education policy leaders and administrators are an expression of that reform idea that we don't just need a parallel system of education, but we need to reject all educational expertise that already exists. It's not that hard-- any person with an ivy league degree could figure out not only how to teach, but how to run a school, a district, or a state. TFA, the Broad Academy, other alternative systems deliberately reject the educational expertise that exists and attempt to build their alternative system from scratch, trusting that their own amateur-hour wisdom renders all that came before moot.

"You had five weeks of training, so now you're ready to take over a classroom," was silly.

"I put in two years in a classroom, so now I'm ready to take over the whole operation," is a higher level of delusion, and yet these deluded soldiers continue to make inroads like weeds, coming first through concrete cracked open for them by their rich and powerful patrons, and then, once through, bringing more of their crew to join them.

ICYMI: One Year Retireversary Edition (6/2)

It has been exactly one year since I hung up my teacher hat, so I'll probably meditate on that today, but in the meantime, here's some good reading from the week. Remember-- if you like it, share it.

Utah Picked a Testing  Company That It Knew Sucked

Okay, so I paraphrased the really-long headline, but you get the idea. How Utah went with a company with a history of trouble-- and how that worked out.  

The Perils of Treating Schools Like Corporations 

I don't often do video clips, but this is an interview with Andrea Gabor, exactly the person to address this topic. Plus this clip will remind you to get her book.

Fables of School Reform

The internet has really been missing Audrey Watters while she's been writing a book, but this piece from the January Baffler is Watters at her best, tying together a dozen different threads and reminding us that the world of ed tech is deeply full of baloney.

In NYC, as Neighborhoods Grow Whiter, Schools Don't

A new kind of white flight?

In Rural PA, a Robotics Program

A little bit of showing off; the teacher behind this program is one of my former co-workers, and he has worked his ass off to make this happen at my old school.

State Takeover Law Fails To Measure Success  

A letter to the editor of the Toledo newspaper explains one of the failures of takeover law-- it's completely inadequate definition of success.

Why Did Charter Support Dry Up? 

Jack Schneider looks at the fatal weaknesses of charter schools and their movement.

Pearson Looks To Cyber-Expand  

Pearson is planning to go after more of the cyber school market. I'm sure that can't end badly.

Undermining Florida's Public Education  

Yet another writer calling out the edu-disaster that is Florida's current governor and legislature.

America's Education Civil War

"Without a revolution seeing education as a social good to be broadly encouraged rather than property to be hoarded, lines will be drawn with consequential conflict and social impoverishment"

In The Middle

Mary Holden just spend a year in middle school. It took her till now to have enough time free to write about it.  

NH: Outsourcing and Privatizing Public Education

New Hampshire's education commissioner has decided to push a really terrible education idea. It's called "Learn Everywhere," and it looks like a new approach to replacing public education, a kind of true backdoor approach to vouchering. It comes dressed in pretty language, but it still smells like a recently fertilized field on a warm summer day.

Frank Edelblut was a businessman, venture capitalist, and one-term NH state representative before he decided to run for the governor's seat. He was beaten in the primary by Chris Sununu, son of former NH governor and Bush I White House Chief of Staff John Sununu (full disclosure: my grandmother was a NH GOP representative for decades, including under John Sununu, and she did not have a very high opinion of him). Edelblut gracefully conceded and publicly supported Sununu, who then appointed Edelblut to the top education job, despite Edelblut's complete lack of anything remotely resembling education experience.

All of Edelblut's children were home schooled. As a legislator, he backed vouchers and as a candidate he backed personalized [sic] learning. Sununu said that the homeschooling was a plus because it meant Edelblut understood alternative methods of education. The state board of education had misgivings about the appointment. Democrats had misgivings about the appointment, but Edelblut tried to be reassuring:

Edelblut says he has no intention of undermining schools, and will simply implement policies set by the Board of Education and lawmakers.

Well, not really. In an op-ed, Commissioner Edelblut talked about how "schooling gets in the way of education" and repeated the old "schools haven't changed in 100 years" baloney. The he went on to praise a cornucopia of privatizing ideas, including Learn Everywhere, which he says can create learning opportunities "at scale."

Learn Everywhere is a proposal to allow students to replace public school courses with coursework offered by private and nonprofit organizations. It is a mechanism for outsourcing public education.

Details are laid out on a Department of Education website. Here's the short form:

While for the most part, school takes place from 7:30am – 2:30pm inside a school building for 180 days a year, students are learning outside of that time frame and outside of that location. Some of this “outside the school” learning is formalized, such as after-school tutoring or dance lessons, and some is less formalized, such as an after-school job where a student is gaining valuable capacity across a number of domains. Learn Everywhere creates a vehicle to capture all students learning and give students credit for it.

The overall approach is similar to what we've seen with micro-credentials, but it keeps the framework of the public school credits. You attend a course or program that has been approved by the state DOE, and upon completion, you get a certificate that you present to your home school for course credit.

There are a variety of issues here, and the department, to its credit, anticipates most of them.

Time issues? You could duplicate classes, such as taking an outsourced drama class and also your school's drama class, but if the outside class is cutting into homework time, drop the school course and take a study hall. The site does not address what happens is you take so many outside courses that your day is mostly study halls. Can you just stop attending public school entirely?

Funding and Equity? Part of what makes this saleable is that it doesn't take a cent from public schools at this time; the families are responsible for paying for the outside courses. This in turn raises another question-- Edelblut is selling this, hard, on the notion that it will solve the equity problems of public schools and help raise up struggling students, but if the families have to pay for the courses, that would seem to lock poor students out of Learn Everywhere, which would seem to be the opposite of what Edelblut is advertising. The website addresses this issue with a resounding, "Well, we don't know." Some of these programs might be free. Businesses might want to pay to send students to programs that would be useful for that business. Families that can't afford full tuition at a Philips Exeter might be able to afford one course.

In other words, all of Edelblut's talk about how this program will close the opportunity gap and increase equity in New Hampshire is pretty much bullshit.

Credentials? Shouldn't the state make sure these outsourced courses are taught by qualified and credentialed educators. The answer on the suite is "Blah blah blah blah no. Also, credentials shmedentials."

What about teachers? If more coursework is outsourced, won't that screw over full employment opportunities for teachers? Why, no. They can jump on this gravy train and be freeeee!

Teachers interested in taking advantage of Learn Everywhere will have the ability to pursue teaching in its most pure form. A common refrain heard from teachers is frustration at an overly regulated and burdensome system that causes them to spend more time administrating students than instructing them. An inspired teacher may discover the entrepreneurial aspect of the program and can now set up their own learning program to instruct students. These teachers may teach at a traditional public school during the regular school day, but decide to add an independent program in the afternoon or on a weekend, to pursue teaching in a less restrictive form.

You could literally teach yourself right out of a job! "Drop this class and come learn the same material from me in the evening, kids, because having steady pay with benefits is unappealing to me!"

Also, some of these outsourced programs will probably look to hire real teachers, so all those teachers looking for a second job could get a second job teaching in a way that will undermine their first job.

Accountability? No problem-- students will have to keep taking the same old Big Standardized Tests, and what else do we need to know about what they're learning?

Doesn't this mess with local control? Blah blah blah blah blah, translated roughly as "We woiuld prefer not to actually answer that question." God, what happened to you, Republican party?

What about students with special needs? Their IEPs will follow them to the outsourced courses, which totally won't cause those programs to set limits because they don't want to deal with IEPs. Students with special needs will totally not be left behind by this program.

How will we know if students are safe in these programs? "That's a great and vitally important question."

Aren't administrators going to fight this program? No, dude, they'll totally love having the scheduling problems and the issues that come with giving credit for courses they have no input or control over. "Rather than losing control, administrators will see that they are gaining a valuable tool to help meet the goal that we share, bringing all students to strong outcomes and bright futures." They'll be delighted that this will solve the equity gap, somehow.

Not a word about how selective programs can be-- do they have to take any students who apply, or can they reject whoever they don't to bother with. Nor any real look at outside courses offered during the school day-- can I skip school to take this class? But lots of pretty words.

There is a heaping mountain of bovine fecal matter piled on top of this program. It's a bad deal for public education and for students, but handy for wealthy families that are already putting their kids in all sorts of extra enrichment, and of course it will mean a nice windfall for providers who create these kind of programs. And if it really takes off, it could gut that pesky public education system almost entirely (except of course for all those problem students).

Look down the road for the part where the administration comes back to say, "You know what this program really needs? Some kind of voucher system so that more students can afford to participate."

Most states that have tried to launch education savings account programs have tried to put that financial instrument in place first. New Hampshire is poised to take a back door approach-- set up the course delivery system first, and then later come back to set up the vouchery means of paying for it. This is all sorts of bad news.

The BOE votes on the "next step" for this program on June 13. If I were in New Hampshire and concerned about public education, I might give those board members a call or drop them a note.

Rewarding Failing Schools

One of the problems with the business oriented view of education reveals itself in the use of the word "reward."

As long as the debate has raged, we can find commentators, thinky tanks, and policy makers arguing that giving more resources to struggling schools is "rewarding" them for failure. (Here's an example, and here's another.) For many folks, this seems simple and straightforward, but it's really not.

Imagine two small children. Pat is growing up in a poor home and not receiving the kind of food necessary to thrive. Chris is growing up in a wealthy home and gets all the food and nutrition necessary to do well. Chris is big and strong, well at the top of the charts for growth. Pat is thin and emaciated, near the bottom of the chart for growth.

Let's imagine a government program for distributing food to families of young children. Who would like to argue that Pat should not get any of this food because it would just be rewarding Pat for failing to grow big and strong?

For some folks, it seems impossible to view money as anything other than revenue. In business, money is your reward for doing a good job. That's the whole point.

But (at the risk of repeating myself) public schools are not businesses. They do not generate revenue. They do not produce a profit. And money is not a reward; it's a resource.

This idea hurts some people's heads. Health care and public education have always treated money mainly as a resource, something you spend in order to take care of people. Yes, there have been plenty of money-related arguments in public education, but they are virtually all (including teacher pay arguments) centered on how best to spend that money to best take care of the students in the system.

No, no, no, some folks have been screaming. That's not how you use money. That's not what money is for. It's supposed to reward people. It's supposed to be saved and used to reward people who earn it. God, you education people-- you need to operate more like a business. You need to watch your bottom line. You need to make sure you reward the right things.

But money in public education is not a reward-- it's a resource. It's food. It's the fuel needed to keep the machinery of education running.

Focusing on money as a reward, as revenue, changes the focus of a district. I think it's no coincidence that charters usually spend more money on administration than public schools; in a public school, the main job is to teach students, but in a business, the main job is to oversee a responsible and profitable use of the revenue. And charter schools are not public schools; they're businesses. As I've said a million times, that does not automatically mean that charters are evil, but it does that educating students is not their primary purpose.

Here are some things we shouldn't say:

That patient is losing heart and respiratory function; don't reward him with more blood and oxygen.

That child is starving; don't reward her with more food.

That veteran is failing to cope with PTSD; don't reward him with counseling.

Likewise, it makes no sense to say:

That school is failing; don't reward it with books.

That school is failing; don't reward it with a new roof that doesn't leak.

That schools is failing; don't reward it with more money.

Faced with a starving or sick person, you cannot punish them back to health. Faced with a struggling school, you cannot punish it to a state of greater effectiveness. Money is not a reward; it's a necessary resource for education. It matters. A finite resource that needs to be stewarded carefully and effectively, but a resource and not a reward. We need to make sure we talk about it that way.

Jeb Bush: Frying Reform Baloney for Michigan

The Detroit News just ran a Jeb Bush fluff piece chock full of reformy baloney (reformaloney?) and an embarrassing lack of those fact thingies.

It's helpful to know that the writer is Ingrid Jacques, deputy editorial page editor, and a graduate of Hillsdale College, the noted far-right Libertarian college with close ties to the DeVos family and the Trump administration (you may remember them as the school that Senator Pat Toomey tried to give a big fat tax exemption gift).

There he is, going big with the passion.

The piece was written on the occasion of Bush coming to Michigan to talk at the Detroit Chamber's Mackinac Policy Conference, one more group of business whizzes who fancy themselves rightful managers of public education while hanging out with politicians who are really interested in their deep pockets ideas, and the piece opens by evoking the dynamic Jeb we all know and love for whom nobody voted in the last Presidential cycle. What does it take to improve schools?

“The attitude should be big and bold or go home and let someone else try,” says the former Florida governor. “If it ruffles a few feathers or gets people uncomfortable, so be it. There should be a little more passion behind more provocative change. You can argue about how bad things are or you can say things have to get better.  That's where convergence could really be."

Big and bold or go home. Passion. Because that's the Jeb we all met during the GOP primaries. But beyond the disconnect of Jeb! being big, bold and passionate, this is reformaloney. It's not nearly as important to be big and bold as it is to be right, and when it comes to education, Bush has rarely been either. There is nothing big and bold about draining public education funds to feed private business operations, nor is there anything passionate about letting those private edu-businesses suck up taxpayer dollars with little oversight. Big and bold would have been, for instance, saying to Florida voters, "I want to run several parallel school systems, and since that will obviously take more money to do right, I'm going to raise your taxes to fund it."

I don't know what he wants to see converge, but Jacques thinks his message is one the business and politics guys need to hear, because Michigan's education situation is critical. Bush is going to discuss change, which is an odd topic really, because Michigan has been pummeled by educational change thanks to influencers like the DeVos family, and the results have been terrible. But the policies that Bush loves--charters, choice and cutting public schools (and the teachers who work there) off at the knees--have been tried, and they failed.

Jacques presents Bush as an expert on education reform because Florida and FEE (now known as ExcelinEd). But FEE is simply one more astroturf advocacy group financed by the usual reformsters. They have been wrong so often, and they have tried a variety of shadow groups and initiatives, like the time they set up four teachers to tweet happy things about the Common Core. Chiefs for Change, Learn More Go Further. Bush has ties to so many groups that never quite produced the excitement and passion he was looking for. Meanwhile, he made a wretched mess out of Florida, with a charter sector that produces more waste and fraud than education , and more bad policies than I can list here.

Never mind all that. Jacques unpacks her English degree to offer this example of passive voice:

And now Florida is seen as an example of reforms done right, from accountability to school choice.

Is it? By whom is it seen that way? What data would lead us to that conclusion? Never mind. Jacques says that Florida has top performers in reading "and other subjects." That's a big bold claim, without context (top of what? compared  to whom? measuring performance how?) and not entirely reflected in at least some test results.

Bush offered some typical reformaloney-- "You need an attitude that every child can learn" which to be clear is not wrong, but is also not news to anyone who works in education. Bush is like a guy who bursts in to an operating room in a hospital and yells out--"Stop everything! Do you realie you need to use the pointy end of the scalpel?!!"  But Bush did lay out some specifics in his interview with Jacques.

Early literacy efforts.

Bush always stays current on  reformy talking points, so he leads with "teachers aren't taught how to teach reading properly." Then he moves to the wonders of third grade do-or-die retention testing, making the amazing claim that it works. No, it doesn't. And this is not news. It is particularly damaging as practiced in Florida, where it has led to the retention of students who passed other reading assessments, but didn't take the honored test. (Florida is also the state that hounded a dying child to take the test.) Third grader retention is effective in just one way; it helps raise fourth grade scores by keeping struggling low-testing students out of fourth grade.

Accountability and School choice.

Well, they've got one of those, anyway. It's possible that Jeb's a little fuzzy on accountability:

“Align the system to the results you want, and by and large you’ll get better results,” Bush says. “It’s not easy to craft a system where you can measure learning adequately but it’s well worth the effort.”

Align a system around test results and you get a system focused on test results. Perhaps Jeb! is familiar with Goodhart's Law or Campbell's Law and how they explain that measures like a standardized test tend to distort and pervert the processes they are intended to measure. As for the second half of his statement, he's correct that it's not easy to craft an adequate measuring system for learning; that's probably why nobody has accomplished it yet.

Jeb! thinks the A-F school grading system actually accomplishes something other than rewarding wealthy schools and punishing poor ones, and he completely ignores other accountability issues, like keeping charter schools from scamming taxpayers or from hiring unqualified staff or from closing in the middle of the year and just wasting taxpayer money.

Governance

Bush remembers fondly when he stripped Florida voters of the power to elect the state board of education, and suggests that Michigan also go to a governor-appointed board that will properly wield a rubber stamp. I've met Michigan's elected board of education, and Michigan is damned lucky to have them. As always when contemplating GOP-branded reformaloney, I wonder when Republicans decided they were against democracy and local control.

Jacques tells the business community to take note. I would suggest that it's long past time to stop paying attention to what this private citizen with no actual education background has to say about education. Florida is a mess for everyone except privatizers and profiteers and people in school districts that are still fighting off the state, but mostly it's scammage and thievery and driving teachers out and educational malpractice, and Bush takes a huge chunk of blame.

OH: Takeover Battle Comes To Senate

Our story so far: The Ohio House has passed a bill scrapping Ohio's disastrous takeover bill, HB 70. The new language was incorporated into the budget (HB 166) and, having cleared the House, must go to the Senate, where education committee chair Peggy Lehner is not particularly sympathetic to public education. So Lehner and a committee of various "interested parties" put together their own proposal for offering "relief" from HB 70. It's another version of a state takeover, packed with $20 million in pork for "consultants."

Wednesday, May 29, was the Senate's day to hold a hearing about the issue, and all the players came out of the woodwork, some offering audacious and amazing words for or against the bill, with particular emphasis on Lorain, Ohio, a city and school system that has caused all sorts of problems by refusing to roll over and play dead.

Mark Ballard, hearing MVP

But we have lots of testimony to look at, all of which paints a picture of a direct head-to-head clash between pub lic education and those who would like to privatize it.  In fact, before we wade into this, let's start with some of the testimony from Lorain School Board President Mark Ballard, because this may win the Quote of the Day award:

A new law is being crafted, in secret, AGAIN - because you admit the last two laws were ineffective - all while Lorain is dealing with the negative consequences of those bills.

Now, if this new bill is approved, we will be required to collaborate with our CEO, even though he doesn’t believe in collaboration and refuses to meet with us.

And our end goal is to create a plan that is exactly...the... same...as what we already had in place before you gave us a CEO?

Please remember this: If the state of Ohio thinks it can continue to experiment with it’s poor children because our communities are somehow too disengaged to fight for them, you are very mistaken.

We are the International City. And fighting for the right to have the same opportunities as middle class white people is something we have been doing all of our lives.

Chad Aldis (formerly with the Waltons and before that a staffer in the Florida legislature) showed up for the Fordham Institute, a right-tilted thinky tank advocacy group that has gone to bat for most reformy ideas. They also run a charter authorizing business in Ohio.

There are several reasons why this body should reject the House’s changes. First, although jettisoning the ADC model rather than improving it would be politically popular, it would come at the expense of students. The districts currently under ADC control have consistently weak academic growth, low college completion rates, and few students reaching proficiency in basic subjects. Some of the districts have been performing poorly for ten years or more. Their schools are producing graduates who aren’t prepared for college or the workplace—and families, communities, and local businesses are paying the price.

This is a standard reformy tactic-- emphasize the severity of the problem rather than provide evidence that your preferred solution is actually a solution .

Dayton, Ohio, is one of the larger communities that will soon fall under HB 70 if the law isn't changed. This, as much as the failures of the model in Lorain, Youngstown, and East Cleveland, is driving the opposition to HB 70-- the very real possibility that more "important" Ohio cities with actual clout will soon be hit by state takeover. The superintendent was at the hearing to get out and front, calling results of HB 70 so far very debatable and arguing that Dayton is already solving problems themselves and meddling from the state will not help, thank you very much.

Becky Higgins, president of the Ohio Education Association  was there to argue the solution isn't solving anything:

As my colleagues and our fellow OEA members in Youngstown and Lorain have experienced, the current state takeover law provides no citizen oversight through elected school boards, no voice for classroom teachers and has been bad for our kids. Our experience in Youngstown and Lorain has demonstrated that the Academic Distress Commission/CEO model does not work. We believe that no more districts should be taken over, and that the districts that have been taken over should be relieved of that burden. That is why the first part of House Bill 154 is so important - repeal.

It is also important to note that state takeovers are based on misleading state report cards that severely penalize students and districts in poverty. After the failed state takeover law is repealed and local control is restored, OEA stands ready to work with state lawmakers to fix Ohio’s broken and misleading report card system.

Jennifer Kluchar, a teacher from Youngstown, pointed out that the advent of urban chartersskims away students in a way that affects the culture of the public schools:

This is the context I need you to imagine: schools where the culture is “we come here to learn” versus schools where the culture is “we come here to be fed and loved, and because there’s no one at home to take care of us”,

Beth Workman of the League of Women Voters showed up to call for better fundng of flagging schools and to challenge the test-based definition of quality:

Quality is a very complex phenomenon, and it deserves a robust definition. Test results, which are most often a reflection of the economic status of the test takers, are a very limited way of gauging quality. And connecting consequences to them, is a very harmful way to force improvement. It doesn’t really work. It encourages a focus on improving test results, which both undermines high quality instruction and negates the validity of the test itself as a fair measure of learning.

ADC member teacher Steve Cawthon enumerated some of the problems instituted by the CEO and also observed that some of the progress signs that the CEO pointed to where the result of reforms that the distriuct had begun before the CEO took over.

Several folks testified to the atmosphere of fear that now perm eates Lorain schools, but perhaps most striking was testimony from Alexis Hayden, the union grievance chair, who noted that from a previous average of seven grievances, this year had racked up fifty-two grievances. In one year. And that's not counting the teachers who called, but ultimately decided not to file a grievance because they feared the fallout of doing so.

Kejuana Jefferson, one of the CEO's turnaround principals, showed up to compare herself to Sojourner Truth, heroically standing up against the powerful political forces of Lorain. Jefferson would be the principal hired for the middle school who had neither principal certification nor teaching certification beyond K-3. She's taken to slamming hers staff on social media. But she's sure the takeover in Lorain is working because the TNTP alignment process is going well and  there's some good data.

Henry Patterson, past VP of the ADC in Lorain laid out the five considerations for a turnaround to work: it will take time, be hard, and cost money. Also, it will require a collaborative CEO who works with local folks and an engaged ADC. HB 70 is broken and needs to be replaced with something that considers all five.

David Hardy, Teach for America product and current Lorain CEO, offered, if nothing else, some comments that further suggest that he was a terrible choice for a terrible job. He, however, is certain that HB 70 was right. But he does see progress in Lorain stymied:

The level of opposition to progress is relentless and the willingness by those who see local control as a means to oppress communities dominated by black and brown children is real. The viability of corruption is at a height that resembles the challenges seen in some of the most troubling situations our world has to endure. Thinly veiled threats, whispers of oppression, and attention seeking adults who are emotionally high jacked to testify against the very necessary change they refuse to see is present today and will be present tomorrow. At the same time our voiceless children and marginalized adults rely on others to speak their truth all while being exploited daily by lies and deceit-filled empty promises.

Hardy is not just speaking against the folks in Lorain, but the idea of local control in general:

In communities like Lorain, local control means control that is unaccounted for and the maintenance of more of the same; maintaining financial benefit on the backs of children of color, staining the very democracy that has put them in place with the stench of systemic racial inequities that continue to perpetuate the separation of the haves and have nots.

And Hardy offers an explanation for why he won't attend a school board meeting:

The answer is simple; I refuse to be a part of corruption.

Hardy has some big sweeping ideas, or at least the language to express them, and he certainly delivers a mean speech about the disenfranchisement of the people. Maybe he is a big thinker, but if so, he would not be the first visionary leader who couldn't turn his vision into the daily nuts and bolts needed to run a school district. You can try to whip people up into a state of frenzied excitement, but at some point they are going to turn to you and ask, "Okay, what exactly are we going to do today?"

Moreover, his view that Lorain is a corrupt cesspool of power held by a small cabal of corrupt leaders seems like an obstacle to collaborative success. His impulses seem to run to sudden authoritarian dictates (e.g. his announcement that everyone in some schools would have to reapply for their jobs), a dislike for explaining himself, and subsequent collisions with reality (e.g. his announcement that all those teachers wouldn't have to reapply after all). And while he talks a good game about having monthly town halls to go straight to the people--well, he doesn't live in Lorain.

Yes, being a school leader involves dealing with some people who are obstacles and problematic. It's a political job, and school super-powered CEO is a very political job created by political means. It requires someone who is both uber-knowledgable about all aspects of running schools and somebody who is a gifted politician; Hardy is just an example of what happens when you try to fill the job with someone has neither skill set. Even if he's right, and that he's the good guy stuck in a pit of corruption beset on all sides by villains, this is not how to deal with that successfully. Lorain is just the worst case scenario display of how bad HB 70 is, and Hardy just keeps demonstrating that.

Hardy has his supporters, including the local NAACP, and they showed up to advocate for staying the course. And no Ohio hearing about education would be complete without Lisa Gray of Ohio Excels, another one of those groups formed by business interests who want to shape education policy. Gray has worked with the Gates Foundation, Achieve, Teach for America-- the usual suspects. Gray has been a reformstery advocate for years (here she is in 2013 explaining how awesome the Common Core will be).

Ohio Excels proposal for replacing HB 70 is even more reformy. They would like to see a plan that targets schools that are trending downward, snapping them up before they even fail. Businesses and philanthropic groups (like, say, the Gates Foundation) should get to be partners (aka "help drive the bus"), and more mayoral involvement in leadership (aka "mayoral control"). And there should be "final consequences" for schools that don't improve, like state takeover-- though they should be allowed to escape that  y trying things like "partnering" with third-party providers or charter schools.

Gray's testimony helps establish the other extreme in the discussion-- rather than local control, let's just get the process of privatizing schools under way. It would be interesting to hear if Hardy believes that corporate privatization would yield better treatment of Black and Brown students.

Lehner was, by most accounts, not particularly sympathetic to the pro-HB 166 crowd-- apparently at one point, when a Lorain teacher tried to recognize the many students who had made the long trip, she scolded the teacher to turn around and face the senators (and then there's the classy Senator who called the student appearance a "nice show.") It remains to be seen what the Senate will decide to do with the education language now written into the budget the House passed, but if I were an Ohio voter concerned about public education, I'd be calling my Senator daily.