Buddy, Can You Spare A Ride (To The Charter School)?

Remember the days when charter school fans were bragging that they would do more with less? That chorus has been replaced by complaints of how unfair it is that they don't get as many tax dollars for their privately-owned businesses as the public school system gets, resulting in fun new ideas like Florida's notion that charters should be entitled to a cut of any special levies that taxpayers pass to support public schools.

A new demand is surfacing now-- privatizers want taxpayers to help cover transportation costs.

Right in the front row of this new choir is Ben DeGrow. DeGrow is currently the ed policy point man for Mackinac Center, located in Michigan (motto: "We helped grow Betsy DeVos and now she's our gift to all America, you're welcome"), an advocacy thinky tank focused on "economic freedom," aka "the freedom of rich folks to get more rich." He previously worked at Denver's Independence Institute, a Libertarian thinky tank. Like many good think tank education experts, he has no actual education background. Well, okay-- according to the Mackinac website, "Ben’s classroom experiences include service as a university graduate assistant and as a substitute teacher in Michigan public schools."

DeGrow popped up at The Hill last week to make the argument for transportation scholarships (well, that, and to oddly try to accuse Jennifer Berkshire of a progressive and being weirdly obsessed with Betsy DeVos). We need these scholarships, he argues, to reduce obstacles to school choice.

We'll get to what he proposes in a moment, but first, let's note that he makes a huge, huge leap in his argument-- namely, that charter operators actually want to remove this obstacle. The patterns of segregation, the use of charters to gentrify neighborhoods, the fact that some charters do in fact provide transportation-- all of this might suggest that the transportation obstacle is just another way for charter operators to legally keep Those Peoples' Children out of their school. At a minimum, the transportation obstacle weeds out families that don't have a firm commitment to providing total support for their child (the kind of thing that Robert Pondiscio discuses at length in How The Other Half Learns).

So I'm not so sure that all charter schools really want DeGrow's "help" with this "problem." There's no way of knowing how many, exactly, but I'd bet that a large number of charters consider the transportation obstacle a feature, not a bug.

DeGrow drops some intriguing ideas into his Hill piece, like the notion that some "young and growing companies" have In recent years "have given parents in certain areas digital tools they can use to hire qualified drivers"-- so, Uber money (as we'll see, not exactly)?

His focus is mostly Michigan where one might think that good solution for the mostly-for-profit charter sector would be "dig into your pockets and pay for transportation since that's part of the cost of doing business as a school.' But no--it's a standard-issue reformy disruptor model, where instead of even suggesting that government or the charters should solve this problem, tax dollars should just be given to parents who are then "free" to figure it all out for themselves.

DeGrow has actually written a whole thinky tank paper report thing about this. The details aren't entirely compelling. For instance, a Mackinac survey of 950 charter school parents found that 200 didn't get their first choice because of transportation issues. 15%. That's similar to the percentage of students with special needs in Michigan (depending on who's counting). This recent piece puts students with special needs as 10% of public school population, but only 3% of charter school population. Mackinac ought to take a look at what the obstacles are keeping students with special needs out of charters.

DeGrow discusses other models for such a program. In the US, it's Florida again, with Step Up For Students, a tax credit scholarship program that allows you to give money to ed-related businesses instead of paying your taxes. Step Up includes a transportation scholarship program. Outside of that, we have to go to Australia for examples.

Meanwhile, the Urban Institute has been studying up on the issue, resulting in some data that DeGrow might find useful, if not exactly helpful. New Orleans doesn't come up in his discussion, but the UI paper looked at it, and in New Orleans, they've solved the "obstacle" problem easily-- charter schools are required to provide transportation. It costs them money. But then, so do books and desks and other items that are part of the cost of doing business. UI researchers did also find that transportation issues affected how schools handled recruitment.

Funding is a challenge here; there's no pretending that the gas money follows the student, or that moving five students off a single bus helps it run cheaper somehow, or that a child's cut of te bus costs could pay for anything other than inflating bicycle tires. So how is this supposed to be paid for.

DeGrow says "the concept is relatively simple"-- some "discrete" amount of state funding (aka tax dollars) could be "set aside" (aka "spent") for this program. The money would go on a debit card. From there, the families spend their travel vouchers however. Uber and Lyft don't handle under-18 folks, but DeGrow knows of a couple of hot new companies that do. Or you could pool with neighbors. DeGrow takes an entire overwritten paragraph to note that rural folks don't use ride shares much because ride share companies don't open in rural areas because it's hard to make money there.

The costs are not cheap. DeGrow wants to do a pilot in Detroit, and he estimates that rideshare costs work out to roughly $1,400 per student, or a million for 700. At $7.77 per student per day, that seems mighty optimistic (DeGrow's touching article anecdote involves a woman who travels 100 miles). In fact, UI's study also looked at Detroit and found it that it had the highest percentage of students attending outside their neighborhood-- in fact, "75 percent of nearby high-quality schools are located outside city limits." DeGrow envisions some philanthropic buy-in or special funding-- in fact, he thinks that DeVos's Education Freedom Grants (another tax alternative funding deal).

UI researcher Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj passed on a "widely shared sentiment" from New Orleans official:

If you are going to say you have school choice, it is somewhat meaningless if parents can't get to the schools they are choosing. I do think school choice and the requirement to provide transportation go hand in hand. ... Not providing it essentially negates choice.

That idea was, she reports, "less prevalent" in Detroit and NYC.

It is another face of the same old problem. Charter advocates want to have a multi-headed educational ecosystem with many parallel parts, but they want to pay for it with the same money that used to run a single system. Too many charter operators want to be in the school biz, but they don't want to actually pay the costs, and keep looking for ways to get someone else to pay the bills while they reap the revenue.

It's like a guy who says, "I want to open up a new burger joint next to Burger King, but I want the city to give me the building, and I want a cut of every meal that Burger King sells, and I wan someone else to pave the parking lot, because I find the lack of a parking lot is an obstacle to my customers."

If you want to be in the business, pay the costs.

PA: Voucher Bill Still A Threat

Pennsylvania House Speaker and Betsy DeVos fanboy Mike Turzai has suffered a momentary setback in his drive to use Harrisburg schools as a launching pad for a PA voucher program, but he reportedly has not given up.

HB 1800 targets the ailing school district at a point where it has only recently been placed in financial receivership under the control of a state-appointed overseer. One might think that the legislature might take a minute or two to see if their Plan A is going to work, but Turzai smells an opportunity, and he's willing to be the guy who runs into the operating room five minutes after the start of a critical operation and hollers, "She's gonna die anyway-- let me have some of those organs."

The PA Auditor General has weighed in, pointing out that the bill would "bleed out" the district. This is particularly true because the bill would actually award vouchers to students who live in the Harrisburg district, but have never actually attended public school. For those families, the vouchers would be a tasty little windfall. For the district, the vouchers would mean that the district would lose a mountain of money before their enrollment dropped by a single student.

The bill has plenty of other lousy features. It expressly forbids the legislature from exercising any accountability or oversight over voucher-receiving schools, and it expressly preserves the power of voucher receiving schools to reject any applicant for any reason. Under this bill, private and religious schools get to decide; it is truly school's choice and not school choice.

The bill squeaked out of committee over two Republican no votes. Then it was pulled from a full house vote; Turzai didn't have the votes.

According to the PA Association of School Administrators, the speaker is pulling GOP representatives in for some arm-twisting. The bill is not dead yet. If you want to stop the push of vouchers into Pennsylvania, keep calling and emailing your favorite legislator.

Patriot Act: No More Batman

This is a genius clip from Hasan Minhaj's Patriot Act show. An interview with Anand Giridharadas about his book Winners Take All, and as Giridharadas tweeted, "he explained my book better than I can." It's all about Bruce Wayne. This is a 90 second clip, well worth your time.

When it comes to billionaires, we need to tax that ass. #NowStreaming pic.twitter.com/4qUwVo6Nyp

— Hasan Minhaj (@hasanminhaj) December 1, 2019

Noblesse Oblige And the End of Public Education

Maybe you don't usually get around to reading David Dawkins, the Forbes staff member whose beat is billionaires. But back in October he ran an interview that should send a familiar chill through those of us who follow the great education disruption debates.

Dawkins talked to Josef Stadler, the head of Ultra High Net Worst at UBS (the big Swiss bank, about why folks don't trust billionaires these days, and why they probably shouldn't. It's a conversation that echoes much of Anand Giridharadas in Winners Take All, but Stadler offers one further observation about the future.

In “the future”—Stadler pauses—“it is likely that those who benefit most—the entrepreneurs—will substitute public institutions when it comes to the big questions of our lifetime. [Only] they have the money. The public side …” by that he means governments, “will no longer have the money” needed.

Stadler predicts a future where the needs of society are met by the generosity of the brightest, best and richest “entrepreneurs” and business “leaders” of the age—the likes of Buffett, Gates, Branson and Soros.

“We’re going to see the return of something that went away at the end of the 19th century,” he pauses, “the reemergence of a benevolent aristocracy, supporting the people because the public is running out of money.”

We have, of course, seen the beginnings of this in education, most notably with Bill Gates attempt to single-handedly fund a redesign of US education. We see it also in the choice movement-- hand public education over to entrepreneurs and under the magical sway of market forces, they will deliver a better version of education with better quality, better choices, and better educated graduates. The trade-off, of course, is that the entrepreneurs and philanthropists get to decide what better looks like. Meanwhile, as Stadler predicts, public education is drained of the money and resources needed to do the job. The end-stage of school choice looks like a city in which there are no public options, and families must depend on the kindness of rich strangers, the noblesse oblige of the wealthy class, to find an education for their children.

They will get the choice that the wealthy class want them to have. Google "cradle to career" and look at the many companies lined up to use a child's data file to match her up with her proper career. "We see you'd like to enroll your child in our private academy? Well, let's take a look at her file and see what would be the best fit." And if your child has special needs? Well, good luck to you.

When the funds of public education have been emptied, there will be nothing left but the choice and charter programs, unregulated and unaccountable, the public forced to accept whatever the monied class wants to offer them.

Charters are the least likely disruption in this oligarchy, because as currently conceived, they still depend on money that flows through government hands. Keep an eye on instruments like tax credit scholarships (like the one proposed by Betsy DeVos as education [sic] freedom [sic] scholarships [sic]), in which the wealthy get to skip paying taxes by contributing to their favorite privately-run education voucher program instead. Or education savings accounts, in which the government has no role except as a pass through, an office that issues an education allowance to each family and says, "Okay, you go spend that on something educationy. Seeya, bye." Or watch for social impact bonds, a method giving private companies big piles of money as a reward for taking over government programs (and cutting corners off them like crazy).

When we talk about privatization, focus often goes to the way that private companies and individuals make money. But privatization is also about putting the control, the decision-making in the hands of private individuals. The aristocracy grabbing the power to decide what they'll let the little people have. This is rigging the system to make yourself a winner and then blowing some philanthropic smoke to keep people from noticing that you're the one keeping them poor, that you're the one who commandeered their school system (and health care and social safety net etc).

This is not an attractive future (unless you're part of the aristocracy). Whatever we can do to avoid it, we should do.

ICYMI: Deer Season Edition (12/1)

Yes, it may be Thanksgiving weekend where you are, but in my neck of the woods, schools are closed tomorrow for the first day of deer season. Don't knock it if you haven't eaten some excellent deer baloney. In the meantime, hre's some reading from the week

School District's Computer Servers Hacked

Sign of the times. This one was in New Jersey. One more reminder of the vulnerability of school data systems.

Betsy DeVos Gives Defrauded Students The Back of Her Hand    

Over at The Hill they've noticed that DeVos is not exactly racing to help students drowning in debt incurred at frauduversities. Fun detail I hadn't previously seen in coverage of this-- when DeVos signed off on claims already approved, she added "with extreme displeasure" below her signature. What a sweetheart.

Teachers Effects On Student Achievement and Height  

This is just awesome. Researchers took a look to see what happened if you used VAM to check on which teachers had the best effect on student height. Turns out VAM is just as valid for that purpose as it is for measuring teacher effect on test scores. A great addition to everyone's VAM is a sham file.

Research Center's Leadership Professional Development Program Had No Impact. Why?

In a shocking development, yet another set of PD stuff turns out to be largely useless (I know-- I'm shocked, to). Peter DeWitt at EdWeek asks what the problem might be.

Vouchers Explode In Ohio

Stephen Dyer at 10th Period takes a look at how Ohio charter vampires are upping their blood intake to even more dangerous levels.

i-Ready Sells 50-Year-Old Education Failure  

Thomas Ultican has a thoroughly researched look at all the reasons i-Ready is a snare and a delusion. A great read (and not just because he included me).

Kindergarten Teachers Speak Ot For Children's Happiness

Peter Gray at Psychology Today reminding us, again, that pushing academics on the littles is not doing anybody any good.

Ed Tech Agitprop  

Audrey Watters is freakin' awesome. Here's the text of a recent speech she delivered about the stories that ed tech pushers use to sell their junk. A must read.

When the Teachers Are Avatars and the Students Are Data  

Wrench in the Gears traveled to Seattle to speak about some of the threats hiding behind the tech revolution in education.

Trust Issues for Billionaires

David Dawkins at Forbes identifies one of the many longterm problems that come with the rise of our philanthropist kings.

Murmuration: Emma Bloomberg's Obscure Nonprofit    

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider has been digging again, and she's found another project messing with education being funded by Michael Bloomberg's daughter.

TX: Bigotry In The Classroom

This is a troubling story, for several reasons.

Georgia Clark was an English teacher in the Fort Worth Independent School District, a district with over 80% Hispanic student population. Clark sent a message to Donald Trump, asking him to do something about all the illegal [sic] immigrant students. Her request included charming lines like "anything you can do to remove the illegals from Fort Worth would be greatly appreciated" and a request for "help reporting illegals in the Fort Worth public school system" and even a complaint that "the Mexicans refuse to honor our flag."

But it turns out that Clark is a little fuzzy on how to work the electric tweeter machine, and posted her various complaints as regular tweet and not direct messages, and that's where her latest troubles began. So her request for protection so that she could make her requests anonymously was, well, not so useful.

FWISD had reportedly already had Clark on their radar for not-entirely-supportive language used with students; she was apparently almost fired in 2013. This blew up in the community, and the district made the obvious call-- they put her on leave immediately, then fired her.

Clark didn't want to go, so she appealed the firing, and last week, Texas Education Agency commissioner Mike Morath ordered that she be reinstated, with back pay.

The FWISD board is appealing, and took a symbolic revote just to be clear that they really mean it, and again unanimously canned Clark. The board says that they believe the state's ruling is based on a procedural technicality, but the conclusion of the state's report also says  

Clark’s Twitters were a private citizen’s free speech about a matter of public concern and was privileged and does not establish good cause for termination.

Free speech? Yes, freedom of speech has to protect odious opinions, or it's not really freedom. And yes, we want the freedom of teacher speech to be absolutely protected. But this a whole other level.

She hasn't just expressed an ugly opinion. She has taken action against her own students. She has made her own classroom an actively unsafe place. This is not just an exercise of free speech any more than if she started whacking her students with a two-by-four. It is impossible to imagine how students could ever feel safe in her classroom again-- this is a woman who asked the President of the United States to come drag some of her students out of her classroom and throw them out of the country. Georgia Clark should never work in a school again. It's shocking that Mike Morath doesn't get that.

After all, there are fifth grade girls in Utah who figured it out. In more encouraging news this week, three girls left a classroom to get an administrator to remove a substitute teacher who had decided to launch an endless rant against a student who dared to say he was thankful that his two dads were going to adopt him. The teacher was shown the door immediately (still reportedly trying to expand on her anti-gay rant). The boy never should have had to go through the experience, but at least the people around him knew how to react.

Look. Different teachers bring different values into the classroom, ranging from the mildly edgy to the horrifically indefensible. But if your primary value is not the safety and nurturing of those students, over and above whatever other beliefs you have, you don't belong in the class. And if your beliefs are so antithetical to valuing all human beings, then you don't belong in the classroom. Texas got this one wrong.

Ed Tech Giant Powerschool Keeps Eating the World

If you want to be a tech giant, you can try to grow organically within your company, or you can just look for companies that are already doing what you want to do, and buy them. Some are better than the strategy than others-- Facebook absorbed Instagram well enough, but Google seems to kill everything it touches.

Back in the day, PowerSchool was a simple little program for taking care of classroom clerical work. Of the e-gradebooks I was forced to use in my career, it was the last and the most usable. Not everyone loves it (though I suspect in some cases it's the local district IT department's choice of options that deserves the blame), and while I'm no technophobe, I never stopped using a paper gradebook and copying it into PowerSchool.

Pearson bought it. Then Pearson sold it to a private investment firm, which is not always good news. But on the user end, we didn't notice much difference.

That was about four years ago, and PowerSchool has developed Aspirations. Now they have finalized the purchase of Schoology, a learning management system that boasts a presence in over 60,000 schools. I have no idea if they're any good or not, though their website does boast one of my favorite Ambiguous Endorsements-- "We put Schoology in front of our teachers and their mouths dropped."

This is the ninth acquisition for PowerSchool since 2015. The goal is a "Unified Classroom" suite, and as described in EdSurge, it's not good news. The goal is "toconnect assessment, enrollment, gradebook, professional learning and special education data services to its flagship student information system, which already houses a variety of data including attendance, discipline, health, roster and schedules."

Nor does CEO Hardeep Gulati's description of the goal of a unified data ecosystem sound any better:

“Having all the information together in one place,” says Gulati, “offers educators a better way to create a personalized learning experience in PowerSchool.” He adds: “Schools should have one seamless way to travel between their student information system, learning management systems and assessment tools through common data sharing experiences and capabilities.” 

There are many reasons not to be excited here. The most obvious is the huge potential for data mining. In a state like Florida that has committed to establishing a full-on surveillance state for students, a program like this would be just what the doctor ordered to better keep its creepy eyes on every student. I expect that one side effect of all this disruptive innovation will be a new sales pitch for pricy private schools-- "Send your child to our swanky private school where we won't keep 24/7 digital records of her every move."

It's also worth remembering that all of this digitized data will be in the hands of a company owned by private investment firms. Data, particularly massive data kept on a whole new generation from childhood, is the new oil. Try to imagine a corporate boardroom where they look at this vast reserve of valuable data they have their hands on, and they just say, "Yes, we could get rich by monetizing this asset, but it would be wrong, so we won't." And even if the current owners managed to hang onto their scruples, what about the guys who eventually buy them out.

Beyond the big global ethical privacy and data concerns, there's one other to keep in mind-- the bigger a learning management system gets, the less use it is to a classroom teacher.

I was a Moodle guy; it was a hugely useful tool for me, with features I really liked and other features I could ignore and a very responsive support system that let me ask for what I wanted. No LMS I ever encountered made me happier as a classroom teacher. The problem--well, part of the problem-- is that when you add a "feature" to an LMS, you are adding a "way this particular function has to be done.": An LMS is particularly helpful when it lets you do something you couldn't otherwise do at all; Moodle let me run online threaded class discussion, a new way to extend student discussion. It was something that I couldn't already do.

But when an LMS moves into areas such as giving tests and record keeping, it is now telling me how to do things that I already do. Feature creep keeps going, and pretty soon the teacher is locked into whole methods of test giving, test grading, record-keeping etc etc etc. There is tell-tale language that often crops up. Schoology, for instance, talks about how great it is for administrators. And I'm sure, in terms of uniform record keeping and accessing and spread sheeting, it's lovely (particularly if you are an administrator who dreams of management by screen. But one size fits all LMS is not great for classroom teachers, Particularly--and this is another part of the problem--if the LMS was designed by computer guys and not actual teachers. And no, you don't get credit for using one or two teachers as consultants, because teachers are different. My management system in my classroom would have given some of my colleagues fits.

So it is not good news that PowerSchool is working on micromanagement and data mining in order to make things easier for the bosses. Big brother just keeps getting bigger, but mostly what that does is make a world in which the people who actually do the work just look smaller and smaller.