MI: Rural Charters, Warm Bodies, and the Effects of the Teacher "Shortage"

St. Helen, Michigan, has its share of problems. Founded as a logging community, it's Up North in Michigan. It's at least near the interstate, but the population is under 3,000, with a median family income of $30,268. They do have an annual bluegill festival, and Charlton Heston spent part of his childhood there. On the other hand, they're Number Two on the Roadsnacks list of Worst Small Towns in Michigan. Unemployment is a whopping 18.9%; poverty is at 31%. This summer the beaches at the lake have been closed down for bacteria.

Not actually a phys ed teacher

The town took another hit that started in 2008 when the Gerrish-Higgins School District wanted to raise some taxes to improve its buildings. St. Helen residents voted for the tax. Then the district was taken over by the Roscommon Area Public Schools and they marked the St. Helen Elementary School for closure, consolidating all their students into an elementary, middle and high school, all located in Roscommon.

Jennifer Jarosz had lived her whole live in St. Helen. She's the owner/operator of the Hen House Restaurant in St. Helen. She started up Rural Education Matters, and the community looked for ways to save their school, a critical part of the rural community. Initially, they could not find an authorizer, but in 2011 Jarosz was among those testifying before the House Education Committee hoping that the cap on Michigan charters would be lifted. Her work has earned her a spot on the Michigan Charter Schools Association board, an unusual presence among the usual collection of consultants, financiers and corporate profiteers.

This is a side effect of charter caps I'd never thought about, but if authorizers can only approve so many charters, the competition will be to see who can promise that authorizer the best return, and big corporate operations will squeeze out the Mom and Pop charters.

The cap was lifted, and St. Helen had their charter, initially for an elementary school, just down St. Helen Road from the Hen House, and named for St. Helen's most famous resident-- Charlton Heston Academy. It now covers K-12. They featured an extra long school day, and no three month summer vacation. Students have been traveling there from the surrounding rural areas, to the point that Charlton Heston Academy asked to be released from state regulations so that they could give preference to residents of St. Helen; Michigan charters must move to a lottery once they're full.

Yes, they indulge in some classic charter school baloney-- out in front they apparently have a sign that says "Tuition free..." and lists some other free things at the school. This is a lie. Like any charter, CHA is funded with taxpayer dollars. It's not free.

CHA has also become the largest employer in St. Helen, and that in itself is leading to other problems.

CHA has a teaching staff of over 40% substitute teachers.

This article features just one of the many (I'm not going to include her name-- you can find it easily enough, but I don't think the writer of this article was doing her any favors). She used to be a repo officer for a credit union. She applied to CHA to maybe be a payroll officer or office manager. They said, "Wouldn't you like to become a teacher?" So now she's teaching math. She says she loves it. She also says

If I would have went to school and came out at 24 to start teaching, I wouldn't have made it. You have to have life experience, you have to have backbone.

She also says:

I would say that [long-term subs and certified teachers] are absolutely equivalent. There’s a lot of misguided judgement from people because I didn’t go to school for teaching. I think they think we don’t deserve it. But I don’t think one’s better than the other.

And she also says this:

It (the test to become a certified teacher) doesn't say that you're going to be dealing with emotions. It's just, ‘Do I know how to add or multiply or do algebra in order to teach it to the kids?’ That's the smallest part of my job. The absolute smallest.

A first grade teacher with no teaching degree or credentials is asked what makes her feel she can teach first-graders without a teaching degree. She replies, "I'm passionate." And she was a preschool paraprofessional for a few years.

Long term subs in Michigan are only required to have 60 total college credits. CHA has the lowest student achievement (aka test scores) in their intermediate school district, which is unsurprising given the level of poverty in the district.

The superintendent (David Patterson, the registered agent of Champion Learning, LLC) says that while he would prefer to hire certified teachers, the subs are doing just as good a job as certified teachers-- "you can't tell the difference." Of course, at this point, many of the certified teachers at CHA are former subs who completed a crash-course, one-year-of-weekends program at Saginaw Valley State University. The math teacher quoted above, who should "have went to school" and who thinks content knowledge is a minor part of her job, is now a certified teacher via the SVSU program. The charter pays for the coursework in exchange for a three-year commitment to teach at the school. It may not be a great program, but it does cut fewer corners than Teach for America. Makes it about as good as the Relay GSE program, which is also baloney.

Patterson's background contains few surprises. He graduated from Roscommon High School and went to work as a social worker in both Michigan and Florida. He's been adjunct faculty at Davenport University, Henry Ford Community College, and the University of Phoenix. And he spent some time as a "school choice" advocate with The Center for Charter Schools at Central Michigan University. So when he says he can't tell the difference between a substitute teacher and a trained, certified teacher, I believe him.

Patterson says that "the issue" is not long term subs, but the "teacher shortage." On this, we agree. Well, sort of. There is no teacher shortage. Hell, there isn't even that much of a "shortage" in rural Michigan. Yes, Michigan has seen a big drop in teachers in the pipeline, but CHA is employing waaaay more substitutes than any other rural schools in the state.

But the narrative of a teacher shortage allows folks to justify all sorts of shenanigans. It lets teacher leaders pretend that there is some sort of teacher crop failure, an act of divine deprivation that they are helpless to address, so, hey, might as well just start grabbing warm bodies off the street or hitting up people who apply for other jobs entirely. As long as they have passion and really care hard, they'll be just like all the other fully trained teachers.

And what sucks more about this is that the students at this school are poor, rural students who really, really need a strong school with strong teachers. Particularly in Michigan, where the state court ruled that the state is under no obligation to provide students with an education that is actually any good. The students of St. Helen have been shafted in an unpleasant variety of ways over the past decade. I actually agree with the concept of a locally owned and operated charter school to replace what's been lost, but come on, folks-- that only works if you provide your students with a real school staffed with real teachers. CHA is all excited about the athletic facilities it's going to build when they need to be excited about the fact that they can't actually attract and keep the staff they need to run a real school.

ICYMI: Just A Quiet Day Edition (8/11)

Buying office supplies. Fretting about getting up in the morning. School must be getting closer-- but not too close yet. Have a cup of whatever you have cups of to relax, and take in some of the education reading from the last week. Don't forget to share the good stuff.

How much knowledge is necessary for comprehension?

You need some background knowledge in order to get better at reading (regardless of what you've been told about "skills"). Turns out there's even research about how much is the bare minimum requirement. Yes, it's from the Fordham blog, but I think it's worth reading, anyway.

Strategy Overdue for Special Ed  

Wendy Lecker, writing in the Register Citizen, looks at how lobbyists have made a mess out of Connecticut's special ed sector.

In PA, a Charter Rules Change To Benefit Just One School

WHYY uncovers a somewhat nuts story about political payback to benefit just one charter school. Because level playing field.  

7 Harsh Truths That Will Improve Your Leadership Skills Overnight

From Inc., this piece isn't education-specific, but both teachers and administrators could benefit from these pointers.

Inside the NAACP Civil War Over Charter Schools 

Yes, charter advocates have gone so far as to plant folks inside the NAACP in an attempt to weaken the organization's stance on charter schools. From Rebecca Klein at HuffPost.

Student Culture in Question  

From Colorado, yet another example of a charter school that uses its "flexibility" to shaft its employees.

Nick Hanauer and Diane Ravitch

Ex-reformster rich guy Hanauer stirred things up a few weeks ago with his piece in the Atlantic. Listen to his podcast talking to Diane Ravitch; there's some really good stuff here.

Problems with Midyear Admissions  

Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat looks at one more way that charters game the test results and avoid taking on some of the tougher challenges of education.

Florida Charters Can Reject Kids With Disabilities

The Orlando Sentinel just noticed one more way that Florida charter avoid providing an actual source of public education to all students.

How a Truly Epic Charter School Fraud Unfolded in Oklahoma  

And speaking of charter cheating, John Thompson is at the Progressive with an astonishing tale of how a truly ballsy piece of charter fraud was pulled off in plain sight.

New Orleans' Kennedy High School Grading Fiasco  

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider with the continuing story of how a NOLA charter has put the future of its students in jeopardy. Will anyone be held responsible?

This Teen Hacker Found Bugs In School Software That Exposed Millions of Records

Want one more story to make you anxious about the online work your students do? This Wired story is just the thing. This high school student didn't just find problems with obscure edusoftware-- he broke into Follett and Blackboard, then used them as doorways to millions of student records including grades, medical, schedules, cafeteria balance, photos, and more. And this was just what a bored, curious sixteen-year-old could do.

Reed Hastings: Stars In Every Position

We’re like a pro sports team, not a kid’s recreational team. Netflix leaders hire, develop and cut smartly, so we have stars in every position.

That's Reed Hastings in a 2009 interview about his then-juggernaut business, Netflix. I came across it recently and, because Hastings has approached education and charter schools with the same business attitude, hoping to turn charter schools into a Netflix-style success story, it seems worth doing a deep read.

This guy.

Hastings has had his hand in many charter pies, from backing outfits like Rocketship and KIPP, as well as serving on the board of California Charter Academy, a chain that collapsed mid-year, leaving 6,000 students high and dry to helping shape charter law in California. Hastings has also had a hand in the launch NewSchools Venture Fund, an investment group that backs ed tech and other edupreneurs. So we're not talking fringe player here.

So what do we discover in this quote?

First, the "pro sports team, not a kid's recreation team" aspect. A pro sports teams picks and chooses its players. A public school does not. Nor can a public school "cut" students who don't measure up.

"Stars in every position" is the same focus. In Hasting's mind, that may apply only to the staff and administration of a school, but people who actually work in education know that part of what creates the atmosphere and culture of a school is, in fact, the students. Would a school that has nothing but star pupils be a great school? Probably. The job in public education is to educate everyone, but what we see repeatedly with the corporate charter movement is schools that "fire" students and their families.

This is educational gentrification. Gentrification says, "This neighborhood is problematic. But we'll come in and replace the buildings with better buildings, the stores with better stores, the apartments with better apartments, and the residents with better residents." Gentrification is about swapping out everything except the latitude and longitude of the neighborhood. In the end, you haven't "improved" anything-- you've replaced everything.

You don't improve a school by replacing everything except the building (and maybe that as well)-- you've just replaced it, and that's no achievement.

I also wonder how far down the star system runs. Is everybody toiling away at minimum wage in the Netflix mail room a star? Or is Netflix just another tech firm like Amazon, built on the labor of anonymous overworked underpaid people who are beneath the notice of the big boys. And how could anyone possibly apply that approach to a school?

But there's something else to watch here, because there's a good argument to be made that Hastings is mostly falling victim to a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. That's the one that says, "I did A, and the B happened, so A must have caused B." I wore my ugly hat to a baseball game and my team didn't suck, therefor my hat made the team unsuck themselves.

Hasting's theories about why Netflix has been successful are going to be put to the test. As you may have heard, the streaming video world that Netflix has previously dominated is about to become much more crowded, with Disney and Warner Brothers pulling content from Hasting's business, and customers already jumping ship. Maybe Hasting's all star team will come up with a clever way to turn this around. Maybe free market competition is about to spur new heights of excellence. Or maybe Netflix is about to become the next Myspace-- first to the party, but not ultimately the dominant player.

In other words, maybe Hastings is not so much a business genius as he is a relatively smart guy was lucky enough to get in front of a wave just as it was starting to peak. Maybe his brilliant leadership and his selection of what he thinks are a bunch of all stars is not the secret of his success at all. Maybe the only lesson he has to teach is "Be lucky," which is not news to anybody (and is already the hiring process for many schools). Or maybe the lesson is that sometimes the free market eats its young and businesses go stumble and fall every day, leaving investors and employees adrift, which may be great for the world of visionary CEOs-- but it's a lousy way to run a public school system, a system which, after all, is not meant to serve just the stars, but everybody.

What Does "Personalized Learning" Even Mean?

Personalized learning is all over the educational landscape these days, even though nobody can offer a clear and consistent explanation for what it might be. The field encompasses everyone from teachers designing more effective methods to businesses with a new edu-product to sell. Assuming for the moment that there is no solid, universal definition, let's consider the different aspects of instruction that could be involved when someone is pitching personalized learning.

Pace

Personalized learning can refer simply to pace. All students cover the same materials in the same order, moving at whatever speed seems to best suit them. If you're old enough to remember doing SRA reading exercises out of the box in your elementary classroom, you have experienced this type of personalization.

Timeline

A more extreme version of pace. Some versions of personalization involve flexible time, with the student allowed as much (or as little) time as is required for them to show mastery of that particular unit. This often requires changes to the traditional rules in order to accommodate students with wildly different, so that Pat's school year may be less than 180 days and Chris's might be more. This could mean that Pat could finish high school by age 15 while Pat was still there at age 20. Nobody has really addressed how to handle this, yet.

Content

The personalization may refer to the content used to deliver the lesson. For instance, everyone in the class may be working on reading for context clues, but Pat gets a reading selection about dinosaurs and Chris gets one about opera, because those are things that Pat and Chris care about. This will require a large library of materials.

Pitch

Netflix is one of many companies that has had success in personalizing pitches. In other words, they take a chunk of content, and they create tailored trailers that are aimed at particular groups.  That's how you end up with a trailer for Lost In Space aimed at Canadians who like comedies. In education terms, this will come out as "we will find the ways to tap into student motivation" aka "we will make this lesson appear to be about something that interests the students." But all the students will still get the same lesson.

Remediation

Chris and Pat take a pre-test about parts of speech. Pat does poorly with adverbs and Chris does poorly with pronouns, so for their next assignment, Chris and Pat get different worksheets. Each gets one geared to the weaknesses they displayed on the previous test. Again, a large and varied bank of materials will be needed.

Learning Styles

The most important thing to know about learning styles is that the whole concept has been repeatedly debunked. Nevertheless, you may find personalization based on this popular but discredited theory. So for a unit about the Civil War, Pat may be assigned a chapter of reading, while Chris is told to watch an instructional video. Be prepared for complaints about how someone got the "easy" assignment.

Assessment Modes

The idea here is to use a mode that best allows the student to display her level of achievement. That might be an objective test or an essay or some sort of project. It may include more than one attempt in more than one mode. Does such a system allow us to consider Pat and Chris's grades comparable? Nobody has really answered this.

Student Choice

One distinguishing feature of different personalization models is the degree of student choice. In a model that's strictly about pace, the student really has no choice except when to move ahead. Other models may give a student a choice of columns A, B or C. The extreme version would be a system that allows the student to make all the choices-- what will be studied, how it will be studied, and how the student will ultimately be assessed.

Delivery Systems

Everything we've discussed so far could be (and often is, because teachers have been personalizing instruction since the invention of dirt) handled by a human teacher. But much of the recent push for personalization comes from the edtech world, where there's a belief that A) computer software can handle many of the complex tasks involved and B) there is money to be made selling that software. The software may be billed as Artificial Intelligence, claiming that it can "learn" the student's style and strengths and therefor generate just the right materials. There are many issues to consider with computerized delivery-by-algorithm, not the least of which is having your educational experience designed and written by software engineers.

Location

Edtech folks like to talk about personalization as anytime, anywhere learning. If all the learning and the assessment of mastery is done via computer, then it could happen any place that the student can hook up to the internet. The issue here becomes the monitoring of these various learning events. Who decides whether or not helping pick up trash earns a student a micro-credential in environmental science.

Questions to ask.

A personalized learning system can include any or all of these features, and yet few come with clear explanations of which features are involved and how they are managed. Personalized learning advocates have generally steered away from discussing the delivery aspect, perhaps because "Let a computer teach your child," is not a great sales pitch. Pitches are also often vague about just how deep and wide their library of materials is; it's worth asking whether the personalized materials are being newly generated or simply plucked from a pre-existing bank of materials, and how large that bank is.

Another good line of inquiry is to ask about the outliers. If you have a student who is socially withdrawn, low-achieving, very interested in Edwardian England, tends to work slowly, but has a very large vocabulary and excellent reading skills, will the program really deliver personalized lessons for that student, will it only come close, or will the student just get basically the same lessons as the rest of the class. In other words, how broad a spectrum of personalization can this system really cover?

Finally, make no assumptions. "Personalized learning" can be a legitimate descriptive educational term, but these days it is just as likely to be used as a marketing term, and like any good marketing term, it is used to encourage the customer to make assumptions about the product that may or may not be related to reality. Don't assume that just because your idea of personalized learning includes a certain feature, so does someone else's. Ask.

Originally posted at Forbes.com

Guest Post: Please Treat Teachers Like Dirt

Last week I posted a blog on Forbes.com about the Phi Delta Kappa annual report on education. This year it features a focus on teacher morale, and I pulled the quote "Tired of being treated like dirt." A reader-- Stacey Miller Chester-- wrote a reply on Facebook I just love, because I'm a sucker for good analogies and metaphors, and so I'm reprinting it here, with her permission:

May I be honest? 

I actually feel we aren't treated like dirt. 

"What?!" No, you read that right. We aren't treated like dirt. I'm a farm girl. I guarantee you that dirt is treated better than teachers. 

Dirt is indeed evaluated...regularly. If it's not producing as expected then the farmer acts quickly to determine the problem. Does it need fertilizer so that the quality of the plants it's responsible for growing is stronger? Perhaps it needs rest since fallow ground repairs itself over a short period of time. Perhaps it needs additives such as lime or nitrogen since so much is expected of it in such a short time. 

Dirt is a limited resource and therefore its value is important to the farmer. He or she values it so much that no expense is spared in its protection and use. Typically, the value of dirt increases and therefore the quality of the dirt is bragged about. Farmers regularly spend thousands of dollars to root out any problems so that dirt's ability to produce is supported and valued by the farmer. 

No, dirt is treated better than most teachers. So, you know, take it for what's worth to you.

Indian Hill, Free To Teach, And How To Bust A Union

If you are a teacher in Pennsylvania, you have probably heard from the folks at Free To Teach (I'm sure there are at least two of them) about how much better your life could be without a union. Their most recent letter includes an example of a district where teachers are happily existing without any connection to the state or national unions.

Free To Teach has been around for a while. It's an operation of the right-wing Commonwealth Foundation which is in turn connected to the State Policy Network, and it's all tied to ALEC and Koch funding. It's the same old gang of people who would like to see unions go away-- particularly those damned teachers unions that provide so much support for the Democratic Party. If you want more details, I've gathered them here.

This time, FTT director Keith Williams wants to tell us about a district he visited-- Indian Hill Exempted School District just outside Cincinnati. It's one of the highest achieving school districts in the country, and they dropped out of the national and state unions five years ago.

They have some facilities, too.

That process apparently involved the help of John Concannon, a lawyer who served as the district lawyer for Cincinnati schools for years. You can read his relatively unthreatening FAQ about the process here; it includes all of the usual reassurances that the teachers don't really need the sorts of protections that the unions offer.

But upon closer examination, Indian Hill Exempted Village School District is a good example of how you really bust a union. Let me tell you a story.

For years, folks from the national union tried to unionize one of our local grocery stores. It never, ever came close to succeeding. The owner of the store paid his workers really well. Beyond that, he treated them with kindness and respect, didn't jerk them around, didn't make them work under crappy conditions, and regularly accommodated their needs outside the job. The employees' stance was simple: What would a union get for us that our boss does not already give us freely? The boss didn't run his business this way in order to keep the union out; that just happened to be one of the side effects.

Let's take a look at Indian Hill Exempted Village School District.

They serve about 1,900 students, who are spread over four schools; those schools are separated by grade bands, not geography, because the district is small. They serve mainly three communities:

Kenwood, Ohio, is 2.3 square miles, includes a little over 3,000 households. Median family income-- $74,511. 1.6% of families below poverty line. 89% white.

Camp Dennison, less than half a square mile with a population under 400.

Indian Hill Exempted Village. A bit over 18 square miles. A little more than 200 households, with a household median income (per 2000 census) of  $179,356. 92% white, less than 1% black. 

In 2002, the Robb Report ("Your global luxury resource") rated it the "best place to raise a family" saying it attracted "well-heeled parents seeking a quiet, safe setting to raise children." Half of the students are labeled gifted. High school student body is 82% white, 8% Asian, 4% Black, 2% Hispanic. Nobody seems to have numbers on free lunch students. Teacher student ratio is 13:1. 53 teachers in the high school. Tons of AP classes and test-takers. Graduation rate is 97%. Average salary is $71,908 (Ohio average is $56, 928). They keep winning awards for being a great place to work-- not a great school, but a great place among all employers.

So, Pennsylvania teachers, as you contemplate this example, consider just how much this district does or does not look like yours. Small, compact, white, wealthy, high-achieving, community supported, with a relatively small teaching staff-- does this sound like your district?

Look, I have never been and will never be a die-hard uncritical fan of the teachers unions; they can be obnoxious, wrongheaded, and focused on issues that don't matter to your local. But it would be foolish to trust the good will and interests of school district management. You will note that Indian Hill School District teachers did not drop all thoughts of a union-- they simply gave themselves a raise by dropping out of unions that tied them to a whole lot of teachers who are poorer and generally worse off than they are (and who don't have access to a friendly edulawyer). They said, "We've made it to the top of the ladder, and it is costing us money and effort to stand around holding onto it so that everyone else can climb up."  That may be a sensible and practical decision (though time will tell), but it's not a decision available to everyone.

In short, Free To Teach's assertion that since Indian Hill teachers ditched the union, your local can, too, is like saying that since LeBron James can skip exercise for a few days, you might as well sit on the couch binging on Cheetos and Top Chef. The real message is, "We don't like unions, and we hop you will quit yours."

Ed Reform vs. Democracy

It was not that long ago that I wrote a piece about how school choice, by shifting the locus of control for the education purse strings, tends to undermine democractic processes. After all, if only parents of school age children, or only rich folks who contribute to tax credit scholarships, get to decide which schools get paid, then the non-parent taxpayers who are footing the bills don't really have much say, and the duly-elected school board has nothing much to do or say, either. School choice is, often, literally taxation without representation (a topic that I could swear has come up before in US history).

Still, it's not always so subtle.

One of the most famously unsubtle incidents would be Reed Hastings (Netflix), who in 2014 told the California School Boards Association in fairly clear terms that elected school boards were a scourge and should be done away with. Hastings has been plenty active in the charter sector, managing to help push through the California law that not only did away with charter caps, but made it possible to run a chain of charters with just one (unelected) board.

But education reform has generally found democracy to be an obstruction. After all, if Bill Gates thinks he knows how to fix education, why should he have to run for some sort of public office when he can just grab power and finance cooperation? Much of ed reform has been powered by movers and shakers and corporate power guys who like (and undoubtedly feel justified by) the all-powerful CEO model. As Hastings once put it when discussing Netflix, "We’re like a pro sports team, not a kid’s recreational team. Netflix leaders hire, develop and cut smartly, so we have stars in every position."

These guys hate unions and government regulation for the same reason guys like Carnegie and Rockefeller hated them-- not just because they cost them money, but because they hampered their ability to be visionary leaders who could control all the elements of their business and make the corporation operate "properly and efficiently" (understanding that only the visionary Captain of Industry truly sees what steps must be taken).

These dismissals of democracy are happening all the time. Let's check in in Florida (state motto "Let's drag public education out back and bury it in the swamp") where privatizers in government jobs have been pushing Duval schools to hurry up and hand their schools over to charter companies, already.

So now, lawmaker Jason Fischer has a new idea-- replace the elected school board with an one appointed by the mayor.

Reformsters are fans of the mayoral takeover of school districts. It gives them cover (after all, the mayor is elected) but insulation from actual democracy (mayoral elections are rarely--though not never-- about education).

Fischer may seem especially cranky because he was elected to the board at one point, but... well, that could have gone better. Like a good Floridian Republican, he clashed with the board over spending money or raising taxes, because Florida (state motto "How can charters compete for education dollars if public schools are fully funded?"). And he's long been a school choice advocate. Ultimately he resigned in order to find some other election fish to fry, but he's kept at the Duval board by proposing term limits and calling for audits. This might also have something to do with the fight between the school board and the mayor over a tiny tax levy to fix some tragically old school buildings.

Whatever the case, the bottom line is the same-- Fischer would like the state legislature to strip Duval County voters of their right to elect a school board, and he's not even offering a lame explanation for why that would be a good idea. Just need to get some of that troublesome democratic process out of the way.