TN: When Charters Abandon The Community

So here we go again.

Another angry piece written about the abrupt closing of a charter school-- two, actually. This time it's a pair of KIPP schools in Memphis.

The closings were announced in April, the reasoning a little fuzzy.

KIPP Memphis Preparatory Elementary and KIPP Memphis Preparatory Middle were par of Tennessee's failed experiment, the Achievement School District, a collection of schools taken over by the state and, generally, turned over to charter groups to run. In April, the board of the two KIPPs voted to shut them down. It was the Covid, they said. The Covid "prevented opportunities for the schools to receive long-term funding from historic philanthropic resources," which maybe-- I mean, reports were that the pandemic hasn't been hard on the rich folks. And aren't charters supposed to be able to operate on the same per-pupil dollars that public schools get? I mean, how many public schools are depending on their philanthropic backers to help them do well? The rest of the explanations don't get any better.

James Boyd, chairman of the KIPP Memphis board of directors said in a statement, “We strongly believe this decision is in the best interest of our KIPP Memphis community and is a step in the right direction to improve our organization’s ability to build a stronger network of schools.” This sounds at least a bit more honest-- "We did what was best for the company as a whole."

David Pettiette, a volunteer at one of the schools (so presumably not funded by philanthropists), lays out what happened after the announcement:

In an effort to limit bad press, KIPP offered a Q&A conference call to address the school closures so that the community’s voices could be heard. However, this session, which did not provide any A’s or responses from KIPP, was yet another unthoughtful decision made by the organization and proved to be an unsuitable forum.

Many families had trouble accessing the call due to technical difficulties generated from the third-party conferencing system used. The call itself went just about as you’d expect. It opened with two pre-recorded statements from KIPP’s board of directors and regional team, which were both vague and painfully insincere.

The comments from parents and staff were anxious, frustrated and morose –a wide variety of emotions. While listening to the call, I couldn’t help but think that the occasion warranted a more personal approach.

Pettiette is angry that the decision was made based on what was best for the company, that it was based on financial issues, that KIPP gave up after only a few years, that they cited "failure to fulfill academic promise."

Yet none of this is, or should be, a surprise. Charter schools, with very few exceptions, and most especially when we're talking about the big chains like KIPP, are businesses. They make decisions based on business considerations, not educational ones, and not community ones. They cloak themselves in the language of "public school," but that's a marketing consideration. It gets people to make assumptions without the charters having to make promises they don't intend to keep.

That includes, especially, not making any promise to stay open when it doesn't make business sense to do so. This map only takes you through 2013, and it shows 2,500 charter schools closing. Or look at the NPE report showing the billions of dollars spent on charters that closed quickly or never even opened.

Look, as I've said repeatedly, I don't think there's anything inherently evil or wrong about businesses or a business mentality-- but they are a bad match for education. If you enroll your chid in a charter, that's not a school, it's a business, and probably a fresh start-up at that. There is no promise of permanence, no promise to put your child's needs ahead of their bottom line. There are literally thousands of stories like this one in Memphis.

Meanwhile, that leaves just four schools in the Achievement School District, charters all.

CA: San Diego Charter Versus The Evil Union

This week you may have run across a piece entitled "How the Union Stopped Innovation at My School." The piece, which has turned up in numerous California outlets, was written by Jessica Chapman, a teacher at Gompers Preparatory Academy. Chapman's story has been steadily promoted by For Kids and Country, the organization run by Rebecca Friedrichs, a former teacher who loves Jesus and America and hates unions.

Chapman leans on an oft-repeated story about Gompers. The school was formerly a middle school in San Diego, and it was universally considered a miserable mess. The school became Gompers Preparatory Academy in 2005, a charter school that focused on college prep, including a partnership with UC San Diego. Chapman paints an inspiring picture of what "innovation" fueled. Soaring test scores, college acceptance, more rigor, and, that classic charter marketing point, 100% graduation rate. This, Chapman says, is what you get when you "remove the constraints of politics."

By that, she appears to mostly mean "getting rid of unions." Unions are why all schools aren't as wonderful as Gompers. Unions are a special interest, set up to grab all the money and deliver crappy educations to students they don't care about. The unions are out to get charters and have advanced a "deceptive" message creating "a campaign of divisiveness between traditional public schools and charter schools." And now they're "scheming to unionize charters" because....? This is where the reasoning of this anti-union screed always runs aground for me--if unions are money-grubbers, would they not want more charters in order to seed more money-grubbing local chapters?

At any rate, Chapman is upset. "The union invaded our Gompers in 2018 under the false premise that the school was not serving teachers well."

That invasion came in 2018. Teachers at the charter cited the issues of unequal pay, an 11-month school year, required work over holidays, and a lack of teacher voice in decision-making. They asked for a "clear and transparent" pay scale. Teachers also complained that teacher evaluations were infrequent and not useful, and they also alleged that administration shot down the organization of clubs such as Gay-Straight Alliance and a Black Student Union. Shockingly, these conditions reportedly led to high turnover and burnout among staff.

In January of 2019, the teachers had acquired signatures from 80% of the staff, and the San Diego Education Association had one more charter school local association. But some folks, like Mrs. Chapman, were unhappy, declaring that the union had gotten those signatures through lies and trickery. "We never even given the respect of a vote," she declared. Negotiations began, with the union declaring that it wanted to make attraction and retention of great teachers their number one priority, both because they wanted to work on a strong staff, and because they thought the issue would allow them to collaborate with administration, build trust, and avoid an adversarial relationship.

Well, it was a nice thought, anyway.

Chapman and others, like the California Policy Center, a right-leaning anti-union thinky tank member of the State Policy Network, decried the death of innovation, but Gompers "innovations" seem to be the same old thing. The "tools that propelled Gompers' success" were "merit pay and the director's authority to hire and fire teachers based on performance" aka "any reason he feels like." Many of the anti-union voices talk about the threat to how Gompers is a family, a "home," which is a cheap way to avoid treating staff like professionals, to shame them for even bringing the subject up-- "Come on. Work a few more weeks for free, because you love the family." Meanwhile, the head of the family, heading this single charter school, made almost $150K-- as much as the highest-paid principal in the San Diego public school system.

As is often the case, miraculous achievements deserve closer scrutiny. A 2017 investigative report found that Gompers actually posted the lowest test scores in the county (I know-- who cares-- but if that's the game you're going to play, play it honestly), and teachers claimed that grades are inflated at head honcho Vincent Riveroll's direction.

“He knows he’s not allowed to say, ‘Change their grades or else,’” said former Gompers chemistry teacher Ben Davey.

“But he can say, ‘You’re killing these kids, are you sure you want to leave it as an F?’”

Grade inflation is one of the few issues that school officials have actually tried to respond to. 100% graduation? The oldest trick in the charter book-- "counsel out" students who are having trouble. One year's snapshot shows 136 students in 9th grade, 103 in 11th, and 91 in the senior class. And a director reminding teachers that they'd be killing a kid to give them a grade that would stop them from graduating. Unfortunately, reports are that those same students hit college unprepared and floundering.

Giving teachers a stronger, more collaborative, more professional status at the school might help. But Gompers is not done trying to fight the union.

Gompers is yet another charter business that decided to grab some of that Paycheck Protection Money from the feds, pulling in $2.25 million from PPP and another $408K from CARES. But it has turned around and laid off 29 teachers from staff. That's about a third of the staff. And while the board (which did not meet between January and June, because "innovation"?) says it laid teachers off strictly based on seniority, that seems an odd claim coming from folks who believe that it's important that the director hire and fire based on merit. The union's theory seems more plausible-- that the furloughed teachers represent a big chunk of the union activists at Gompers. Departments like math (which was already patched together with subs) and English are being cut to the bone, while phys ed will be wiped out entirely. Meanwhile, Chapman and other anti-unionists have petitioned to have the union de-certified.

Hard to say what comes next. I'm sure Chapman will keep us updated, though I feel like this is a mashup of several movies I've seen before. If Gompers were smart, they would embrace the union and let it help them make the school stronger and better; if not, they can just keep fighting to keep the staff compliant and cheap while papering over the results with marketing claims. But when you hate unions more than you love your students, I guess this is what you get.

CA: Charter Decides To Grab A Small Business Loan

Palisades Charter High School has a lot of history. When launched in 1961, it was the most expensive high school in the LA City School system. The state grabbed the farm property through eminent domain; previous residents included the daughter if Francis X. Bushman, and Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher. Members of the Class of '65 were the basis for What Really Happened to the Class of '65?. By 1989, 20/20 aired an episode about the school, characterizing the school as both high academic performance and high drug and alcohol abuse.

By 1992, enrollment had dropped so far that the district was thinking about shutting them down entirely; instead, staff and parents argued for becoming a charter school, so in 1993, the high school and three of its feeders became the first charter school "cluster" in California. Enrollment bounced back; today there are about 3,000 students at PCHS. The campus, which is big and beautiful, has been used in movies and tv shows, and alumni include J.J. Abrams and Jennifer Jason Leigh.

PCHS is a charter school, and like many other such outfits, they have heard the siren song of the Paycheck Protection Program, the loan program designed to help small businesses stay afloat during the current pandemic mess (the second one, meant to clean up after the first one that ran out of money almost instantly). They are not alone--many charter schools are deciding that, for purposes of grabbing some money, they will go ahead and admit they are small private businesses and not public schools. Two thirds of the charter school businesses in New Orleans have put in for the loans.

What makes Palisades special is that we have video of their board discussing the issues of accepting the loan. (A hat tip to Carl Peterson, who has been watching these folks for a while.)

The discussion of the loan starts in the video about six minutes into the May 12 meeting. Chief Business Officer Greg Wood brings the news to the board that they've found a bank (in Utah) and landed approval for a $4.6 million loan.

If you're wondering if they agonized over issues like tying up four and a half million dollars that might otherwise have been used by an actual small bus9iness that is currently struggling to stay afloat, the answer is, not so much. Wood acknowledges that there could be some rough press with such a move; nobody much cares. A member also mentions that he has friends with small businesses who were not able to be approved. The group gets a little confused about whether or not they're eligible for the loan, and one member says "Well, the answer is, let's get it anyway." Wood says that they could be seen as "double dipping."

They are eligible, and Wood has already applied and been approved pending board approval. Wood doesn't know if the loan will be forgivable. In particular he dances around the idea that in order for the loan to be forgivable, they might lose the freedom to fire staff as they wish.

Payback is steep-- they get two years, with six months before repayment has to start and a big balloon payment at the end. This does not seem to bother the board because they are mostly considering to grab this money in the off chance that they might need it, and if they don't need it, they can just give it back in two years-- basically a line of credit just in case, which I'm sure would be a big comfort to a business that goes under because there is no money for them in the PPP. But this meeting is marked by phrases like "get the money while the getting's good" and "get the loan first...worry about that part later." No payback plan was raised.

A bitter coda to all this. There is just one public comment submitted to the meeting, from a woman who is a Pali High grad and who taught there for thirty years and who is retiring. She's speaking up because the rest of the staff is afraid of retribution. The teachers worked 2019-2020 without a contract, and while the praise and attaboy's they've gotten for making the pandemic-pushed jump to distance crisis schooling are swell, the board could put their money where their mouths are by offering the teachers a decent raise-- particularly since it looks like PCHS is finishing the year with a $2 million surplus. Her comments are read into the record, and then the board just moves on to authorizing the bank that will manage the loan.

Peterson has tried to raise this as an issue for the LAUSD election, with little effect.

You can argue that the PCHS board is supposed to watch out for PCHS and not the rest of the country. That, of course, is what many businesses do, and a charter school is first and always a business. But even a business is capable of exercising some civic responsibility.

Trump Back DeVos On Soaking Scammed Students

Trump has mostly ignored DeVos and the education department (insert joke about Trump and education here), but he's now decided to jump in, with both feet, right onto the backs of people scammed by for-profit colleges.

This story has been dragging on for-freakin-ever. In 2017, 18 states and DC sued DeVos over her stated intention of ignoring/rewriting the Borrower Defense to Repayment rule from 2016, which was supposed to help out those students who were being crushed by debt they'd incurred so they could attend fraudulent for-profit colleges. While that dragged on, the department "accidentally" kept collecting debt, in some cases attaching paychecks of students. The "accident" was egregious enough that the court found DeVos and the department in contempt and fined them bigly for ignoring the injunction to stop the collecting.

Judge Sallie Kim was pretty cranky when she offered the October ruling (“I’m not sending anyone to jail yet, but it’s good to know I have that ability.” So she was not any happier in December when it turned out that the department had been collecting-- against the injunction-- from not just 16,000 students, but from over 45,000. So, a more-than-double oopsy.

DeVos has been plenty clear in her feelings about debt relief, siding whole-heartedly the corporate interests. She has thoroughly choked off the public service loan forgiveness program as a prelude to proposing to kill it entirely. Called in before the House Education Committee to explain why she was still dragging her feet on loan forgiveness for the scammed students, she offered a very DeVosian quote:

I understand that some of you here just want to have blanket forgiveness for anyone who raises their hand and files a claim, but that simply is not right.

The very idea of people borrowing money and then being excused from paying it back really, really rubs her the wrong way. She hates it. So she wrote new rules, under which hardly anyone would get loan forgiveness.

And Congress finally said, "Enough."

The House and Senate used the Congressional Review Act to overturn the DeVos rule. The rule was opposed by 85 groups, including nine veterans' groups (veterans, with their tasty GI benefits, are popular targets of predatory for-profits), and so DeVos managed to spark actual bipartisan support for undoing her handiwork.

So a few weeks ago, during the magical hope-nobody's-looking hour of Friday afternoon, Trump unleashed his very first Presidential veto, once again suggesting that he is perhaps not exactly a great friend to US veterans. The House and Senate need a 2/3rds vote to override, and while that is a safe bet in the House, but far less certain in the Senate. Meanwhile, a group of US citizens and veterans who thought they were taking steps to build a better future find themselves in the midst of a pandemic, saddled with debt and a future made more uncertain by His Royal Hairness. Call your Congressperson.

ICYMI: Fathers Day Edition (6/21

I've had my hands full elsewhere, and have been spending refreshingly little time on line, but I still have a few goodies to pass along. Remember, sharing is caring,

What Teachers Want

American Education Research Journal has some research about what it takes to attract and retain teachers. A fun conversation starter.

Looking for the Missing  

NBC News has the story of Detroit teachers who went looking for students who went missing when schools shut down.

Charter Schools Tap Coronarelief

Erica Green at the NYT with a story of how some charter schools are wearing their "business" hats when money is involved.

Netflix billionaire building secret luxury teacher retreat

Reed "Who needs elected school boards" Hastings has another fun eduproject. Rich amateurs messing in education-- what could possibly go wrong?

What Anti-racist teachers do differently

The Atlantic with a cool story about How It's Done

The Beginning of the End for Testing?

Valeria Strauss with some analysis about where we are right now with the whole Big Standardized Test love affair.

Standardized Tests Increase School Segregation  

Steven Singer explains how standardized testing adds to our segregation problems.

Arrested Development: How Police Ended Up In Schools

Have You Heard (the only podcast we actually follow here at the Curmudgucation Institute) takes a look at how we ended up with the halls of school being policed like the streets of a city.

On Comparing Education Spending Across Time   

Nobody explains and clarifies the esoteric issues of school funding better than Mark "Jersey Jazzman" Weber. Here's a guide to the meaning and use of some of those figures folks like to throw around.

Ask Dads How To Reimagine Public Schools   

Nancy Bailey offers a Fathers Day look at what fathers would like to see in the world of reimagined public education.

Strummin' On The Ol Banjo  

Nancy Flanagan takes a look at issues that music teachers face, and how they are really some of the same issues all teachers face.

No, Software Still Can't Grade Student Essays

One of the great white whales of computer-managed education and testing is the dream of robo-scoring, software that can grade a piece of writing as easily and efficiently as software can score multiple choice questions. Robo-grading would be swift, cheap, and consistent. The only problem after all these years is that it still can’t be done.

Still, ed tech companies keep making claims that they have finally cracked the code. One of the people at the forefront of debunking these claims is Les Perelman. Perelman was, among other things, the Director of Writing Across the Curriculum at MIT before he retired in 2012. He has long been a critic of standardized writing testing; he has demonstrated his ability to predict the score for an essay by looking at the essay from across the room (spoiler alert: it’s all about the length of the essay). In 2007, he gamed the SAT essay portion with an essay about how “American president Franklin Delenor Roosevelt advocated for civil unity despite the communist threat of success.”

He’s been a particularly staunch critic of robo-grading, debunking studies and defending the very nature of writing itself. In 2017, at the invitation of the nation’s teachers union, Perelman highlighted the problems with a plan to robo-grade Australia’s already-faulty national writing exam. This has annoyed some proponents of robo-grading (said one writer whose study Perelman debunked, “I’ll never read anything Les Perelman ever writes”). But perhaps nothing that Perelman has done has more thoroughly embarrassed robo-graders than his creation of BABEL.

All robo-grading software starts out with one fundamental limitation—computers cannot read or understand meaning in the sense that human beings do. So software is reduced to counting and weighing proxies for the more complex behaviors involved in writing. In other words, the computer cannot tell if your sentence effectively communicates a complex idea, but it can tell if the sentence is long and includes big, unusual words.

To highlight this feature of robo-graders, Perelman, along with Louis Sobel, Damien Jiang and Milo Beckman, created BABEL (Basic Automatic B.S. Essay Language Generator), a program that can generate a full-blown essay of glorious nonsense. Given the key word “privacy,” the program generated an essay made of sentences like this:

Privateness has not been and undoubtedly never will be lauded, precarious, and decent. Humankind will always subjugate privateness.

The whole essay was good for a 5.4 out of 6 from one robo-grading product. 

BABEL was created in 2014, and it has been embarrassing robo-graders ever since. Meanwhile, vendors keep claiming to have cracked the code; four years ago, the College Board, Khan Academy and Turnitin teamed up to offerautomatic scoring of your practice essay for the SAT.

Mostly these software companies have learned little. Some keep pointing to research that claims that humans and robo-scorers get similar results when scoring essays—which is true, when one uses scorers trained to follow the same algorithm as the software rather than expert readers. And then there’sthis curious piece of research from the Educational Testing Service and CUNY. The opening line of the abstract notes that “it is important for developers of automated scoring systems to ensure that their systems are as fair and valid as possible.” The phrase “as possible” is carrying a lot of weight, but the intent seems good. But that’s not what the research turns out to be about. Instead, the researchers set out to see if they could catch BABEL-generated essays. In other words, rather than try to do our jobs better, let’s try to catch the people highlighting our failure. The researchers reported that they could, in fact, catch the BABEL essays with software; of course, one could also catch the nonsense essays with expert human readers.

Partially in response, the current issue of The Journal of Writing Assessment presents more of Perelman’s work with BABEL, focusing specifically on e-rater, the robo-scoring software used by ETS. BABEL was originally set up to generate 500-word essays. This time, because e-rater likes length as an important quality of writing, longer essays were created by taking two short essays generated by the same prompt words and just shuffling the sentences together. The findings were similar to earlier BABEL research.

The software did not care about argument or meaning. It did not notice some egregious grammatical mistakes. Length of essays matters, along with length and number of paragraphs (which ETS calls “discourse elements” for some reason). It favored the liberal use of long and infrequently used words. All of this leans directly again the tradition of lean and focused writing. It favors bad writing. And it still gives high scores to BABEL’s nonsense. 

The ultimate argument about Perelman’s work with BABEL is that his submission are “bad faith writing.” That may be, but the use of robo-scoring is bad faith assessment. What does it even mean to tell a student, “You must make a good faith attempt to communicate ideas and arguments to a piece of software that will not understand any of them.” 

ETS claims that the primary emphasis is on “your critical thinking and analytical writing skills,” yet e-rater, which does not in any way measure either, provides half the final score; how can this be called good faith assessment? 

Robo-scorers are still beloved by the testing industry because they are cheap and quick and allow the test manufacturers to market their product as one that measures more high level skills than simply picking a multiple choice answer. But the great white whale, the software that can actually do the job, still eludes them, leaving students to deal with scraps of pressed whitefish.

Originally posted at Forbes.com

AEI And The Commodification Of Education

The American Enterprise Institute comes from that part of the ed reform spectrum devoted to free market approaches. But a new report from AEI really pushes the boundaries of treating education as a commodity like a house or a piece of jewelry. Really.

The report is entitled "An Appraisal Market for K-12 Education" and it's authored by Lindsey Burke, the director of the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation, who also pops up at The Heartland Institute,  and is part of the "team" at EdChoice (what used to be the Friedman Foundation), and Education Next, and Fox Business, and even ALEC, where we find her pushing education savings accounts (aka super-vouchers). She earned a BA in political science from Hollins University (2005) and a Master of Teaching from the University of Virginia in 2008, at which point she went to work for the Heritage Foundation. So you've good a pretty good idea where she's coming from.

The "paper" (honestly, it has just one "source" in the "endnotes," and dressed up with a snappy stock photo, it would easily pass for a "blog post") is part of a series the Frederick Hess is putting together  for "sketching a new conservative education agenda." Let me just cast a vote to say that Burke's notion should not be part of anybody's new education agenda.

Burke starts out with a problematic analogy-- "Think about the last time you bought or sold a pricey item. Chances are you had the item appraised by an independent appraisal firm to provide peace of mind to both buyer and seller." Her specific examples-- houses and jewelry and antiques and cars and boats.

Basically, any costly expense with a high potential for information asymmetry has an associated appraisal market.

You can see where she's headed. Education is expensive. "Families," she argues, "should be able to easily acquire real-time, external audits of their child's learning."

This has always been a missing piece of the free-market education crowd-- parents should be able to go shopping in an education "marketplace," their selection aided by clear data about the relative quality of their choices. Burke is offering a variation on that theme-- let parents have money to hire an appraiser in the as-yet-non-existent marketplace of education quality appraisers.

There are several problems here.

Education is not a commodity, not a thing that that can be weighed and measured for value like a truckload of pork shoulders or sheets of plywood. Education is a process, a relationship, a human quality that takes on different values in different contexts. It mostly exists inside the heads of the students, and as such is largely immeasurable. Appraising an education is like appraising a human being--only barely doable in a narrow context like a specific job. In fact, because an education becomes part of who a person is, it's very much like appraising a human being, which means very subjective and ethically suspect.

Education is not a car or a house. Often its value or effectiveness is net revealed until years after the fact. The closest analogy she hits is antiques--if you were talking about an appraiser who could look at a brand new object and predict what its value will be in 100 years.

Information asymmetry is, of course, a feature of a free market, on purpose. Almost nobody who is in the selling biz takes the position of, "We have far more information about what we are selling than you do, so we're going to make it all transparent for you." If you're selling, you are doing your best to hide information behind a shiny curtain of marketing. (Hence my saying that the free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing.)

The shape of "learning" is huge and multidimensional and we can't even agree on which parts are most important. We have suffered through two decades of a bad solution to the problem, the policies that have said "We have no idea how to fully measure an education, so we'll just measure something and pretend that it tells us everything." Policy makers couldn't wrap their heads around the size and depth and dimension of an entire continental ecosystem, so they collected elephant toe clippings and weighed them, pretending that this produced useful data.

Burke wants to separate the appraisal of education from the providers of education, but education has already suffered from entirely too many amateurs tromping around. This is not a problem unique to education; the people who understand a sector best are often the people who work in it.

But Burke argues that appraisers are necessary for parents to hold providers accountable, which in the free market argument means "to vote with their feet." This notion that foot-based voting will have any effect on anything is simply not supported by reality. The notion that free-market choiciness is more effective than actual democratic processes or the ability to call officials on the phone is hard to make an argument for. Virtually every free-market business hopes for, plans for, structures for getting some people to vote with their feet. Every business plan separates the population into groups-- people they hope to serve and people they hope not to serve. Read Robert Pondiscio's How The Other Half Learns to see Eva Moskowitz aggressively encourage some families to vote with their feet; many families decide that Success Academy is not for them, and not one of them causes Moskowitz to worry, "Maybe I'd better look at how I'd operating my schools."

The shift to free-market education that Burke and other free-marketeers argue for would require a whole discussion about changing the mission of public education to no longer involve a promise (however imperfectly kept) to educate every single child in the country.

Burke faults the Big Standardized Test for working accountability vertically, up to the state and federal bureaucrats. I'm more concerned that the BS Test substitutes a stunted, meagre view of what a good education should, and then doesn't even measure that well. But Burke's examples of companies that soft of kind of get at the job includes those that use their own cramped measures (Kaplan) or those that use the same BS Test results she faults (Great Schools).

There's much to disagree with in Burke's spare two pages, most notably the idea that education is a commodity. But her biggest, most glaring gap is that while she wishes that parents could purchase an independent appraisal of how well a school is doing, she offers no real ideas about what such an instrument could possibly look like. That's always been the missing link in education reform of all stripes. Sure, we can spot most of the schools at the extreme top and bottom--in fact, we can do it without the use of any fancy appraisal instruments. But the vast majority of schools are somewhere in the more complicated middle, serving a wide variety of stakeholders who all have a different set of expectations about what a great school would look like.

In fact, research suggests that parental choice is not even driven by how much students are learning, but by factors like location and extracurricular activities. But this is one of the disconnections in free  market education theory-- fans insist that parents should be trusted with making the choice of schools, but also insist that parents need the help of third-parties-for-hire to make that choice.

Education is not a slab of cheese for sale at the deli. It's not easily measured or weighed, and if the goal is to create accountability, instead of trying to make an accountability bank shot off of parents, why not come up with a system that helps the school identify and improve its problem areas, or if we wanted to be really crazy, a system that holds politicians and bureaucrats accountable for providing schools with full support.