Talking Point Update: Focus on Fit

This has been going on for a while, but just in case you've missed this rhetorical shift, I want to highlight the tweaking of a reformy talking point.

Complete this sentence: "We need school choice because____________________"

The classic answer has been "because students need to escape failing public schools." Or "because the quality of your education shouldn't be determined by your zip code."

Betsy DeVos herself used to call public education a dead end. But DeVos (who, as I keep saying, is not a dope, despite the commonly shared cartoon version of her) has been steadily tweaking language in an apparent attempt to stop pissing off and energizing her opposition. So she has a new answer to this sentence completion puzzle. You can hear it in this radio interview that Betsy DeVos did with Chris Salcedo, a conservative radio talker in Texas.

It's fit. DeVos and some other reformsters have largely stopped talking about bad failing public schools and the terrible teachers who work there. Instead, the new idea is fit. The parents should be able to choose the school that best fits the student's needs or desires or "learning style."

From the reformster POV, there are a couple of benefits to this talking point.

One is that it is less confrontational with the public school system. "We're not saying that your school sucks; we just think another school might fit Pat better." Ironically, this is a flipped version of the argument used to push some students out of private and charter schools-- "We think Pat would be happier in a school that fit his needs more."

Another is that this is a good cover for one of the DeVosian goals-- tax dollars for private Christian schools. If Pat's family thinks that the best fit would be a school that is soaked in their personal brand of religion, well, that's a feature, not a bug. Never forget-- one policy goal that does separate DeVos from reformy ed secretaries before her is the goal of getting Christian churches in charge of education.

Best of all, the fit argument helps get past the poor folks incremental foot in the door that has marked choice policy before. In other words, a common policy trick has been to say, "Well, we'll just offer vouchers and choice to students who are in failing schools because they must be rescued (but not by, say, properly funding and supporting their public schools)." But the "best fit" argument knows no bounds. Selling choice to suburbs and wealthy communities, where the public schools are well-funded and supported, or rural communities, where the public schools are a beloved community institution-- well, those roadblocks are part of what has made the charter boom slow to a crawl. But the best fit argument can be used anywhere; you don't need a disaster, real or created, to make this pitch.

Mind you, it's all still baloney used to mask the privatizing of public education. And it's weirdly backwards. Where are you most likely to find a school that offers a variety of options, a choice of education paths, and a staff of teachers who represent a broad range of styles and approaches? That would be in a public school system. Where are you most likely to find a school that requires all teachers to teach the same content in the same style, with everyone lockstepped into a set of rules and approaches that permeate every room in the building? That would be the charter sector. And, as always, let's not forget where we find schools that can reject any student for any reason, including background, religion, or just "not fitting in"? That would be the world of private schools.

If finding an education that fits a student, including a variety of options so that the student can figure out what that best fit is, all under one roof so that families don't have to start over at a whole new school every time they want a change-- well, that's a public school. As always, school choice is about school's choice; not so much about students finding a school that fits their ideas about learning, as it is about private and charter schools finding the students who fit their ideas about teaching. It's charter and private schools that offer one size meant to fit all.

WV Senate Can't Seem To Hear Teachers

It would be funny if it weren't so angrifying. But West Virginia's legislature is at it again.

Back in February of 2018, the teachers of West Virginia were fed up. Low pay. Lack of support. Lack of respect. They were fed up enough that they staged an illegal wildcat strike that shut down every school district in the state. The governor and legislature backed down, and in short order, the teachers had won. Well, until they hadn't. Because when you strike during district contract negotiations, you get back to the table, settle a contract, sign, and you're done. One of the smaller lessons of 2018 statewide teacher strikes is that when you negotiate with a legislature, negotiations are never over.

I hear you just fine.

So in January of 2019, the West Virginia legislature said, "Well, let's give them one of the things they asked for, and put in a whole bunch of privatization baloney that we always wanted, and they'll just let it go so they can get their raise." That was incorrect. Teachers struck again, and the legislature and governor agreed that maybe they'd tackle education in a special session.

So now it's June, and the Senate is back at it. GOP Senate President Mitch Carmichael took the latest pile of poop and tried to sneak it through extra-quick and quiet like last weekend (because, he said, he wanted to save the taxpayers the money it would cost for legislators to stay in session and actually discuss the bill-- what a thoughtful guy). But West Virginia teachers have learned never to turn their back on their legislators, and they were there to raise a fuss and stiffen the spines of some lawmakers.

That pushed the vote to Monday, when GOP lawmakers demonstrated yet again that they either don't get it or don't care. Sunday the GOP inserted a new amendment to make striking even more illegaller by adding new penalties for striking-- most notably, firing. Yup-- under this law any teachers in West Virginia who would dare to walk out could lose her job. And there was lots of meat for Reformsters, including super-vouchers and the launching of charters. Betsy DeVos used some rare twitter bandwidth to throw her support behind the GOP forces which, as one writer noted, may be an indication that the folks behind the bill have wider interests than West Virginia families. Then there's the listening thing:

“We have been accused of not listening,” said GOP State Sen. Patricia Rucker during Monday’s floor debate, likely referring to teacher protests. “I have to apologize if I sometimes slip into teacher mode. But listening is not the same … as agreeing. We can listen and we can agree or disagree … I’m here to represent more than just the unions in West Virginia.”

That complaint would carry more weight if the GOP didn't keep proposing the same measures, and if they focused on making a case for their bill instead of trying slick maneuvers to circumvent the process.

In addition to firing strikers and pushing vouchers and charters, the bill also aims to do away with seniority as a factor in cutting staff. And while charter authorization power is given to county school boards, the state board can overrule any county board that refuses to play ball.

From out here in the cheap seats, it's not clear why exactly the Senate believes the new set of proposals will fare any better than the earlier incarnation. The proposed teacher raise would be moved up a year, so maybe the feeling is that West Virginia teachers can be paid off to stand aside while public education is gutted. Maybe the senators believe that teachers can be threatened into shutting up.

Whatever the case, legislators seem to think that West Virginia's teachers are just saying, "We want more money," when in fact the message is more "The public education system that takes care of our children is in trouble." Imagine folks sitting on a porch and the kids come screaming out "Pa! The living room is on fire!" and Pa says, "First, if you raise your voice to me again, I will paddle you till you can't sit for a week. Now, if you'll toss the bucket of gasoline in there like a good girl, I'll give you a dollar to go to the movies."

The education bills come up to the House in about ten days. If I lived in West Virginia, I'd get on the phone to my rep.

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.