ICYMI: August Already Edition (8/2)

So, here are some things to read.

Is the push to reopen schools really a plot to dismantle them?

Accountabaloney listens to some bonus content from Have You Heard that lays out how DeVos has set up a pandemic win-win for herself.

Worst Year Ever  

Nancy Flanagan reflects on the year and wonders if it couldn't actually mark a good change for education?

How the child care crisis will distort the economy for a generation.

Politico takes a look at the ripples that are going to spread from the pandemic crisis in child care (which is just a more severe version of the child care crisis we were already having) 

Trump paints teachers as villains; how that hurts students.

I saw this piece when Anna Lutz Fernandez posted this on her own, but then NBC picked it up, and here it is. Well worth the read.

Note from the principal: This fall your classroom will be equipped with a lion.

From Mary, a blog that specializes in satire. A reminder that satire doesn't always make you laugh.

Infamous John Deasy Resigns, Again 

Thomas Ultican with a well-researched look at how reformsters manage to fail upward, with a case study of one of the great serial failures of ed reform.

The Post-Espinoza End Game  

Bruce Baker and Preston Green take a look at what comes next, now that SCOTUS has busted another hole in the wall between church and state.

How To Stop Magical Thinking in School Reopening Plans 

Share this with an administrator. Jersey Jazzman lays out how to do a reality check on a district's plan for the fall.

Biden Opens Door for Vouchers

Not on purpose, mind you. But here's Max Eden to explain the opportunity that reformsters think Biden just handed them.

Does Covid-19 spell the end for public schooling?

Finally, this scary read from USA Today, conjecturing about just how bad this could be for education in the long run.

Report: PA Charters Game The Special Education System.

In a new report, Education Voters of Pennsylvania looks at “how an outdated law wastes public money, encourages gaming the system, and limits school choice.” Fixing the Flaws looks at how Pennsylvania’s two separate funding systems have made students with special needs a tool for charter gaming of the system, even as some of them are shut out of the system entirely.

The two-headed system looks like this. Public schools receive special education funding based on the actual costs of services, while charter schools are funded with a one-size-fits-all system that pays the same amount for all students with special needs, no matter what those special needs might be. 

Pennsylvania’s Special Education Funding Formula recognizes three levels of cost. Tier 1 is minimal interventions (eg a student who needs one speech therapy session per week). Tier 2 students need larger interventions, such as a separate classroom or physical therapy. Tier 3 students may require interventions such as a full-time nurse or even out-placement at a special school (for which the sending district is still financially liable).

Public schools receive state funding based on student tiers; charters get the same funding whether the student needs an hour of speech therapy a week or a separate classroom, teacher and aide.

This creates an obvious financial incentive for charter schools to cherry pick students who are considered special needs, but who need no costly adaptations or staffing to meet those needs, while at the same time incentivizing charters to avoid the more costly high needs students. Denial of those students does not require outright rejection of the students; charters can simply say, “You are welcome to enroll, but we do not provide any of the specialized programs that you want for your child.” Parents will simply walk away.

Examples of this technique are not hard to find in the state. Before they closed down in 2018, the Wonderland Charter School in State Collegel was caught over-identifying students with speech and language impairment, a low-cost Tier 1 need, by 1,000%.

The actual dollar amounts vary by sending districts, making some districts more attractive to charters than others. Chester Uplands has been so hard hit by charter operators that at one point its payment to charter schools was greater than its funding from the state. The district’s state-appointed receiver identified students with special needs as a major issue. He found that the public system had an enrollment for costly autism students of 8.4%, while the three charters had enrollments of 2.1%, 0% and 0%. Results are similar for other high-cost needs. However, when he looked at speech and language impaired students, he found the public school with 2.4% enrollment, while the three charters enrolled 27.4%, 20.3%, and 29.8%. It costs pennies to meet those special needs, but in Chester Uplands, each student with special needs, regardless of what those needs might be, brought $40,000 into charter bank accounts, far more than the reimbursement for a student with no special needs at all.

This matches the pattern that the report found. In Philadelphia, twenty-four charter schools enroll no Tier 2 or 3 students. In Pittsburgh, while some charters such as Environmental Charter and City High Charter enroll numbers from each tier that match the city, twenty-two charters enroll no Tier 2 or 3 students. In nine Pennsylvania counties, not a single one of the charter schools enrolls Tier 2 or 3 students. 

Across the state, the report finds roughly 10% of public school enrollment is students with special needs; for charters, the percentage across the state is about half that.

The result is that taxpayers, through their local districts, are overpaying charters for the services provided. If a student with a language impairment moves to a charter, the funding doesn’t just follow her—it increases by thousands of dollars. A student who cost the taxpayers $15,000 to educate in a public school now costs taxpayers $27,000, though no more money is being actually spent on that student’s education.

The other result pointed out by the report is that high-needs students do not have access to the same school choices that others have. Realistically, some students need highly specialized services available from limited providers. But parents of other Tier 2 and 3 students were promised all sorts of options when school choice laws were passed, and that turns out to be false. 

Charter schools are businesses, and a basic decision in any business is which customers are too much trouble or expense to serve, and which are more profitable. And so charters make a basic business calculation. Meanwhile, the public school system is still required to make good on the promise of a free and appropriate education for every single student.

The Pennsylvania legislature could fix the problem pretty simply; just apply the same funding system to both public and charter schools. The report shows that this would save taxpayers roughly $100 million. We’ll see if charter schools are willing to let that kind of income go quietly.

Originally posted at Forbes.com

Pence, DeVos, And More Private School Choice Baloney

My thanks to Bill Ferriter, who raised some of this on Twitter, thereby allowing me to boost my blood pressure before I even got all the way home from vacation.

Mike Pence, Betsy DeVos and a few other notables took a trip yesterday to North Carolina, to plug an assortment of their favorites issues while visiting a private school that, unsurprisingly, underlined everything wrong with their favorite issues.

The school was Thales Academy; Pence visited with faculty and with a Fourth Grade class (where he and the teacher wore masks, DeVos did not, and Pence took his off to do his talky talky). He tweeted that "To Open Up America Again is to open up schools again."

Thales of Miletus. Nobody asked him if he wanted
a school chain named after him.

Thales is one of many schools founded by Robert L. Luddy, who made his bundle turning a sheet metal shop into a manufacturer of kitchen ventilation systems. He launched his first charter school in 1998, followed by a private Catholic Prep school, and the Thales chain. You may remember one of his schools being in the news for its policy forbidding the mention of anything related to LGBTQ--well, anything. His libertarian-ish bona fides are many, and he was not initially in the Trump camp in 2016, bnt he's since joined the team. And when it comes to pandemic response, Luddy is right there in Trumplandia; take this March 2020 piece he write entitled "Back To Work: America Has No Choice If It Is To Avoid Total Disaster."

That's a big part of what brought Pence and DeVos to Thales. As Pence noted in his remarks:

We were — we had a great discussion, and I could sense the spirit in the room — the enthusiasm the children feel for being back in school, which is where we want all of America’s children to be. We think we can safely reopen our schools. And I’m here to listen and learn from your experience here at the forefront of reopening a school here in America to understand how Thales Academy is doing it and how North Carolina is making it happen.

DeVos took the opportunity to restate some of her current policy positions:

“There’s not a national superintendent, nor should there be, therefore there’s not a national plan for reopening,” DeVos said.

Too many schools in North Carolina are giving families “no choice but to fall back on virtual learning,” she said. DeVos advocated for school choice, including private school vouchers.

North Carolina has a school voucher program that DeVos's American  Federation for Children ranks as 5th in the country, and both that and the 100% tax-deductible Luddy Schools Scholarship Fund offer financial support to Thales students. Nevertheless, Thales is an example of how choice ends up not being choice at all.

Thales is a uniform school, and families are responsible for buying the correct clothes, including phys ed uniforms.

Thales also won't be providing transportation; "parents are responsible for transportation to and from the school each day." Thales schools run a fairly typical school day, so that parents not only need to do their own transport, but need to be able to get students to school before 8 and around 3:00. After school care is offered, for an additional price.

Thales won't be providing lunch, either. Parents can order through My Hot Lunchbox, a business that is free to the school (and actually provides a little kickback fund raising to the school, though the school expressly eschews fundraising, because Self Sufficient)--just charge the extra costs to your Visa, MasterCard, or Discover card.

Thales also won't be providing IEP or 504 plan supports. You just let the school know what your child's plan calls for, and they'll let you know whether or not they accept your child.

Thales focuses on a classical education, aka Ancient White Guy and Eurocentric Stuff, plus Traditional American Values (Thales of Miletus was one of the Seven Sages of Greece).. They like Direct Instruction for K-5, Latin logic and rhetoric, and will get that important character education focusing on "virtues such as self-discipline, perseverance, respect, responsibility, and humility."

So if Thales represents choices available to students, it's worth noting that the choice is not available to students who need transportation, or subsidized school lunch and breakfast, or who have special needs, or who don't think white Latin-ish culture is the only culture they need to be steeped in.

In her defense, DeVos would probably not argue the point, saying instead that a school like Thales exists just to serve the students for whom it is a good fit. You know--the right kind of students. Other students should find another school with a better fit for their station in life. A subtext of DeVos's approach to choice has always been that people would all be much happier if they just accepted their proper place and role in society. In the meantime, let's have the taxpayers foot the bill for private schools who serve the right sort of students, and do it by stripping resources from public schools which are for, you know, those Other People's children.

Update: the inevitable Covid-19 sequel.

Diary of a Socialist Indoctrinator

This ran over a year ago at Forbes.com in response to a comment by Trump Jr. and for some reason I never shared it over here. Correcting that now, since teachers are once again teaching students to hate America.

Monday

We started the week here at Karl Marx Middle School with the usual reminders about monitoring the hall between classes and limiting bathroom passes during class periods. Principal McBossface handed out the school nurse schedule for the week (remember not to send sick students when she's not in the building) and the lunch monitor schedule for staff. He reminded us that state tests are coming up, so we'll be giving pre-test practice tests soon. The grapevine says that there have been flareups among the eighth grade girls on Snapchat this weekend, so keep an eye out for any possible fights here at school coming from that. Also the new Healthy Students for Health, No-Bully Zone, Make New Friends At Lunch, Drug Free Students, Anti-Depression Army, and Honor Our Veteran programs launch this week, so be sure to talk to your students about those, and remember to hand out and collect the registration forms for the Read Your Way To Mars program. Finally, we were reminded to make our Socialist Indoctrination targets by the end of the month.

Principal McBossface held me over a minute after the meeting to let me know that he's aware I'm running behind on my Socialist Indoctrination and to remind me that it's super-critical that I get up to speed. I'm really feeling the pressure.

Tuesday

None of the students in fifth period algebra had completed their homework from last night. They said they didn't understand yesterday's lesson about quadratic equations, and could I go over it again. I've been working on this quadratic equation unit for three weeks now, but if they're struggling, they're struggling, so I scrapped my original lesson plan and spent the day reteaching the concepts we had covered before. When the bell rang in the middle of answering some really good questions, I realized I hadn't done any socialist indoctrinating at all.

Wednesday

Today, fifth period walked in talking about the Read Your Way To Mars program. Actually, what happened was Chris hollered, "Hey, you gonna read your way to Mars?" and Pat answered back, "No, I'm going to read all the way to Uranus," and then the whole class laughed for five minutes because they are eighth graders. It took a while to restore order because when they want to, they block me out so thoroughly you'd think they'd been told to ignore me by some prominent public figure.

Then in the middle of class we had a big argument about whether or not Puerto Rico is part of the United States. I said it was, looked it up on line for them, showed them several pieces of documented proof, but it didn't matter. They were pretty sure it wasn't, and they weren't about to take my word for it, or any other authority's. Convincing an eighth grader who doesn't want to be convinced is like trying to part the ocean with a rake.

Then, while I was walking around the room helping them with the quadratic equation work one to one, I discovered that Pat was just crying, so I talked to Pat for a bit. Mom is sick and it has made for a tough time at home. I told the rest of the class to keep working quietly while I gave Pat a chance to talk it out (it's a Wednesday, so there's no nurse or guidance counselor on duty to handle this kind of issue). At the same time, Sam needed extra extra help on the assigned work, so I kept Sam after and then missed doing my socialist indoctrination with both fifth and sixth period.

Thursday

We were informed in the morning that today would be the pre-test practice test, so my classes were canceled while I proctored.

At lunch, I asked some of my department members how they kept up with her socialist indoctrination work. One just laughed and said that she lies when she fills in the report forms.

Friday

This was a really exciting day. After I tried some new explanations of the quadratic equation material, something clicked and most of the class was starting to get it. I was excited. They were excited. They demanded turns at the board to show what they could do. When the bell rang at the end of the period, they were still at the board solving equations and hollering, "Come look at this! Check this!" I know the odds are that many of them will forget it over the weekend, because middle school brains are made of Teflon. And, of course, I was so busy teaching that I never got around to my socialist indoctrination.

I was depressed by the time I got home. I can tell my wife is losing patience. "Look," she said. "I teach kindergartners and we work on it every day between recess and art. How hard can it be? Just read off some Fabianist theory and then get out the construction paper."

I didn't bother to explain that I'm too busy teaching and doing all the extra stuff and, anyway, who can get kids interested in complex socio-political theory. It makes sense in my head, but then I realize that, like every other teacher, I didn't go into this because I wanted to help young people grow and learn and better understand the world and themselves-- no, like every other teacher, I entered the education field so I could be a Socialist Indoctrinator, but now all I ever do is teach. I feel like such a loser.

Archives: Personalization and Outliers

While the Institute is away at a corporate retreat, far, mostly, from the interwebz, I've arranged for some dips into the archives.

Personalization and the Outliers 

Henry Ford was an early proponent of personalization. "Any customer can have a car pained any color that he wants," said Ford in 1909, "so long as it is black."

There have always been limits to personalization. I like to wear hats, but my head is some sort of extra-large melon, so while hat manufacturers may offer choices to fit the personal size preferences of many customers, I'm an outlier. Many times I'm just SOL on a particular hat.

Archives: Myth of the Hero Teacher

While the Institute is away at a corporate retreat, far, mostly, from the interwebz, I've arranged for some dips into the archives.

Oh, that damn hero teacher. She does it for the kids, and not because she likes to eat and have a place of shelter. And now we need her to answer the call again. I've bitched about this myth a few times, but here's an early take on this damaging trope:

The Myth of the Hero Teacher

Oh, that hero teacher.

Larger than life. Leaping tall filing cabinets with a single bound. Taking a few moments out of every day to personally reach out to every single student and making that child feel special, while at the same time inspiring greater levels of smartitude just by sheer force of teacherly awesomeness. The Hero Teacher shoots expectation rays at students, making them all instant geniuses.

Archives: What Does The Free Market Really Foster?

While the Institute is away at a corporate retreat, far, mostly, from the interwebz, I've arranged for some dips into the archives.

If I ever get a "theory" named after me, let it be this one--

The free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing.

And here are some of the many times I've talked about it.

What Choice Won't Do

Netflix and the Myth of Personalization 

Do Charters Create Pressure for Excellence? 

Coke Provides a Marketing Lesson

Choice and Cable