AL: Why The State Pulled The Plug On A Charter For The First Time

Last week, the Alabama Public [sic] Charter School Commission took an unprecedented action and revoked a charter school's charter before it even managed to open. It's a tangly story, with connections to several charter school issues.

Woodland Prep was supposed to be a hot new charter school, but it came with so much baggage that there is an entire blog following the entire mess. Believe me-- I'm going to give you the broad strokes, but if you want to go down this rabbit hole, it runs deep.

At the center of all of this is Soner Tarim. Tarim has a degree from Texas A&M, is a trained biologist, and if you look at any of his bios, he sounds like a heck of a well-trained guy. He's a certified trainer via Texas Education Agency, and ran Harmony Public [sic] Schools, a Texas chain that likes to make claims like a 100% college acceptance rate. He's even connected to the Pahara Institute, a virtual education outfit connected to the Aspen Institute. Pahara-Aspen is connected to all sorts of cyberschool nonsense, and even has ties to our old friend David Hardy, the TFA-grown superintendent who crashed and burned in Lorain, Ohio. Oh, and he also is studying at Eli Broad's fake school for training superintendents.

On top of all these reform credentials, Tarim has one other important connection, and that's to the Gulen Charter empire. The Gulen chain is infamous and huge--centered around a Turkish political leader-in-exile now located in eastern PA. The chain is charged by, well, many many people of being a device for sucking up US tax dollars and using them to finance Fetulleh Gulen's. Again, there are entire websites devoted to following the many abuses and scandals.

In addition to the huge Harmony chain, Tarim also owns Unity School Services, a company that makes money operating other charters, like the Lead Academy chain, with which Unity had a nasty break-up.

But controversy of one kind of another has followed Tarim. In 2011 the New York Times wrote a story detailing Harmony's tangled connection to the Cosmos Foundation which was in turn connected to Gulen. Tarim denied the bulk of the story, but the Times outlined the usual pattern of the Gulen schools-- hiring Turkish nationals for all jobs, using plenty of H-1B visas (along with allegations that those employees are expected to bounce part of that pay back to the imam). One simple example: a $50 million construction contract for a company that had only been in business for one month. The Gulen network, which is huge, has taken advantage of states where charter oversight is lax, and hoovered up great mountains of US taxpayer dollars.

Still, Tarim keeps swinging. The US has considered Gulen Our Guy (though in the last couple of years that has changed a bit-- politics, you know), and so his chain remains untroubled by any federal concerns.

So Tarim left the Harmony network, though he kept trying in Texas. In June of 2019 he asked their state board top approve eight new charters, and met blistering resistance from board member Georgina Perez, who came to the hearing with six pages of questions. "He attempted to create his personal set of alternative facts," she told Larry Lee, a journalist who has made himself a leading expert in Tarim's machinations (Here's a great piece about how, with Tarim, it's always the other guy's fault).

In the meantime, Tarim had moved from Texas into some other states, including Alabama, where he tried to get a LEAD Academy approved but hit a roadblock when the Alabama Education Association took Tarim to court over an illegal approval process involving made-up rules and charter applicants who had zero experience running schools.

Then, for whatever reason, Tarim set his sights on a small rural area of Alabama. And that was where he wanted to build Woodland Prep.

Nobody wanted Woodland Prep--not the local leaders, not the local citizens. They were worried that a charter would drain resources from their already-struggling school. The National Association of Charter School Authorizers took a look at the application and said that it should be denied; it was full of inaccuracies and what Lee kindly calls "misrepresentations." But the Alabama Public [sic] Charter School Commission operates independently and answers to nobody, least of all the voters and taxpayers of Alabama. So in 2018, Woodland got its charter. But by this spring, it was still educational vaporware, a school that existed only as a Tarim sales pitch, and so it received a long-overdue pulling of the plug.

How many articles have I written about this? At least 50. And to be honest, I got to the point where I began to doubt that I would ever have the chance to write a headline like the one above.

In the end, it was as much a story about a very rural community that simply refused to quit fighting and standing up for what it believed in strongly. It was about a community that takes pride in its public schools and refused to be bulldozed by a group of education “experts” from out-of-state who were far more intent on making money than helping children.

Lee, incidentally, is a tremendous education journalist, covering Alabama in particular. He's been at it for a while, and he knows his stuff.

Soner Tarim has more irons in more fires than I can count at the moment, so keep your eyes peeled for that name. There are two lessons in the Woodland Prep story. First, nobody is so tiny that they can safely say, "It'll never happen here." Second, that nobody is so tiny that they can't still win.

Never Mind The Personalized Learning. Let's Do Personalized Learning Instead.

As the education world scrambles to figure out what next fall will look like, many, many voices are speaking up for reimagined schooling. One particular model has surfaced repeatedly, and it’s not at all new—but it could be.

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has set aside some of the stimulus fund for a competitive grant that would reward state-wide virtual schools, much like the model she admires in Florida. Many commentors are arguing that now is the perfect time to “innovate” and shift to personalized learning, or its twin sibling, competency-based education. One clue to what these folks are really talking about is the market research, which focuses on education tech companies. But Governor Andrew Cuomo gave a clear signal when he was announcing that Bill Gates would be helping reimagine New York schools:

The old model of everybody goes and sits in the classroom, and the teacher is in front of that classroom and teaches that class, and you do that all across the city, all across the state, all these buildings, all these physical classrooms — why, with all the technology you have.

What most advocates have been selling for years is not actually personalized at all, but is a system in which content delivery and assessment are handled by software. An algorithm, often touted as Artificial Intelligence, decides which assignments to deliver to the student. There may be a human “mentor” available to the students, but the computer manages most of the “educating.” The argument is that software is fast, deep, and flexible to “personalize” education, or that the software can move a student through a list of competencies and certify each one, checking off the list at the student’s personalized speed. 

The model has been tried by charter chains like Rocketship Academy, without a great deal of success. But it’s appealing at the moment because sitting each student down in front of a computer screen in separate locations is the ultimate in social distancing (and replacing expensive humans with software is appealing to some folks, too). Nevertheless, it’s hard to have personalized learning when you have removed persons from the education.

But what if we reclaimed the term “personalized education”? What if we decided that the key to personalized learning is not computers, but human beings? Could we meet the needs of students and the recommendations of the CDC? Let’s play the reimagining education game. What could actual personalized education look like?

To really personalize education, you need to provide more time and opportunity for teachers and individual students to interact. There are many ways we could do this, but let’s try this—split the school day in half and have teachers spend half the day teaching class, and half the day in conference with individual students. Reduce class size to a maximum of fifteen; that will allow teachers to get to know students better, sooner, and will also make it easier to do social distancing within the classroom. It retains class meetings, which provide the invaluable opportunity for learning to occur as part of a community of learners.

Students would have either morning or afternoon classes, reducing the number of students in the building at any time. Cafeteria services could be cut to a minimum while still providing meals to go for students who need them. Classes would be structured so that lots of the work is done outside of school. Teachers and students would maintain on-line contact and students could reach out for help at any time; keeping in contact virtually doesn’t work too badly if there’s a meat world relationship as the foundation. 

Each student would have personal contact with a teacher who has ample time to work with that student one-on-one. Teachers would have time to really learn the strengths and weaknesses, interests and goals, of every student. Teachers and families could develop individualized education programs (IEPs) for every student, not just the law mandates. There would even be time to design and implement courses of independent study, and leeway to focus on mastery and not just seat time. 

There are all sorts of challenges with this vision. Transportation in particular would be a problem for lots of working parents. Creative scheduling would be needed to give high school students a full schedule in half days. And teaching staff would have to be increased, even doubled, to make this work, as well as increasing the physical space for the school (though moving away from the institutional bricks and mortars would fit well with the personalized approach). That cost alone guarantees that nobody is actually going to try this.

Covid-19 or not, we’ve always known what’s required for truly personalized education. Instead, we’ve focused on how to keep costs low, how to make schooling “efficient.” Truly personalized education is costly. We should not be fooled by people who attempt to slap that label on a cheap alternative.

Originally posted at Forbes.com

Five Examples Of What's Wrong With Ed Tech

I get pitches-- e-mails from PR folks who have noticed that I write about education and want to offer me a chance to talk to an up-and-coming visionary who can tell me all about Bunkadiddle Corporation's new program! The pitches have taken on a pandemic sheen for a few months now ("In these trying times, when students and teachers are all struggling, we offer this Shiny New Thing!"). Mostly they highlight everything there is to dislike and distrust in edu-business, but a couple of weeks back I got a super-entry in the category, a pitch that threw five "sources" at me, and they serve as a fine example of what's out there and why it's Not Good.

These companies are all "best in the space" (all of these pitches are for best top exemplary companies--always) and offer to help with the "two looming thoughts" for re-opening schools. How to keep people safe, and how edtech will be implemented. Which is the first bad sign, because I know lots of teachers are wrestling with concerns about students and health and classrooms and curriculum, but hardly anybody who is specifically worried about how to find edtech a happy place (the correct answer is, "I'll use any ed tech that actually does something I need to do better than I can just do it myself, and the rest can just take a hike.")

These five companies didn't ask to be raked over coals here, and it seems mean, even for me, to call them out by name after they handed me their info in an email. But here they are, offering to do their thing for pandemic times.

Our first CEO's LinkedIn profile leads with "A tireless visionary and the founder of multiple technology companies."

They're not kidding. Their profile lists him as founder for six companies, including gaming center management software, a communications platform, a business ecosystem, and a company that brings entrepreneurs to co-live in Bali. They've done a TED talk. They signed the Founders Pledge. They graduated from Copenhagen Business School in 2006, Harvard (Business Valuation, Mergers & Acquisitions) in 2007, and Northwester University Kellogg School of Management, specializing in business marketing, entrepreneurial ventures, venture capital, bargaining and negotiations, in 2008. After finishing at Northwestern, he spent a year at McKinsey and Company. Four of the six companies were founded after his McKinsey days.

Their most recent company creates virtual lab simulations and offers the promise "your students will learn twice as much with" their product. Twice as much as what is not explained, but they promise that it will close the knowledge gap. The email argues that "motivation and engagement issues with at-home learning can be solved by utilizing the right ed tech platforms," so hey-- problem solved. You can get up to eight simulations for $49 per student, or go "full course" with over 140 simulations for $99 per student. And they're global. The CEO/Founder, you may notice, has zero background in education; the company website offers no indication if anyone who works there has an education background.

Our next CEO/Founder/President graduated from the University of Phoenix with a MBA in 1996, founded the company in 2003 (though incorporation papers filed in Delaware in 1999), and has been riding that pony ever since, growing through acquisition. The CEO also did some work with distance learning companies, including his alma mater.

The company runs for-profit education services, specializing in the "data driven" personalized learning. They've had legal troubles in multiple states, including charges of illegal robo-calling sales prospects. It bought a couple of universities that it grew through online learning, except that they also became a prime exhibit of predatory for-profits that didn't actually produce useful degrees.

This company is in my email touting their newest subsidiary, an on-demand tutoring service with over 10,000 tutors available. Within management, there does not appear to be a single person with the slightest background in education--it's all business. In fact, there are several management committees--none are related to education.

Number three. MBA from Wharton in 2010. Prior to that they worked as a business analyst at Capital One, and spent two years at Bain and Company, along with some summer "associate" work. Degree in hand, he went to InMobi for signing publishing partnerships, then founded their company in 2013. They are "on a mission to make high-quality education accessible to everyone in the world." Also, "learn in-demand skills online--on your schedule." You get a mentor, too. The focus appears to be almost entirely on tech-related career prep. Networking is their big thing, and their pitch to me seems to be at least partly about people "looking to reskill due to the pandemic."

Our fourth CEO/Founder graduated top of the heap from University of Virginia with a degree in Foreign Affairs and Spanish. From there it was a United Nations commission, the Brazilian Embassy, the Organization of American States, and a Fulbright Scholar for a year at the US State Department. An account executive at Powell Tate, and a program advisor at UPEACE/US. All of that in the space of five years. Then a big job at Atlas Service Corps, an international exchange for non-profit leaders.

Somewhere in there in 2007, they founded a company that "cultivates students' social and emotional learning skills that empowers them to navigate the complex and rapidly-changing realities of our world." It uses interactive videos, movement and creative expression and the program was "developed with educators in alignment with CASEL." Since this CEO was a dancer, too, they may come the closest of any to having some piece of qualification for the work they're doing. But the company can also pitch baloney stats with the best of them; the email promises that they have "helped schools see a nearly 40% increase in students' ability to manage and resolve conflict by using their program." I can't imagine how one would design a study to actually measure that.

Their management team at least includes jobs like Senior Education Consultant, but one such consultant has a BS in finance, another "has been working in the education market" for years "in several aspects of education, including fundraising, publishing and technology," which are totally not aspects of education. The third such consultant has been working in edtech for the past 7+ years; only in the tech world are seven years enough to qualify you as a senior anything.

CEO number five has worked since 2006 in marketing., launching a self-titled consulting group in 2016. Then in 2018 they became CEO of "a language learning organization on a mission to empower students to learn new skills, and by so doing, expand their horizons and foster understanding and communication across cultures and communities." The business website seems far less student-oriented and more aimed at the adult and corporate market. You can join a group class for $399 or take private lessons at $32/hour, and there are corporate packages, too. This CEO is prepared to talk to me about the importance of personalized learning.

The five CEOs have two things in common--1) they are offering huge, sweeping, grandiose promises about education and 2) they have absolutely no background in education whatsoever. Well, three things--3) they smell an opportunity to grow some market while schools are shuttered.

The sadder thing is that, per my in-box, this is just one batch of cubes off the iceberg.

John Oilver and Defund the Police

I don't do this often, but all I'm doing in this post is asking you to watch this video from John Oliver looking at the police, how we got here, what we could do. And you must watch through to the very end.

Without The Big Standardized Test, Would Schools Be Flying Blind?

The future of the big standardized test is in doubt. This year’s pandemic pause made the annual rite of spring both logistically impossible and generally pointless as a means of data collection. With the year thoroughly disrupted, there was no chance that the tests would generate any sort of usable information, but their cancellation raises two more questions—wouldn’t testing next year be equally pointless, particularly when the time could be better spent helping students catch up, and wouldn’t a two-year hiatus be the perfect time to end the practice entirely?

As noted in the delightfully-titled “Statewide Standardized Assessments Were in Peril Even Before the Coronavirus. Now They’re Really in Trouble,” the testing regimen has been falling out of favor with a wide variety of folks. Two years ago I was writing about the eroding support for high stakes testing, and things have not improved since,

This could be the end, but the annual Big Standardized Test still has its supporters. Some argue that even more testing will be required when schools open, perhaps to determine if students move up a grade, while one advocate tweeted that scrapping the tests means “we’ll fly blind.” That echoes the argument for the high stakes tests that has been pushed since the early days of No Child Left Behind—if there’s no Big Standardized Test, then policymakers, administrators, researchers, parents, taxpayers and students will not know what is happening inside each school.

As this argument is revived, it’s worth reminding ourselves what the tests do—and do not—measure.

The testing regimen (PARCC, SBA, your state’s special flavor, etc) is a standardized test focused on math and reading skills. 

That’s it. 

Do you want to know how well students are doing in the study of science or history? In most states, the test won’t tell you.

Do you want to know the depth of student knowledge about a body of literature? The test won’t tell you.

Do you want to know how strong the school’s arts and music programs are? The test won’t tell you.

Do you want to know if your child is likely to grow up to enjoy “positive life outcomes”? The test won’t tell you.

Do you want to know if your child is maturing into a responsible and healthy young person? The test won’t tell you.

Do you want to know if the school is providing a safe environment? The test won’t tell you.

Do you want to know if your child has a solid knowledge of US civics and government? The test won’t tell you.

You get the idea. There is a long list of things that people have in mind when they ask “How is this school doing” that are not addressed by the test.

And what the test does address, it doesn’t address very well. School results can be predicted fairly effectively just by using demographic information, and individual student results take far too long to come back for them to be of any use to classroom teachers. 

The notion that parents, teachers and students will have no idea what’s going on in their school unless they can see scores from that one special test is absurd. When students return, teachers will do what they have always done. They will do their own formal and informal assessments of students for quick, on the spot information about where those students are. They won’t be flying blind, and they won’t miss the scores from the Big Standardized Test.

Originally posted at Forbes.com

PA: Charter Advocacy Chief Booted For Offensive Post

Ana Luiza Lannes Meyers is known to folks who follow the charter school debates in Pennsylvania as a vocal charter advocate as the executive director of the Pennsylvania Coalition of Public [sic] Charter Schools. But as of yesterday, she is out of a job, one more casualty of emotional blowback from the current Black Lives Matter demonstrations.

Working on her resume

Meyers 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. Meyers held the job since March of 2017.

Meyers has been an active voice in opposition to Governor Wolf ever since he put charters on notice that there would be more regulation and less gravy train. Can't limit family choices, can't trap students in failing zip codes, etc, Meyers said. She tried hard to sell the idea that PA charters are non-profits (they are,  but the management companies that run some of them surely aren't). And she just helped the coalition launch 143K Rising, a PR push to resist attempts to cut charter budgets (something Wolf hasn't actually tried to do, but you have to keep your people scared). And shew wasn't very shy about it, calling Wolf  "an idiot on so many levels."

The world of charter supporters has long been an alliance between those who see charters as a tool for equity and social justice, and those who want to unleash free market forces in place of "government schools." Meyers' tea party past offers a hint about which group she comes from. But Saturday, May 31, she really put her foot in it.

Avi Wolfman-Arent caught the story and has been reporting it for PBS station WHYY. Saturday, Meyers posted a response to an emergency alert about "violent protestors" in Philadelphia. "None of this is okay," she said, noting that her husband is a retired state policeman, argued that all sectors have some bad apples "including the church." After offering support for the police, she closed with "These protestors disgust me. All lives matter."

When the station called to ask her about the post, it disappeared and an apology was posted. Meyers asserted her support for Black Lives Matters, explained she had not meant the protestors, but the looters. "I did not mean to insinuate that I don’t support Black Lives Matter,” she said. But it's pretty hard to read "All lives matter," any other way.

Criticism from the charter sector was swift. Sharif El-Mekki is a charter principal and heads up a group working on solving the problem of too few Black teachers in the classroom rejected her apology. At least one charter chain "condemned" her remarks. And as of yesterday, she was out of a job. Said the coalition board, "We have determined that new leadership is in the best interests of our member schools and the families they serve across the state." They thanked Meyers for her work, and buh-bye.

For more details from the story, you can catch Wolfman-Arent's reporting here.

No Teachers Teach Average Students

The average height of the staff here at the Curmudgucation Institute is about 4.5 feet (the Board of Directors really pulls the average down). Yet if you buy clothes that fit a 4.5 foot frame, those clothes will not fit anyone here.

The average guy named Peter Greene has made at least one major film. And yet, here I sit, with no IMDB entry or residual checks coming in for my work.

So here's one reason that a lot of educational research is that it is the findings are about average students. And nobody teaches an average student. Each student is a very specific individual with a specific complex of specific characteristics, strengths, weaknesses, history, etc.

So something like the widely-circulating NWEA "research" (aka "wild-ass guess") about the Covid-19 slide that everybody is kind of expecting to be a major feature of school in the fall. And really, three's no reason that the testing company can't make an edu-WAG; right now, WAG is pretty much all anyone has. But from a classroom teacher perspective, I have to ask what earthly good aa piece of research like that could be. From the classroom perspective, it boils down to, "Each of your students will be 'behind' some amount, more or less."

This is the problem with much of the "science" out there about learning--it describes what the average student does. But if I'm in a classroom, I don't want to know how the average student leans about widget decoding--I need to know how I can best get it across to Pat, who has a short attention span and not much interest in the printed word but likes to draw pictures all day, or Chris, who is pre-occupied most of the day with dinosaurs, and who doesn't read long multi-syllabic words easily, but who never forgets anything you read out loud.

One size does not fit all, but average size doesn't fit anybody.