This Is Why You Need A Secretary of Education With Classroom Experience

Betsy DeVos has been pretty much no help at all during the pandemic closing of schools. The US Department of Education has offered next to no guidance to public schools on how best to navigate the current storm.

Imagine a country where, in the face of a major disruptive health crisis that cuts across all communities, the federal department of education says, "We've got some stuff figured out and some resources to share. Let us know what we can do to help you get through this." That might be cool.

This frickin' amateur

But it's not where we are. Mostly DeVos has seemed anxious to capitalize on the crisis by pushing online schooling. This has led to some unclear directives that seem to boil down to, "Get that education stuff on line, and if you have to leave behind some students to do it, oh well." DeVos also smells a chance to launch another kind of national voucher program.

All that, and once again, she shows the effects of having no actual background in a real classroom. Witness this little side note from a recent conference call, as reported by Andrew Ujifusa at EdWeek:

On a conference call with reporters Thursday that focused mainly on higher education, DeVos said that she recognized that the virus has created unprecedented circumstances for students and educators. But in response to a reporter's question, she also stressed that she's not inclined to simply let schools off the hook on their core mission, saying "We can do hard things" and that some districts that have responded well to the coronavirus should serve as a model for others.

"We have an expectation that learning will continue for all students," DeVos said. "And we would hope that it would be an aspirational goal ... that the students would not only maintain their current level of learning, but continue to expand" it.

This probably seems like a perfectly sensible position to take if you have no idea what goes on in a classroom.

There are layers here. Like the use of the phrase "let schools off the hook" which suggests, as DeVos often does, that public schools and their staffs are always on alert for ways to get out of work, that the teachers in this country are right now kicking back and sipping margaritas and not, say, losing sleep at night worrying about their students and their students' education.

And that "we can do hard things," which--well, first, what do you mean "we"? Since when were you part of the vast cadre of educational professionals who get up and do hard things every single day, because yes, teachers do hard things every single frickin' day and only someone with no direct knowledge of what goes on in a classroom would assume that the default setting for a teacher's life is "easy."

And serving as models for others is perhaps not completely out of line except that it's coming from DeVos and is rooted in her belief that every public school in this country is like every other one, that it's a nation of one size fits all, which again simply reveals a deep ignorance. While schools can (and will and have and do) learn from each other, one of the features of this mess is that every school, teacher, and family's situation is very specific and personal.

As for her expectation that learning will continue form all students-- is she not paying attention? Has she not read the accounts of the many students who have simply stepped away from crisis education entirely, either because of a lack of resources or too many other troubles at home or actually we don't even know some of the reasons. Is she not aware of the ongoing debates among education professionals-- can we teach new material, even if we have no way of providing some students with the support needed? Can we grade it or count it? Particularly when we are flying by the seat of our pants to shift instruction into a mode that has never been done effectively, even by the people who are in the cyber school business?

Can she not offer some clear understanding of the complexity of this task instead of just waving her hand vaguely and saying, "Make it work somehow. You know, be aspirational."

Meanwhile, privatizers are chomping at the virtual bit to get students shoved into more profitable avenues of education-flavored products, like her old friends at the Heritage Foundation who are cheering her on to keep pushing the product because this is ed tech's Katrina and by God they are going to cash in or know the reason why.

The Koch-funded Mercatus Center has more of the same. "Leverage the near-ubiquity of cellphones and internet to deliver instruction online," but near-ubiquity is a lame measure, indeed. I imagine that none of these deep thinkers would like to be shot into space in a rocket that contains a near-ubiquity of oxygen tanks nor live in a home with a near-ubiquity of food. Worried about students with special needs? Senior policy analyst Johnathan Butcher reads the fed instructions as saying, "Give it a shot, but hey, if you have to leave them, leave them with our blessing." Butcher adds "Parents, taxpayers, and policymakers should not allow traditional schools to claim they do not have the resources or expertise to deliver instruction online" based on God only knows what. And he touts the Florida Virtual School, Florida's experiment in cyber-schooling that just keeps failing upward because Florida's political leaders would rather finance a profitable turd than support public education.

In short, the amateurs are out in force, yammering about how schools should now see things their way, even though they don't know what the hell they're talking about.

It would be great, in the midst of all this, to be able to turn to a secretary of education who actually knew something--anything-- about the inside of a classroom, who actually had a grasp of the many issues involved in the current crisis. I don't mean to pick on DeVos, who is basically the Herbert Hoover of education right now-- I can't think of any secretary of education, not Arne "Katrina is super-duper" Duncan, not John King, not Rod Paige, not any of them, who would be worth a spoonful of rat spit right now.

But we could really use someone who knows what they're talking about and isn't just salivating at the chance to push some more anti-public ed policies. Of course, what any classroom teacher would know includes this-- that when times get tough and crisis rear their heads, you can absolutely depend on the government bureaucrats to be largely useless, and you'd better figure out how to navigate this on your own. Which sucks, but it's one of the many "hard things" that teachers already do, all the time.

PA: Another Charter PR Push

The Pennsylvania Coalition of Public [sic] Charter Schools has been having a rough year, what with PA Governor Tom Wolf threatening to finally implement the charter school reforms that the heavily-lobbied legislature just can't seem to get done. So they've launched themselves another PR push to try to make their case.

Meet 143K Rising. This is ostensibly a group of "families united for charter schools," but there's no pretense here that this is a spontaneous grass roots group. As their website puts it, "The Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools (PCPCS) has created 143K Rising to give families a voice in the battle to protect public charter schools." And they are raising the alarm-- "Special interest groups are trying to rob Pennsylvania families of their rights. Let's rise up together and stop them!"

The 143K Rising site has a fuzzy handle on most of the issues it is upset about (143K refers to the number of students currently enrolled in charter schools-- no word if they plan to regularly rename the group as enrollment rises or falls). On their "issue" page (apparently there's just one issue), they say that "limiting public charter schools as an educational option" would be "devastating." They complain that "every year" there are "policies that would spell the death of public [sic] charter schools" in the state, proposed by lawmakers "listening to education special interest groups." And if by now you are wondering what, exactly, the proposals are, or who, exactly, these special interest groups are--well, 143K Rising isn't saying. You just have to take their word for it-- evil forces are coming to "take away a child's only hope for a good education."

This chicken littling appears to come in response to the governor's call for things like transparency and ethics; there's been no call for any existing charters to be shut down. But Wolf has been clear about his overall priority:

Pennsylvania must help school districts struggling with the problem of increasing amounts of school funding siphoned by private cyber and charter schools. Funding reform would increase transparency so all schools that receive state dollars are accountable to the taxpayers.

143K offers a page of "facts" that are not so very facty. Just the usual talking points.

FACT: Charter schools are public schools.

Nope. Not transparent. Not owned by the public or accountable to them. In fact, their own national group just advised them to pas themselves off as small businesses in order to get some $$.

FACT: Charter schools serve all students.

Well, it's not quite as easy for them to weasel out of this as it is in, say, Florida. But charters serve the students they choose to serve. Starting with marketing, they can send a message about who belongs and who doesn't. And unlike public schools, when a charter has a student withdraw, they don't have to pay any attention to what that student does next.

FACT: Tax money follows the student from their home school district to a public [sic] charter school.

Well, that one's true. It is, of course, part of the problem, since taxpayers have no say over or accounting of how their tax dollars are being used. And the loss of funds has a negative impact on the sending district-- the one that taxpayers pay to support.

FACT: Cyber charter schools offer the same rigorous coursework as district schools.

Nope. Not even possible. And there's that study by CREDO, a pro-choice outfit, that found cybers wildly ineffective.

FACT: Charter schools are directly accountable to the authorizing school board and the Pennsylvania Department of Education, who have the authority to renew or not to renew a school’s charter.

Directly accountable? Nope. In fact, some charters accused of misbehavior have been allowed to investigate themselves.

FACT: Charter schools are the most accountable public school systems in Pennsylvania, with the threat of closure as the ultimate accountability – unlike failing district schools, which never close.

I think what they meant to say is that charters are allowed to dump and desert their students, instead of having to live up to the promise to provide every student with a decent education. Check out the NPE report that shows that over 40% of PA charters quit after using up over $4 billion of federal money-- and that's just the federal money wasted. Fraud and mismanagement are a problem.

FACT: Pennsylvania requires all brick-and-mortar and cyber charter schools to be organized as public, nonprofit organizations.

True, but meaningless. In the state that's home to UPMC and its unspeakably rich executives, we understand that just because an organization is nominally non-profit, that doesn't mean that the people who run it aren't getting rich, like Vahan Gureghian, charter entrepreneur who built an $84 million mansion in Palm Springs, or the top execs of K-12 who made a grand total of $16.4 million. And as charters have demonstrated again and again, a non-profit school can hire all sorts of for-profit folks to actually run the operation, making the non-profit entity a kind of shell company.

FACT: Charter schools in Pennsylvania are diverse. Charter schools serve higher percentages of African American and Hispanic students than district-run schools.

Not entirely sure what the point is here, other than to bolster the notion that charters exacerbate segregation.

FACT: Charter schools receive less funding than school districts.

"Less" how? This is a long time talking point, but not often accompanied by hard numbers that account for things like the fact that the public school system runs buses. But this is late stage charter argument-- originally, "we can do more with less" was a talking point, now replaced with "give us more money."

FACT: Pennsylvania's public charter schools serve a higher percentage of special education students than school districts.

That may well be true, but it's not a good thing. Some PA charters have learned how to game the system. The school gets more money for a special ed student, so if they can round up students who have special needs that don't require expensive supports, they make out like bandits. Wonderland Charter would be just one example.

The site also features some stirring anecdotes. And their message has been pushed out into some media outlets, repackaging the same talking points, courtesy of Ana Meyers.

Meyers is the executive director of PCPCS. She has previously worked as "Director of Legislative Affairs" for LeadingAge PA (an advocacy group for aging services providers) as well as PA Field Director for Libertarian advocacy group, FreedomWorks. Before that she co-chaired the Kitchen Table Patriots, a Tea Party group in southeastern PA, and before that sales and marketing for the likes of Nickelodeon and American Airlines. Her degrees are in business. In short, she has virtually no background or expertise in education, but does have a long-standing experience in arguing that government services should be privatized. This is not new for PCPCS-- their previous chief's experience was as PR head for Westinghouse. Education expertise? Not so much.

Meyers has been a quick study in recycling the usual charter talking points, touting how they bring "innovation to education," and they are big on education that is "individualized." Also, public schools are tired and boring.

143K Rising has a Youtube channel with one subscriber and five videos that have gone up in the past couple of weeks. They have a Facebook page, in case you want to share some thoughts about PA cyber charters, and a Twitter account. Plus a bunch of sponsors-- mostly the usual suspects. All trying to make noise so that Pennsylvania can remember a state where an entrepreneur with a dream can cash in on the charter business. Great.

Trees, Philosophy, and What Comes Next

My wife teaches first grade; she is working via online tools with her team to create materials. Meanwhile, we are potty training the twins, even though a bit of necessary-but-minor surgery has left me a little less mobile than usual.

That's our story right now. Through social media, phone calls, e-mails, etc, we all know, at this point, hundreds more. The guy who lives in a trailer with no internet at all. The teacher who has three kids, one computer, and a spouse who also works from home. The guy who has hired a nanny to watch his own children so he can get work done. The people who are struggling with zero income, waiting to see if they'll be evicted. The mother who wrote her teachers a "Love you, thanks for trying, but school will now stop for my child so that I can keep him mentally healthy." The people with lousy internet. The people whose family has been splintered by their quarantine location choices.

What I'm struck by, now a few weeks into this, is just how individual everyone's experience is-- teachers, parents, students. Everyone is in a different situation, facing their own set of obstacles. The end result is a nation of people facing very specific issues, pushing aside the big philosophical questions we usually like to chew on. Not "what is the best instructional model for my child," but "how do I get lunch made and the babies down for a nap on schedule while still being on time for my own zoom meeting?" Not "what's the best pedagogical method for this instruction," but "how do I get this document in a digital form that will load successfully on my school's learning management platform?"

Much of US education has been pushed from "What should we do" to "What are we actually able to do?"

There's a lesson or two there. Note first that the answer to "What are we able to do" varies wildly between wealthy districts and unwealthy ones. Note second, and perhaps more importantly for the long run, that for many non-wealthy school districts, "What are we actually able to do?" is a large part of how they do business even when we're not all hunkered down in pandemic mode. One of the big--well, it's not really a lesson because some people already knew it, but this whole mess has seriously highlighted the widened gulf between the haves and the have-nots.

The other big lesson has to do with individualizing. Under the pandemic microscope, that issue turns out to be more complicated than we usually treat it as being.

Individual circumstances and differences are many and varied. Everyone is on their own tree in this forest, and every tree has a special constellation of needs. But it also appears to be true that simply trying to accommodate all of those differences is not only hard and expensive, but is not necessarily making folks any happier.

Consider Success Academy, which has by many accounts made the shift to online learning pretty quickly and easily. But SA secret sauce has been a culture of compliance and surveillance, a simple "do as we say, or there's the door" as well as curriculum-in-a-box. In other words, Eva Moskowitz doesn't really give a rat's rear what your family's special concerns are-- do it her way, or go enroll somewhere else.

Consider the myriad of social media posts about the frustration and challenges of establishing some kind of routine at home. Turns out that being free to make individual choices about--well, everything-- all day is tiring and taxing.

Like many classroom teachers, I was always inclined to push hard against stuffing individuals into the box and making students bow to the system. But watching folks struggle with the absence of any box at all has made me wonder just how far people are wiling to be pushed away from a system. Fans of competency based education like to point to the advantages of the idea that a student is done as soon as she has mastered whatever was on the list. But I am skeptical about how joyful parents would be when Pat comes home in January and says, "Hey, I finished my learning list, so I'm done for the year now."

People like a certain amount of predictable routine and set procedures, not, I think, because they are lazy or foolish, but because having those things set and decided frees you up to think about other, larger things. People like this stuff. Early in my career, I would try to liven up the long dull stretch from Christmas to Easter (some years, twelve weeks without a single vacation day) by giving students a different seating chart every day. They hated it. In some classes, once we got to the part of the year when I had actually learned names, I'd allow them to sit wherever; they invariably assigned themselves seats and insisted on the same seating every day.

The set routines, procedures, traditions can seem stupid and arbitrary, and often they are. It's arbitrary that we drive on the right side of the road. But a world in which everyone was required to make their own decisions about where to drive would be stressful and taxing and probably more dangerous.

None of which means that I don't favor individualized approaches to education. Some practitioners are managing the transition to non-classroom crisis education well. Here's a good example from the ever-erudite Paul Thomas, and it points to what may be the critical core of all of this ruminating I'm doing here (sorry if you're only now realizing that you have stumbled into one of my rumination posts)--

School as we do it in the 21st century is a collection of traditions and techniques, structures and procedures, a shell of sorts filled up by the work done by actual teachers. Some of that structure has been bent out of shape to accommodate junk like high stakes testing. And some of it has been targeted by disruptors and privatizers as, depending on how much credit you want to give them, a weakness of an aging system that interferes with education, or a vulnerability that can be capitalized profitably.

And now most of it has been unceremoniously and abruptly swept aside.

Lots of folks are writing pieces about what will come next. I don't know, and I don't think they do, either. After 9/11, many things were declared dead (so long, irony) that bounced back pretty quickly. There's every chance that come the fall of 2020, everyone will be desperate for a recognizable, familiar, comfort food version of public education that will look exactly like it looked back in January. Homeschoolers and choicers are salivating in the belief that they are right now winning a zillion converts; I would be truly astonished if that turned out to be true.

But when schools come back, folks will have a chance to make mindful decisions about what the real core of the institution should be. Some are figuring it out, and some already knew and, like Thomas, sort of re-confirmed those values by transporting them. There's a real chance here to push back some of the worst parts of 21st century ed reform (I have a whole post about that coming), but also a chance to make sure there is room for the things that stakeholders really value. Absence can make the heart grow fonder, and it can also make the head a little clearer.

What are the things we value? What do we want to be certain makes it back into public schools when they return from crisis mode? What should be accommodated by the structures and procedures?

We've been reminded of the vast breadth of individual needs, even had a glimpse of what seven million individual schools might look like. But we need to remember those questions even as we try to balance individual needs against uncomfortable chaos. And we need to avoid getting bogged down in the detailed stuff, the "how do I get this printed out" stuff, the little detail fleas that will hover over everything come the fall. All of this pandemic chaos has pushed the big education questions from the stage; we need to make sure they are not neglected for too long.

Charter Schools: We Are Businesses

Charter schools have always been chameleons of convenience. "Public school" sounds good for marketing, but "private business" is what comes up in court when the issue of transparency appears. Like Schroedinger's cat's training school, they can be both or neither depending on what is most financially advantageous for them.

It may be the financial advantage that most defines them, and that was never as clear as it was when the National Alliance for Public [sic] Charter Schools advised its members to put in for the small business loans available under the coronavirus relief packages (CARES).

SBA7 (A) is a paycheck protection act, designed to help small businesses keep paying essential personnel during the current mess. The intent of the act is pretty broad and includes a surprise for fans of the church-wall-- under the bill, churches can have the government pay their pastor's salary. The language used to justify it in the bill closely follows the language from the decision in Trinity Lutheran v. Comer, the case that set the stage for Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue. I can't wait to see all the ways our tax dollars are going to be funneled straight into churches. Also, if churches now fall under the Small Business Administration, will we be talking about taxing them any time soon?

NACPS thinks charters might also be eligible for SBA Economic Injury Disaster Loans, which are meant to overcome "temporary loss of revenue." Which is a curious argument, since the whole case for calling charters "public" schools is that they are paid with public tax dollars-- so what revenue would a charter be missing? 

NAPCS says you'll need to check how your state law feels about charter school "non-governmental status." It gives some guides to the requirements, although it does not include on its list, "One requirement is that the recipient be a business, and you are a school, so don't bother."

There are plenty of businesses out there that will really need some of this money, so it seems especially uncool for charter schools to try to grab some of it. And it's not clear at this point how many charter schools are going to take NAPCS advice. I'd like to think that somewhere out there there are some ethical charter operators saying, "That's nuts. We're a school, not a business."

But in the meantime, here is national charter school leadership saying, "Yes, we are absolutely businesses." I'm glad to see we agree on this point. 

PA: PNC A Charter School Player

We may think of the financial arm of the charter movement coming from specialized groups like the NewSchools Venture Fund or from hedge fund groups, but I've been reminded that sometimes it's regular old everyday banks in their helping to prop up the privatization of public education.

PNC Financial Services is a big fat financial holding company with a long history. It's the 9th largest bank in the US by assets, 5th by number of branches. They own 22% of Blackrock, the biggest asset management company in the world. They operate in nineteen states, but they're headquartered jst up the road from me in Pittsburgh. They trace their history back to the Pittsburgh Trust and Savings Company, founded in 1845. After years of various mergers and acquisitions, the current PNC version appeared in 1982 when Pittsburgh National Corporation and Provident National Corporation (a Philly bank originally founded by Quakers) merged into a new entity named PNC Financial Corporation. It was the largest bank merger ever at that time. They've continued to gobble since then.

While most folks in these parts recognize them as a consumer bank, PNC is a busy little conglomerate. That includes sponsorships; PNC is a sponsor of Sesame Street, NASCAR, and six different sports teams.

They are also proud sponsors of the Pennsylvania Coalition of Public [sic] Charter Schools.

That makes sense, because they have a whole financing group dedicated to charter school finance. The PNC Charter School Team includes both Investment Bankers from PNC Capital Markets LLC and Corporate Banking Relationship Managers from PNC Bank, N.A., and they have handed out a collective $500 million in charter school financing-- and they just scraped together another cool $250 mill for charter school finance.

They know the rhetoric. Their charter schools page defines charter schools as "new, innovative public schools that have been freed from some of the rules, regulations, and statutes that apply to other public schools," and they repeat the talking point that charter schools are public schools, also calling charters "a way to increase educational choice and innovation within the public school system." Their specialty appears to be helping charters own a facility; they are fans of the tax-exempt bond.

The bankers in charge of this operation are, well, bankers. Here's Nicholas Tripician, managing director and co-lead of the Charter School Sector Group. He's worked for JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley doing income and pricing analysis--oh, and he was a big time rower. Or  Greg McKenna, who works with the execution of the bonds and other financial services for charters.

It's not that I think having an education background is essential for being an investment banker. But if someone comes to you to get a loan to start a bagel factory, wouldn't you taste the bagels. And if you, for some reason, were incapable of tasting bagels, would you not get ahold of someone who knows bagels and can give you a real opinion?

The PNC division has underwritten charter schools in PA, in Florida, in Delaware. They've financed a school for Montessori Works, the Delaware group intent on mass-producing Montessori education. In all of their materials, they talk about charter school excellence and high quality and it's not particularly clear how these guys would know a high-quality school when they saw one. I can believe that they would know a good investment when they saw one, and there are plenty of rules in place to insure that charters are good real estate investments. Most particularly, we can point to the Clinton-era Community Tax Relief Act of 2000 (now in place until 2021) which guarantees a buttload of benefits, including the chance to double your investment in seven years. It's worth noting that when you read about the Waltons pumping tons of money into charters, they're not investing in curriculum development or teacher salaries-- they are mostly investing in real estate.

PNC is just following in the steps of many financial institutions who have figured out that the quality of charter education is largely irrelevant to the advisability of investing in them. We're living with huge financial incentives to build a lot of bad charter schools that have negative impacts on public education. And when an 800-pound financial gorilla like PNC feels that charter school growth is a win for them, how do you suppose that effects the messages that legislators get about charter regulation.

Follow the money. Always follow the money. And in the case of charter schools, following the money will often lead you to someone who doesn't care all that much about actual education.

In Short, I'm Unhappy With the Democrat Result

So here we are.

Joe Biden is the worst possible Democratic candidate for public education; only Blomberg would have been worse.

It's possible that Biden so closely resembles an establishment Republican that traditional GOP members who are appalled by Trump will vote Biden. If there are any significant number.

The campaign will be awful and stupid and largely pointless, because Trump's supporters will stick by him, firmly insulated by Fox against any facts that don't fit their love of Beloved Leader. There can't be more than three or four undecided votes in the country, which means the campaign will be all about managing the actual vote. The GOP will focus on voter suppression (voter ID, closing polls in non-GOP areas, all the stuff they've been honing for years) not even just because they want power but because they believe some Americans should not count, and the Dems will try to somehow drive enthusiasm among the Common Folks that party hoi polloi barely can identify, let alone identify with. The GOP/Russians will remind all the Democratic voters about how the candidate they actually wanted was screwed over and don't they just want to stay home to teach the party a lesson. A whole bunch of low information voters will go ahead and believe whatever lies the Trump camp continues to pump out, with highly educated people somehow believing only what Fox tells them today (even if it's the opposite of what they said yesterday). The Democrats will struggle with creating a compelling campaign around a guy who has the same rapey mental blur corporate lovefest as the current occupant. It will be ugly, and it will suck, and by the time we're done, there will be a whole lot of people that I won't be able to look at the same way ever again-- kind of like the last four years, only worse.

And at the end, whatever the outcome, public education will once again have no friends in high places.

So, I'm not having a great day here. I'll hope and pray and work for the chance to hear about Senate Majority Leader Elizabeth Warren, and I'll wish that the amplification of Trumpian hatefulness won't completely ruin every day, and I will go and vote and hate every minute of it. And please God, oh, please, let nobody that I care about try to explain to me why a vote for that hollow shell of a virtueless gorm in the White House is a good and justifiable thing.  And then I'll get back to agitating over the privatizing profiteering disruption that passes for education policy in this country.

I did call this, just over a year ago. I said I wouldn't like the candidate, and I don't. I like him even less because all the DFERs and neo-liberal privatizers and corporate money-grubbing disruptors are right now sitting at home and writing each other emails about how relieved they are that the gravy train will, red or blue, keep running to the green. And I swear-- the first union leader who starts to tell me about the virtues of a seat at the table-- well, I will say some very cranky words.

It just, you know, sucks.

I'll practice saying, "Yes, that thing about him stinks. How is Trump any better? And please answer only in actual facts." I'll put on my big boy pants and get back to it, but this space has always been where I dump out my frustration, so congratulations if you made the mistake of clicking on this link.

Silver lining? I see none. Just a reminder that waiting for some political beast to come lead us to a more just nation is a fool's game. We've all got to do the work ourselves.

Coronavirus Triggers Ed Tech Free Sample-Palooza. Be careful.

Imagine that you have a great new food product to sell, and you suddenly catch wind of a neighborhood where all the restaurants and grocery stores have been shut down. How quickly could you get on a street corner there with a big tray of free samples?

As schools are shut down across the country, ed tech companies, from old faithfuls to fresh young startups, are rushing to help fill the gap and/or take advantage of the situation.

Broadband providers like Spectrum and Comcast are offering free internet hookups to households with students. Most are offering sixty days free, but those who take advantage should note that in many cases “regular pricing will take effect at the end of the 60-day period if a customer doesn’t cancel or change the service.”

Look! Free cheese sample!

Websites like kidsactivitiesblog.com are running lists of the many websites that are offering free samples to help out with this difficult time. The resource is popular enough that over the last twenty-four hours, it has not always been possible to load the page due to heavy traffic. Other versions of this kind of list are out there.

Meanwhile, just out of sight of the general public, professors and teachers report receiving a wave of e-mails following a basic pattern. You’re going to move to online teaching, and in these difficult times, we’d like to help. They may offer free trials, or special discounts for their services. 

And on the journalism side, I’ve received a variety of pitches from companies who would like to give me the chance to talk to one of their experts about how their product can be especially useful in this widespread shift to online learning. It would make a great article, they assure me.

All of these initiatives are clustered around a fine line, a thin boundary between beneficial private support and profiteering, between good Samaritans and vulture capitalists. 

School closures have created complex and complicated situations. Some districts have expressly forbidden any attempts at running classes online, in part because they know that for some students, internet connectivity is not happening. If social media is any measure, some percentage of parents are panicking about having their children at home as if nobody has ever been through summer vacation before. And do we really want to have students—particularly the youngest ones—spend that much more time in front of a screen?

Some of these organizations and businesses are truly here to help; some of them smell a profitable opportunity to elbow their way into the education space, their own ed tech Katrina.

So before the coronavirus panic spurs you to sign your child up for 263 different online education services, do your due diligence. Check the following.

How free for how long? As with the free internet hookup, check to see if you aren’t going to be automatically subscribed at the regular price once the free period is over. That’s not philanthropy; it’s marketing. Also remember that sometimes the price is not dollars, but data. Do not trade away your privacy for six weeks of a mediocre subscription service.

Be aware that there are resources out there that are completely free. Some are “informal,” like this crowdsourced spreadsheet “150+ Enrichment Activities for Children While Parents Are Working Remotely,” which lets you search by indoor/outdoor, screens/no screens, and group/solo. Others have always been there, but under-noticed, like SAG-AFTRA’s charming Storyline website, with its library of children’s books read by a wide assortment of actors. And Google Arts and Culture will help you tour all these museums without ever asking you to set up an account or share your credit card number.

Is this a company with a product to sell? That does not make them evil, nor does it automatically make their motives suspect. But all the usual rules of being a customer apply. Check claims, particularly claims like “this covers exactly the sort of materials that your child’s teachers want her to learn.”

Is this product any good? Watch out for opportunistic junk. Like the hackers who created the malware-spreading coronavirus map or the folks hoarding sanitizer, there will be people popping up to make a quick buck on junk. Watch also for companies that have rushed to market with products that aren’t ready for prime time. 

Perhaps most importantly, take a deep breath and ask yourself, “Would I think this was a good idea if I weren’t freaking out over having my child at home for weeks because of a global pandemic?” Maybe things will be back to normal soon, or more likely, this is a marathon and not a sprint. Take your time and get it right. 

Originally posted at Forbes.com