Booker Returns To The Corporate Fold

On Monday of this week, Cory Booker went full charter school in an op-ed for the New York Times, a choice that made a little more sense when I looked at my Wednesday e-mail from Whitney Tilson.

Whitney Tilson is a successful hedge funder who started Democrats for Education Reform mostly because at that point, Republicans for Education Reform would have been unnecessary. The GOP was already behind the idea of privatization; it was the Dems who needed a push in that direction. In some states, actual Democrats have repudiated the D in DFER, and since Betsy DeVos became the public face of so many of their favorite policies, they've been struggling for Democrat leverage. Look for them and their friends every time you hear of a poll that shows how much Real Democrats love charter schools.

Cory Booker was a hot young star and a friend of DFER, so things were looking good. But then suddenly the 2020 election actually involved more education discussion than just thirty seconds about universal pre-K, and Booker's close ties to charters and, yes, Betsy DeVos, were looking like an obstacle.

Apparently, Booker has decided to just lean into charter support. Monday's op-ed was a compendium of the usual pro-charter baloney. Students are trapped in zip codes with bad schools; this is not baloney, but the idea that we should let some privatized amateurs rescue a few of those children instead of investing resources in the improvement of the public schools-- well that is baloney. The back seat of my car is filled with fast food boxes and twinkie wrappers-- clearly the only solution is to buy a second car.

And Booker tries to dance along the thin line that has been frustrating reformsters for the last three years:

For-profit charter school schemes and the anti-public education agenda of President Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos are hurting teachers, students and their families. Of course, we must fight back against these misguided and harmful forces. But we shouldn’t let the worst actors distort this crucial debate, as they have in recent years.

Dude. You worked side by side with DeVos, cheering a multitude of for-profit schemes (and please don't insult our intelligence by trying the old "for-profit charters are evil but non-profits are fine" dodge. There are plenty of ways to profit from non-profit charters, and you have seen most of them). Hillary tried this stuff. Mayor Pete is trying it right now.

Booker is going to assert that "high-performing charter schools" are some kind of entirely different beast, and he's going to try to attach "public" to them. They aren't. He's going to try to paint the privatization and charter mess in Newark as a success, which is a generous read. Then there's this gem:

As Democrats, we can’t continue to fall into the trap of dismissing good ideas because they don’t fit into neat ideological boxes or don’t personally affect some of the louder, more privileged voices in the party.

Can we fall into the trap of dismissing bad ideas because they are bad? Because I don't have a problem with unaccountable, privately owned and operated, non-transparent, selectively creaming, public school draining, redundant, segregationalist, profiteering charter schools because they ofend some ideological box of mine.

And about those "louder, more privileged voices" in the party-- well, that brings me back to Tilson's Wednesday e-mail, in which he stumps for Booker.

Turns out that Booker had a couple of meetings with Tilson last week, and now Tilson is convinced that Booker is "viable." He'll beat Trump "handily." He published the "courageous" op-ed that I'm assuming was Exhibit A in Booker's "You Rich Guys Can Trust Me" pitch. Also, they're longtime friends, and Booker helped Tilson's daughter with a class project.

It appears that Booker has decided to join Mayor Pete and Bloomberg and that other guy whose name I've already forgotten in trying to tap the Rich Guys Who Are Scared To Death of Warren and Sanders wing of the party. And why not-- Booker might as well run as himself and not court whiplash by trying to veer leftward. A later paragraph in his op-ed suggests he might be trying to stake out a place in the Make Everybody Happy Lane:

As a party, we need to take a holistic approach to improving outcomes for children who are underserved and historically disadvantaged. That must mean significantly increasing funding for public schools, raising teacher pay, fully funding the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, investing in universal preschool, eliminating child poverty — and yes, supporting high-performing public charter schools if and when they are the right fit for a community, are equitable and inclusive, and play by the same rules as other public schools.

"Equitable and inclusive and play by the same rules as other public [sic] schools" is a mighty tall order, one that charters have pretty consistently kicked back against. After all, they will say, the whole point of being a charter school is to not have to play by those rules. The funny thin here is that if Booker actually meant that-- if he actually meant that charters must be owned by the taxpayers, and operated by taxpayer-elected boards, and must raise the tax money needed to operate, and operate with complete operational and financial transparency ,and students teachers and staff all have all their rights and protections, and all students must be accepted even if that means the additional expense of providing necessary programs for special needs, and teachers must be fully certified and free to unionize, and must be operated by fully qualified trained educators, and cannot be used in any kind of profit-making shell game-- if he actually meant all that, then he wouldn't be quite so far removed from Warren and Sanders. But then, if he actually meant all that, I don't think Whitney Tilson would be writing him a glowing letter of recommendation.

No, it appears that Booker remains a good friend of corporate ed reform, the kind of guy who, had he been elected in 2016 ,would have been perfectly happy to install Betsy DeVos or Eva Moskowitz or Michelle Rhee as Secretary of Education and pursue the same failed policies that we suffered under in the Bush-Obama years. I'm already on record-- my expectations are low and I will vote for Cory Booker-- hell, I'll vote for Cory Booker's dog-- should he win the nomination. But until that day comes, public education voters should steer clear

The Waltons Try To Disrupt Elizabeth Warren (updated)

Elizabeth Warren was in Atlanta at Clark Atlanta University to talk to black voters, when the rally was disrupted by a group of charter school supporters, angry about the hard line stance Warren has staked out on the charter school industry.

The group of grass roots charter supporters had, they said, "come from all over the country," and if that doesn't send up a little red flag, then perhaps their perfectly matching t-shirts and signs might.

Intercept reporter Ryan Grim was there, and with some interviewing and online searches, he unraveled the whole thing pretty quickly in a series of tweets that are collected in this write-up.

The group said they raised money on GoFundMe, which turned out to be true-- however, the funding was stacked with  anonymous $1,000 donors.

The group included Memphis Lift Parent Institute, Sarah Carpenter is the founder and chief exec, but she didn't do it alone. The group was aided by Strategy Redefined, a Nashville education consulting firm, and Natasha Kamrani, head of Tennessee's chapter of Democrats for Education Reform and the wide of Chris Barbic, the original head of Tennessee's ill-fated Achievement School District. Grim says that the group is 100% funded by the Waltons; published reports say they've given Memphis Lift $1.5 million since 2015. Since their 2017 filing shows $375, 200, with $200 coming from public contributions, that 100% seems just about right. Here's a glowing profile of the group on the Walton Foundation site.

[Update: Per Matt Barnum* the group also include Howard Fuller and a few other activist groups funded by Walton and City Fund money.]

It's not unusual for the Waltons to find and fund black faces to put forward their charter agenda. And while Memphis Lift sometimes claims to be agnostic about public-vs-charter schools, that is one big batch of charter-loving folks backing up this grass roots group.

As Grim tweeted, "A group funded by some of the richest people in the world, the Waltons, just disrupted an @ewarren speech on the 1881 Atlanta washerwoman strike. Can't make this stuff up." It's not a new game; charter advocates have often loaded up parents and students, made them some t-shirts, and deployed them as citizen lobbyists.

There's a lot of money and power behind the charter school movement. Expect more of these shenanigans if Warren continues to lead the Democratic pack. The charter industry is not gong to let her go without a fight.

*Update: There's a good further account of the meeting and more details about the group that protested here by Matt Barnum in Chalkbeat

The One And Only Lesson To Be Learned From NAEP Scores

It has been almost a month since the NAERP scores have dropped, and some folks are still trying to torture some sort of useful insights from the numbers (here's Mike Petrilli at Fordham writing a piece that should be entitled "What to learn about being better a hitting the wrong target").

The world of education is a fuzzy one, with some declaring that teaching is more art than science. But then the National Assessment of Educational Progress is issued. “The Nation’s Report Card” is greeted as a source of hard data about the educational achievement of fourth and eighth graders (and in some years, high school students), theoretically neither biased nor tweaked as state tests might be. 

NAEP scores were released three weeks ago, and they have been percolating down through pundits, ed writers, ed bureaucrats, and ordinary ed kibitzers. So now that we have had weeks to absorb and process, what have some folks offered as important lessons, and what’s the only lesson that really counts?

Some have offered lessons that are simply misreadings of the data. The three NAEP levels (basic, proficient, and advanced) do not necessarily mean what folks think they mean, which is why Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was incorrect when she claimed that NAEP showed two thirds of students don’t read at grade level. NAEP’s “proficient” is set considerably higher than grade level, as noted on the NAEP site. (This is a lesson that has to be relearned as often as NAEP scores are released.)

It’s worth noting that there is some debate about whether or not NAEP data says what it claims to say. There are arguments about how levels are set, with some arguing that the levels are too high. An NCES report back in 2007 showed that while NAEP considers “basic” students not college ready, 50% of those basic students had gone on to earn a degree. A 2009 report from the Buros Institute at the University of Nebraska also found issues with NAEP results. It’s possible that those issues have been tweaked away in the decade since, but that would have implications for any attempts to trace trends over all that time.

NAEP is extraordinarily clear that folks should not try to suggest a causal relationship between scores and anything else. Everyone ignores that advice, but NAEP clearly acknowledges that there are too many factors at play here to focus on any single one.

Betsy DeVos argues that the NAEP scores show that the U.S. needs more school choice. Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform, which has long supported charters schools over public schools, argues that the NAEP scores are evidence that the U.S. public education system is failing. Former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan argues that the scores are proof that the country must courageously pursue more of the reform initiatives that he launched while in office. Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Institute called the poor results “predictable”as he blames them on the Great Recession, and pointed to a few small data points as proof that the kinds of reforms backed by Fordham work. The National Council on Teacher Quality claims that the static scores are the result of college teacher education programs that don’t teach teachers the proper ways to teach reading and math. It’s clear that when your only tool is a hammer, the NAEP looks just like a nail.

Critics of education reform like Diane Ravitch note that the NAEP scores showthat a “generation of disruptive reform” has produced no gains, that the NAEP trend line stays flat. DeVos singled out Detroit as an example of failed policies, yet the policies that have failed in Detroit are largely those reform policies that she herself pushed when she was an education reform activist in Michigan. And some policies may improve scores without actually helping students; Mississippi in 2015 joined the states that held back students who could not pass a third grade reading test, meaning those low-scoring students would not be in fourth grade to take the NAEP test. It would be like holding back all the shorter third graders and then announcing that the average height of fourth graders has increased. 

In all discussions, it’s useful to remember that the increases or decreases being discussed are small– a difference of just a few points up or down. NAEP scores have shown neither a dramatic increase or decrease, but a sort of dramatic stagnation. That is arguably worse news for education reformers, who have been promising dramatic improvements in student achievement since No Child Left Behind became the law almost twenty years ago. 

So what’s the one actual lesson of NAEP? One continuing belief for some students of education policy is that if we just had some cold, hard data, we could really get some stuff done. We could settle arguments about curriculum and pedagogy and policy, and by making data-driven decisions, we could steer education into a new golden age.

Well, here’s our regular dose of cold hard data. It hasn’t settled a thing. 

That’s the one actual lesson of NAEP; the dream of data-informed, data-driven decision making as a cure for everything that ails us is just a dream. Data can be useful for those who want to actually look at it. But data is not magical, and in education, it’s fruitless to imagine that data will settle our issues.

Originally posted at Forbes.com

Yes And

Why do I see such a profound lack of “yes and” in education conversations?

“YES we can criticize bad data AND advocate for preparing students for the jobs of the future.”

“YES we can advocate for abolishing the the tests AND argue to improve education.”

— Akil Bello (@akilbello) November 13, 2019

This tweet (shared with permission) really hit me where I live. Because defenders of public education have too often let themselves be pushed into a one-part argument when a two-part argument is what's called for.

Blame No Child Left Behind. It was educational baloney, but rhetorical genius. Every attempt to discuss the empty baloniness of it was met by the same response; "Well, then, which children do you want to leave behind."

Ever since, this has been the ed disruptors' framing for everything. If you want Goal A, then you must support Method Z. If you want accountability, you must support high stakes testing. If you don't like bad schools, you must support privately run charter schools (also, if you support freedom, you must support charter schools).

When pressed, reformsters double down on descriptions of the awfulness of the problem.

Reformster: Look at these test results. Look at these x-rays. You definitely have a brain tumor, and if it's not fixed, you'll soon lose feeling in your limbs and your legs will stop working properly.
Patient: Oh my God! Save me!
Reformster: Certainly. I'm just going to use this chain saw to cut off your legs.
Patient: Wait! What? How will that help with my brain tumor?
Reformster: Look at these x-rays! Look at how big it is! Right there in your brain! This is terrible!
Patient: But how will hacking off my legs-
Reformster: X-rays! Brain! Terrrrrrrible!

What's always missing is the link, the evidence that the proposed solution is the only solution acceptable to someone who cares about the problem. Question VAM and hg-stakes testing? It couldn't because there are real problems with those instruments-- the only possible explanation is that you hate accountability.

This is where we need "yes and"

Not even "yes, but." Because "yes, but" implicitly acknowledges that linkage as legit. "But" signals a change in direction, which suggests that the people you're butting were headed in the direction they said they were in. It lets things stay connected that are not truly connected. It agrees that some things are mutually exclusive, when they really aren't.

See, the problem with most of the reformster disruptive solutions is not just that they're bad practice, bad pedagogy, bad economics, or just plain bad. It's that they aren't going to solve the problems they purport to solve. It's a problem that some students attend schools that are under-resourced, under-staffed, and generally a mess. Charters will not solve that problem. It's a reasonable goal to provide students and family with educational choices. Modern corporate charters do not solve that problem, It is right and reasonable to have some form of accountability in place for public schools and the people who work there. High stakes testing soaked in VAM sauce does not solve that problem.

So.

Yes, I want an end to high stakes testing, and I want a useful measure of accountability.

Yes, I want charters to be reined in with accountability measure, elected local control, and no form of profit attached to them at all, and I want to see every student in this country in a good school.

Yes, I want an end to programs that put warm bodies with inadequate training in classrooms, and I want every student to have a quality professional teacher.

Yes, I want to end all the practice testing and test prep, and I want us to get better at targeting and addressing the needs of students.

Yes, I want to chuck every foolish piece of ed tech in the ocean, and I want to find good classroom uses for current technology.

Yes, I reject attempts to make teaching jobs less secure and teachers easier to fire, and I want the teaching pool to get better and better, with fewer and fewer lemons.

Yes, I reject attempts to compare students in Idaho to students in Vermont, and I want parents to be able to know how well their children are doing.

Yes, I think college and career ready standards are a stupid idea, and I want every student to be able to move into a college or career that suits them.

Yes, I think rich amateurs should shut up and sit down on the topic of education, and I think we should be having a robust national discussion about education.

I could go on all day. You get the idea.

Look, we have real issues to deal with in education, and they've been largely exacerbated by rich and powerful amateurs who have shiny disruptions to sell. The other important part of "yes and" is that it allows us to focus on real issues and real solutions instead of getting caught up in arguments about whether or not someone should cut off our legs with a chainsaw. Granted, the chainsaw wielding pretend doctor is a real threat, but somehow we can't let him drain all our attention and energy. And we certainly need to reject and work past the notion that his solution is the only one that serious people can consider.

David Osborne Tells The Big Charter Lie

Somewhere on the other side of the Wall Street Journal paywall, David Osborne is bloviating about why charters are swell and Democratic candidates should stop telling "big lies" about them. The WSJ undoubtedly considers this a real stroke of some kind because Osborne is nominally a Democrat, the kind Arne Duncan hugging, Al Gore assisting Democrat who loves him some charters just as deeply as any conservative.

I didn't read then piece, because I'll be damned if I'll give that Fox-in-a-fancy-tux news outlet any of my money, but I've been watching the conversation about it all morning, and I'd like to chip in two cents more, because even if David Osborne were right, he'd be wrong, and even the fileted chunks of his piece that I've seen are not countering the Big Charter Lie-- they are perpetuating it.

Leonie Haimson fired off a letter to the WSJ that she also posted at NYC Public School Parents, and it cuts straight to the chase.

Osborne is particularly upset about the scurrilous claim that charter schools drain revenue, and he offers as counter-proof that a school that falls below 75% enrollment can start renting out space to charters. Haimson reminds us that in NYC, public schools are forced to hand over that space for free.

Osborne also argues that in some states, the public school is "cushioned" from having money drained by charters, and he gets his list of states really wrong there, but here's the thing-- he's just indulging in the true Big Lie of charters. (His baloney about charters being public schools is just marketing baloney.)

Let's say a full cushion really happens. Let's say that in Pennshiretuckia, when a charter pulls $1 million away from a public school, the state just cushions that hole so that the public system doesn't actually lose any money. What is that cushion made of? An extra $1 million of taxpayer dollars! A "cushion" would be a de facto tax increase to fund charter schools! It's like this conversation:

Son: Can I have five bucks to buy gin?

Dad: Absolutely not.

(The next day) Son: Can I have five bucks for lunch money?

Dad: Sure. But what happened to the ten I gave you yesterday?

Son: I spent half of it on gin.

Dad: Well, thank God I didn't give you any money to spend on gin.

The Big Lie of Charter Schools is that we can fund multiple systems for the exact same cost that we spent to operate one. But no charter advocate has the balls to stand up and say, "I want to raise your taxes so that we can open new, privately operated, profit-generating schools in addition to the ones you're already funding." So instead we either force public schools to cut what they can't afford to cut, or we put extra money into the total education ecosystem and hide it as donations from rich people or grants from a government slush fund or nice words like "cushion."

SMH. Look, if you want something scholarly, there's a whole new study showing how North Carolina's charter system is gutting its public system. But this really isn't rocket science. As soon as you suggest that a "cushion" protects a public system from being harmed by charter vampires, you've admitted two things:

1) Anyone who doesn't have a cushion is being harmed and

2) The whole premise of charters for cheap is a big lie

PA: Charter Drains Public Schools, Now Wants To Absorb Them

This week the Philadelphia Enquirer ran the story of a charter operator that wants to take over all of a district's public elementary schools. This is perhaps a logical next step in a district that has been steadily and methodically starved over the past decade. Once you've sucked out the blood and consumed the flesh, what is there left to do but feast on the bones?

The school district is Chester Uplands, and they've been in the charter-related news before. Specifically, they were the poster child for how a careful gaming of the charter system in Pennsylvania could result in huge charter profits. As I wrote at the time:

The key is that while all CUSD students with special needs come with a hefty $40K for a charter school, they are not all created equal. Students on the autism spectrum are expensive to teach; they make up 8.4% of CUSD special ed student population, but only 2.1% at Chester Community Charter School, and a whopping 0% at Widener and Chester Community School of the Arts. Emotionally disturbed students are also costly; they make up 13.6 % of special ed at CUSD, 5.3% at Chester Community, and zero at the other two. Intellectual disabilities make up 11.6% for CUSD, 2.8% for CCCS, and zero for the others. 

Speech and language impaired, however, are pretty inexpensive to educate. CUSD carries 2.4% of the special ed population in this category, but the three charters carry 27.4%, 20.3% and 29.8%.

Back in 2015, this helped put CUSD in the astonishing position of giving more money to charter schools than it received from the state.

Gureghian's PA home, where he
no doubt sits and thinks about
how he does it all for the children

Meanwhile, the district has been under the supervision of a court-appointed receiver since 2012. The state takeover hasn't exactly helped; the administrative side of things is such a monumental mess that in 2017 the state auditor general aid his office could not complete an audit of the district-- too many records were lost or just screwed up. The third of the court-appointed receivers was re-appointed this year--and promptly to spend more time with his actual day job. This is not supposed to mess up the newest recovery plan roll-out, as that work is being done by some hired consultant.

In 2015 the district made a deal for charters to accept less money for students with special needs, but the cyber charters went to court to be exempted-- and the court eventually agreed, giving CUSD a huge retroactive bill to pay cyber charters.

The district has long been attractive to worst of charter vultures. Not just the cybers, but for-profit management companies like CSMI, founded by the infamous Vahan Gureghian, charter school multimillionaire and generous GOP donor.

Currently, charters enroll about half of the 7,000 student district population. CSMI would like to have a larger piece of the pie and run all of the elementary education in Chester Uplands, and it has asked the court to hand them over (because the district itself has no say in this). CSMI runs some charters elsewhere, including a school in New Jersey that is the subject of a whistleblower lawsuit. The suit was filed by a former principal who says she was fired for making a fuss over CSMI's policy of cutting corners to make a buck. Cutting corners didn't just mean cutting services; it also meant falsifying records and misappropriating funds. Great company.

The Palm Beach mansion Gureghian just sold at a profit.
There's probably a whole separate room just for thinking
about the children.

It is unclear how much money CSMI would make on the Chester Uplands deal because, as a private business, it doesn't have to account for its financials activities-- even though they are funded by trhe taxpayers. Do you see why, when someone like Cory Booker or Pete Buttigieg starts talking about how only for-profit charters are bad, they are just selling thinly sliced baloney. Chester Community Charter School is as non-profit school--that generates profits for the CSMI management company that runs it, and runs it like a business and not like a school.

The Inquirer quoted the CUSD school board president--his primary concern isn't the charter takeover of the elementary schools as much as it is the inadequate funding from the state. "Ask them what they have done for 25 years in Chester Upland." He has sort of a point, but the fact is that this non-weathy non-white district is in danger of losing all local control and voice.

This is what chartering as a tool of privatization looks like. Gut the public schools. Chase the students into profitable charters. Strip every last asset from the public school and strip all the power from the voters and taxpayers. Operate charters like businesses; every dollar you spend on students is a dollar you don't get to keep. Make some guy a multimillionaire while stripping public education and democratic voice from the members of a poor community.

PA: Vouchers Are One Step Closer To Ugly Reality

HB 1800, the bill intended to pilot vouchers in Pennsylvania, made it out of committee today. The vote was 13-12, with two GOP representatives (Rosemary Brown and Meghan Schroeder) voting no.

The precipitating excuse for this bill is the school system of Harrisburg, a system that has suffered from financial mismanagement and so was put in financial receivership, a sort of state takeover, last June. By August, House Speaker Mike Turzai was chomping at the bit, because after all, the state had had almost two whole months to turn things around.

Turzai is a Betsy DeVos fanboy with a long-standing dislike for public education, so Harrisburg's vulnerability must strike him as a great chance to once again try to sell vouchers to a GOP-dominated legislature that has already grabbed onto plenty of choice-flavored assaults on public ed.

The foot in the door is the classic voucher approach. It's generally "these will just be for the poor families" or "just for those trapped in a failing school." Turzai has always been a fan of the "We spent all this money on these schools and where are the shiny test scores?" line of reasoning, and Harrisburg schools don't have a lot of friends or political support right now, so they must look like a great chance to start the voucher train rolling in PA.

The bill is ugly. The state-appointed receiver is directed to offer vouchers, without caps and without oversight. Also, the districts have to provide transportation. Half of the voucher amount ($8,200) would come out of local money and half from the state subsidy. And the bill expressly forbids the state from forcing anyone to accept these vouchers-- so private schools can pick and choose which students they want to accept.

It's also worth remembering that where they have been implemented, vouchers tend to pump lots of public tax money into private religious schools.

In other words, this bill will literally require taxpayers to send their tax dollars to schools that may refuse to accept those taxpayer's children.

Turzai is floating the bullshit claim that this will somehow have a financial benefit to the district. It won't. It will drain millions of dollars from a struggling district, allowing only certain select students to move to voucher schools, without any oversight to let the taxpayers know how those dollars were spent. Plus that whole separation of church and state thing.

This bill is bad, bad news. It's another assault on public education, and honestly I don't know why conservatives aren't bothered by the whole "We're just going to send taxpayer money whereever and you don't get to ask any questions about what happened to it ever."

But the thing is out of comittee, which means it will be up for general vote at some point. So if you're in PA, now's a good time to get ahold of your legislator and ask them in forceful terms to vote "no" on this damned thing.