Brookings Makes A Bad Pro-Charter Argument

Mona Vakilifathi graduated from the4 University of California, San Diego, with a BS in political science and government back in 2009, and she's been working policy jobs ever since. Over at Brookings, she has some thoughts about Democrats, charter schools, and ed policy, and while she seems to mean well, she has missed a few spots here and there. I've read it so you don't have to.

Let me get the answers from you!

She opens by repeating the reformster narrative that charters divide Democrats along racial lines, citing the "research" from DFER showing that Black voters want charter schools. The poll (from May of 2019) is another one of DFER's attempts to push the narrative in a pro-charter direction. That poll was particularly riddled with questionable technique and spin. And most of the Black Democrats want charters "data" has come from people trying to push charters. So her premise is problematic.

She also offers a quick history of recent "evolving politics"by citing Trump and DeVos as charter supporters, however, DeVos and Trump have left charter schools behind, throwing their weight behind voucher programs like the DeVosian Education Freedom voucher program. This may be because DeVos has always preferred the idea of tax dollars going to private (religious) schools, and Trump's use of vouchers as a way to draw Catholic support.

And she brings up the old "Albert Shanker liked charters" line, skipping the "and then he realized they were turning out to be awful" part. But her definition of charter schools simply identifies them as schools with "greater policy discretion." There's a great deal of complexity, including the reformster belief that charters can unleash the magical power of market forces, that she skips, other than offering this line from the Vast Understatement Hall of Fame: "As the charter school movement evolved over time, charter school advocates prioritized charter school growth with little attention to how charter schools might benefit traditional public schools..." That's a feature, not a bug, in the market forces conception of charters. Vikilifathi is talking Shanker when she should be talking Friedman.

She notes that charters don't seem to do much better than public schools when it comes to student achievement, by which she means scores on a narrow ill-designed two-subject Big Standardized Test. I'll just go ahead and fix that for her from here on in.

She specifically identifies Democratic opposition to the Charter Schools Program, but a desire to rein in that program is not necessarily about opposition to charters, given that the CSP has thrown at least a billion dollars of taxpayer money into a pit of waste and fraud. Vakilifathi has some ideas about how the CSP can be put to better use.

She pulls this nugget from the body of research-- that charter schools manage higher test scores  than public schools in urban communities. She sails past some of the obvious explanations-- creaming, pushing out low-scoring students, self-selecting for involved families, intensive test prep, longer school hours, and whittling down cohorts without backfilling empty seats (for examples of all these in action, see Robert Pondiscio's How the Other Half Learns  about Success Academy).

Vakilifathi seems to believe that charter schools might know some magical secret to learning, and her policy suggestions are built around that assumption. She proposes that the CSP be amended to do the following.

1) Prioritize federal funding to charter schools that will innovate, experiment, and identify best practices. In other words, she wants the Obama/Duncan notion of charters as laboratories of learning. She wants charters to commit fiddling with ways to improve test scores for low-income, racial/ethnic minority, or special education students (it might help to first require charters to accept special education students). The charter also has to submit to "rigorous, empirical evaluation of the policy intervention for broader dissemination." In other words, they must break down their secret formula to share.

2) The USED must publicly disseminate the results. Show how they made the secret sauce, and share it with all other schools. Include what they did, how they did it, and the improved test scores that they got out of it.

3) USED must give low-scoring public schools to help them implement the special sauce. The public school announces it wants to try East Egg Charter's special sauce, files out an application, gets a grant. They, too, go under the sciencey microscope to see how well that policy idea raised test scores at the school.

In short:

I argue that charter schools provide a unique opportunity to identify evidence-based best practices to improve low-performing traditional public schools because of charter schools’ rich variation in state regulatory exemptions, charter school practices, charter school accountability policies, and student enrollment. Democrats should consider amending CSP to incentivize charter schools to revert closer to its original intent as laboratories of traditional public schools to improve low-performing traditional public schools and student performance.

So, there are several reasons to be less than excited about this idea.

1) Charters are unlikely to be excited about it. Since the movement is largely premised on the notion of unleashing free market forces--well, in that context, this proposal makes as much sense as telling MacDonald's that they have to show Wendy's how to make fries.

2) Vakilifathi's use of BS Test scores as a measure of achievement disqualifies the whole business right there. The tests are a lousy measure of student achievement and school effectiveness-- which are two entirely different things that Vakilifathi just sort of lumps together. Either way, the Big Standardized Test is not the measure to use, unless you want to re-organize schools around standardized test results instead of education.

3) Vakilifathi makes the unfounded assumption that the methods used "successfully" at East Egg Charter can be transferred whole cloth to West Egg Public High School and work just as well, as if the specific situation of the school is not a major factor is student achievement. Hell, as any classroom teacher can tell you, I can't even transfer the methods I used five years ago into today's classes. Hell, lots of times I couldn't even transfer the methods I used third period into sixth period.

4) There is zero reason to think that the charter world, populated primarily by education amateurs, knows anything that public school systems don't already know. Charter success rests primarily on creaming student population (and the families thereof), pushing out students who won't comply or are too hard to educate, extending school hours, drilling tests like crazy, having teachers work 80 hour weeks, and generally finding ways to keep out students with special needs that they don't want to deal with. None of these ideas represent new approaches that folks in public education haven't thought of.

5) If charters were pioneering super-effective new strategies, we would already know. There is a well-developed grapevine in the public education world. If there were a charter that was accomplishing edu-miracles, teachers all over would be talking about it. Teachers who left that charter would take the secret sauce recipe with them, and pretty soon it would be being shared across the country. After decades of existence, charters do not have a reputation in the education world for being awesome--and there's a reason for that. Puff pieces and PR pushes may work on the general public and provide fine marketing, but that's not what sells other teachers.

Short answer-- if charters knew something really awesome and impressive, public school teachers would already know and already be copying it.

6) Rigorous empirical evaluation only measures certain sorts of data friendly things, and we are talking about a wide variety of human beings in a web of complex relationships. You can only get so far trying to, say, do a rigorous empirical evaluation of why two people are best friends. But it will only scratch the surface (and it will not tell you the secret to making two other people become best friends).

7) We've sort of tried all of this (see Obama/Duncan administration). There's even a whole federal website of "What Works" that supposedly provides evidence about a random assortment of programs and materials. You probably haven't heard about it because not that many folks find it useful.

Vikilifathi's idea seems sensible enough on paper, but it just doesn't translate to the actual world of charter schools these days. We're going to need better ideas than this; however, that's a discussion that may best wait until after November.

The Zero Sum Game

I'm feeling a little dumb at the moment, because a light bulb just went on that should have gone on a while ago.

I was having the same conversation I've had many times. "Charters and vouchers and public schools could absolutely coexist. There's no reason it has to be a zero sum game," said someone.

And I agree, sort of. There are some things that can't help being zero sum, like having enough students to run certain programs. But financially, it's absolutely true that we don't have to make it a zero sum game. We don't have to be forced into the ridiculous attempt to finance multiple school systems with the money that isn't sufficient to fully fund just one. That's a choice that politicians make.

There are a couple of reasons we get stuck with a zero sum financial game. One is simple-- there is no politician with the cojones to stand up and say, "We want to set up multiple school systems and we want to raise your taxes to pay for it." The old claim of "my money should follow my child" line is a lie (it's your money--and your neighbors' money, too), but it sounds good and kind of fair. I even think there are people who honestly believe that you should just be able to move some money around and run multiple school systems with little muss and fuss. They're wrong, but I believe they believe in their story.

But there's one more reason to support the zero sum game, and that's that you know it's a zero sum game and you're hoping public education loses.

Again, this is not all the disruptors. This is the far right crowd, the :"government schools are bad" crowd. Talk to your evangelical friends and listen to how they talk about the need to "take back" some institutions, including schools. That's the DeVosian crowd, the let's get Kingdom Gain by putting schools (at least the schools for people who count) back in the hands of the church.

So things like the Education Freedom program are a clever way to end both paying taxes and public schools. Get rid of public schools, and you can also get rid of teacher unions and regulations that tell you that you have to tolerate LGBTQ students and BIPoC students who don't know their place, plus shutting off one of the government avenues for programs that serve poor people.

Again, not all reformsters. But still. I feel a little like I did a decade ago when I thought, "These damned tests-- it's almost as if they want us to fail and--oh, hell! That's it! They do want us to fail."

There will always be an assortment of reasons for disruption advocates to favor the zero sum game for school funding. But one of those reasons is that they do really want to bleed public schools to death. If I've learned anything in the last decade, it's that you cannot underestimate how very much some people hate hate hate the public education system.

Information Sources: Don't Quit Your Day Job

The New York Times just announced another "project" to be embedded within the paper and funded by philanthropic types. It's not a new model; the Gates Foundation has been funding journalism "projects" for a while. This piece by Tim Schwab at the Columbia Journalism Review lays out in depressing detail just how large the Bill Gates Underwritten Journalism Industry actually is (freakin' huge). This kind of funding model reflects how hard times for "journalism" has affected the tilt of what you and I get to read.

Blame the internet, at least in part, because of its prodigious grasping hunger for content. If you want to keep your site in the game, you've got to be rolling out new content several times daily. And that content has to come from somewhere, and there has to be a lot of it, and it has to be cheap.

The old Huffington Post model was a prime example of what can happen next. You may recall that I used to write for HuffPost. So did a lot of other people. It paid exactly $0.00; more accurately, it paid in eyeballs. Sometimes it paid handsomely; this piece may be the most-viewed thing I've ever written.

What we've got is an information ecosystem in which people can't afford to be writers. Nobody who does journalism for a living is making a particularly great living

And what that means, in turn, is that we have an information ecosystem in which many of the producers aren't actually working for the organization under whose masthead they appear. They are either working for someone else, or they're working out of dedication to a cause.

I'm not just talking about the cardboard faux fronts put up by the wealthy, eg Education Post, originally created by Eli Broad, Laurene Powell Jobs, and others of that crowd to imitate an education information website while really devoted to pushing their PR (EdPost has recently morphed into something a little more interesting, but that's a conversation for another day).

I'm talking, for instance, about thinky tank employees who are readily available as a source for any education article, because that's part of their job, and who regularly produce content for other outlets not because they are working for those outlets, but because they are using those outlets to do their real job, which is to push a particular narrative.

Those of us who blog are used to accusations that we're tools of the teachers union, and I think that's partly because that's the model that many folks in the reformy biz are familiar with--you get paid by these folks over here so that you can go write stuff for those guys over there. What has marked much of the resistance to privatization and disruption of education has been a whole lot of folks willing to do the work for no pay but eyeballs, and that has been a powerful force, but at the same time, it has meant that the movement relies on a loose network of people who have lives and day jobs and have to somehow do the work in the margins, while the ed disruption movement has a small army of employees for whom getting the word out and selling the narrative is their day job. And behind them, guys like Gates who are funding a whole lot of writing in other organizations' publications, and making it easer to insure that their narrative is the one that's most readily accessible to readers.

Education Law Center: States Are Using Fed Grants To Cut Education Spending

According to the folks at the Education Law Center, states are repeating the sins of a decade ago. Let me explain.

Pity Tom Corbett. He became one of the few Pennsylvania one term governors, and he lost in no small part because he was accused of cutting education spending by a billion dollars. And he sort of did, but he was also sort of set up by the previous governor, Ed Rendell, who collected some Great Recession relief and used it to replace state tax money rather than adding to it. When that short term federal grant ended, there was suddenly a big hole in PA education spending (which Corbett tried to hide by deciding to start counting pension costs as "educational spending"). Here's the graph:

You may recall that as the Great Recession ended, many states found themselves spending less for education than they had pre-2008. There were many reason for that, but using federal funds to replace state funds and then doing nothing as the federal money ended was in many cases a contributing factor.

And now ELC says some states are doing it again.

ELC cites New York, Texas and Michigan as three states that are following "a playbook from the 2009 Great Recession by cutting over $1 billion in states aid."New York calls this a "pandemic adjustment."

That 209 playbook looks like this:

In the Great Recession, states responded to revenue declines by making significant, recurring cuts in state school aid. Then they offset those cuts with non-recurring federal stimulus relief. This caused deep structural deficits in state support for K-12 education that continued long after the Recession ended.

So, for instance, Michigan cut aid by $175 per pupil, or $256 million total. The state then plugged that hole with an additional $350 per pupil from the Coronavirus Relief Fund along with another $351 million from the CARES act, all of which is going to look like a short term win. But the day that all the federal coronavirus money runs out, the state will suddenly suffer a huge spending "cut."

The effects are particularly brutal for districts in low-income communities, aka districts that have less ability to make up a state shortfall with local tax increases. This model creates a ticking time bomb for the poorest districts.

And it's not just bad news in the long term. This approach also means blunts the effect of federal relief. This is Extra Bad News during a pandemic because schools are suddenly facing new, large expenses (PPE, substitutes, distance learning supplies, etc etc etc). It's like this-- you tell your folks that you're going to have to pay extra for school lunch this month and your usual allowance won't cut it. "Will ten dollars a week extra be enough," they ask, and you answer that you can probably make that work. "Great," they reply. "Also, we're cutting your weekly allowance by seven dollars.:"

In other words, we're in danger of the same mess we had with education spending during and after the Great Recession, only worse. It's the kind of thing that requires keeping a careful watchdoggy number-crunchy policy-wonky eye on your legislature, but it has to be done because otherwise it's far too easy for state politicians to kick the can down the road and leave it for some other poor slob to clean up.

How Bad Is This Gates-Funded Essay Cyber-Scorer? This Bad.

Software that can grade an essay is the great white whale of automating education. If software could actually score an essay effectively, data-mining personalized [sic] algorithm-delivered edu-product could work with more than just multiple choice and true or false questions. I've written a plenty about why this great white whale is not going to be landed any time soon. But let me give you a specific example of how bad one product really is, even though it's getting funding from the Gates Foundation.

Ecree was founded in 2014 and promises to use "artificial intelligence to replicate teacher-quality feedback on written assignments." It was founded by Jamey Holt and Robin Donaldson. Holt used to do a little college teaching, then became COO of Phronesis Health, Inc, a healthcare data mulching outfit. Donaldson is the computer guy.

The Gates Foundation is a big fan of this kind of software-driven edu-product, and have given  something like $3 million to companies working on the problem, including ETS, Vantage Learning, Measurement Incorporated, and the University of Michigan. Plus our new friends at Ecree. All five grants are "to validate the efficacy of Automated Essay Scoring software in improving the student outcomes in argumentative writing for students who are Black, Latino, and/or experiencing poverty."

First, I'm looking askance at the word "validate," which is a lot like "prove that this works" when it should be "see if this works or not" (spoiler alert-- not).

Second, it's silly to talk about validating the efficacy of these products for Black, Latino or poor students, because these products have no efficacy for any students at all (which is why I'm going to skip over the ethical and educational issues of having someone/something sit beside you and help you write a paper).

But don't take my word for it. Let's see just how well Ecree works.

Ecree offers a free trial, which I used, with help from BABEL, the nonsense essay generator created by the long-time scourge of automated essay scoring baloney, Les Perelman. Ecree asks you what your prompt was and then lets you either write the essay on their site, or simply upload it.

My prompt was "What was the role of isolationism in World War I?" BABEL builds an essay out of three words-- I gave it "isolationism," "Europe" and "war," and this is the essay it kicked out.

Warfare has not, and no doubt never will be expedited. Human society will always oust isolationism; some of appetites and others for an exposition. a lack of war lies in the field of literature but also the field of philosophy. War is the most inappropriately eventual trope of mankind.

Gluttony, especially for howl, authorizes an advancement on positively but magnificently blustering speculations by Europe. If allocations inquire or intensify admiration, consistency that is mournfully contemporary but is puissant, gregarious, and manifest with warfare can be more naturally reprimanded. Additionally, europe, often at an adjuration, can be the scrutinization. In my experience, all of the ligations to our personal precinct of the arrangement we attenuate concede the inquisitions in question. Even so, armed with the knowledge that the contrived anesthetic expedites pulchritude, most of the comments for my utterance relent. Our personal convulsion to the proclamation we lament sermonizes. Europe which precludes all of the performances might dubiously be an allegation on our personal authorization with the thermostat we assimilate as well. The assembly of celebrations may be decency but is incensed yet somehow inappropriate, not paganism that undertakes admixture and circumscribes concurrences. In my theory of knowledge class, none of the axioms at our personal sanction by the apprentice we inspect advocate and allocate amplifications which compensate the altruist. The more a probe that collapses should be disruption, the less contretemps can gratuitously be a Gaussian multitude.

As I have learned in my semiotics class, isolationism is the most fundamental casuistry of humankind. Though interference for obloquy inverts, information processes brains. The same pendulum may process two different orbitals to process an orbital. The plasma is not the only thing the brain reacts; it also receives neutrinoes for irascibility with war. Due to interceding, petulantly but extraneously petulant expositions protrude also on Europe. a contemptuous isolationism changes the injunction at warfare.

The organism, frequently to a respondent, diagnoses war. The sooner the people involved yield, the sooner admiration dislocates drones. Furthermore, as I have learned in my literature class, society will always belie isolationism. Our personal intercession of the assumption we accede will be appreciation with circumspections and may diligently be rectitude. The amanuensis might, still yet, be coruscating in the way we incline or belittle the indispensably and posthumously philanthropic recount but preach appetites. In my semantics class, almost all of the affronts at my agreement bluster or inaugurate the exposure. a quantity of isolationism is consummate for our personal orator on the response we propagate as well. The inspection delineates excess, not a scrutinization. In my experience, many of the interlopers by our personal civilization at the prison we feign complete agriculturalists. The less profession that whines is prelapsarian in the extent to which we excommunicate most of the ateliers for the realm of reality and confide or should completely be a conveyance, the more ligations authorize the conveyance of augmentation.

Warfare with concessions will always be an experience of human society. In any case, armed with the knowledge that presumption may confrontationally be whiner, most of the accumulations at my proclamation scrutinize tropes but commence and allure assassinations which provision an assembly. If joyous reprobates speculate and assassinate demarcations to the aborigine, war which corroborates authorizations can be more squalidly unsubstantiated. War has not, and undoubtedly never will be countercultural but not vied. Europe is countlessly but precariously contentious as a result of its those in question.

You'll notice that, in addition to being gibberish, the BABEL essay never actually mentions World War I at all. 

On upload, the program, for no apparent reason, plugged my paragraphs into the every other graph spot. You'll notice that it has decided on its own where the topic sentences are in these topic-free paragraphs. Each of the little comments on the right margin offers more detail when you hover. In Body Paragraph 2, Ecree says that the "topic sentence for this paragraph clearly connects to your thesis." Also, "you do a good job of explaining how the information in your paragraph supports your point." 

In Paragraph 4, where Ecree says that the analysis is weak, the explanation is that the analysis gets off to a good start, but I don't spend enough time explaining why the information helps make my point. 

Throughout the text, Ecree also offers style guidance, like to emphasize ideas, use clear nouns rather than verbs. Also, "describing actions takes focus away from a sentence's key ideas." Both of those turned up a lot. It also checked some spelling and punctuation. I moved some paragraphs around to get rid of the "blank" paragraphs; it did not notice when I had the same paragraph in the essay twice.

Ecree also grades the final product. My BABEL essay received a B, 83%. It does, in smaller print note "The grade given by your teacher may be different than the grade provided by Ecree." 

The great and terrible weakness of automated essay grading is that software always measures superficials. Big words? Sentence structure? Length of sentences and paragraphs? Scan for a couple of key words? That's it. There is about as much artificial intelligence involved as there is in my wireless mouse.

The complaint when a software is BABEL-tested is that the BABEL essay is not a good faith attempt to complete the assignment, that it's just trying to bullshit the scoring software. But if you think students writing essays never try to bullshit the teacher, I have a bridge over a swamp to sell you. More importantly, handing the essay over to software is not a good faith attempt to assess the writing, so what do you expect?

The feedback is instantaneous, much like the instantaneous feedback from a magic eight ball. And the pricing is modest-- $5.00 a paper, or a yearlong subscription for $200--okay, not really that modest for something that doesn't actually work. But this is the kind of thing Gates is spending money on. What a waste. 

Trump's Education Agenda

Trump has released his agenda for his second term, and it's special. Cut taxes. Add jobs. Eradicate Covid-19. End reliance on China. Cover pre-existing conditions. Congressional term limits. Bring violent extremist groups like ANTIFA to justice. Dismantle human trafficking. Build the world's greatest infrastructure system (so, more infrastructure week!) Stop endless wars.

It's all familiar hooey, in bullet point list form (so not a word about how or why, but education gets its own subheading, under which we find these two bullet points.

Provide School Choice To Every Child In America

Teach American Exceptionalism

That's it. That's the whole thing. Get some of that good old ahistorical jingoism back in the classroom, and dismantle the public education system and replace it with a privatized one. It's a fun pairing because if you're going to have a school choice system, how are you going to force every school to teach exceptionalism? For that matter, how will you force a free and open market to serve every single student (spoiler alert--you can't).

So not just crap, but sloppy, poorly thought out crap. Trump's listicle agenda is less an actual agen da and more a collection of catch-phrases that he's figuring will appeal to his base. Also, in the case of sc hool choice, it also lets him reassure folks like the Catholic Church that deal he made (voucher-delivered taxpayer dollars in return for votes) is still in place.

Note also that there is no GOP platform this time. The GOP has decided to skip having a platform and instead has simply declared that the press is mean, that whatever the Dems are for, the GOP is against it, and finally, that they pledge their loyalty to Dear Leader. So this bullet point list is all we get this time around.

Lots of public school teachers voted for Trump first time around. There may have been some question about how things would go that time, but this time out there can be no doubt-- a vote for Trump is a vote against public education.

Addendum: For those sputtering "But but but what about Biden," here's the post I already ran about Biden's "unity" platform.

More Pandemic Privatization

"This New Nonprofit Is Training Better Online Teachers This Fall" gushes the EdSurge article that is barely disguised PR for yet another reformy initiative.

This summer a group of education leaders, many from the world of charter schools and education reform, sought to change that by launching the nonprofit National Summer School Initiative, or NSSI for short. Its solution was both a crash course in effective online teaching—and figuring out what good online teaching looked like—and a summer enrichment program for students across the country.

"Many" from charter/reform world is not really correct-- "entirely" would be more accurate. Crash course is right--the training "institute" lasted a whole week. And the company, which has already rebranded itself as Cadence Learning, is selling one more screen-delivered education program. This rebranding is a bit of an unforced rookie error, as Cadence Education is already a company in the early childhood ed biz, and the Cadence Learning Company is a Canadian pharmaceuticals firm. Boys and girls, first rule of 21st century business--before you choose a name, google it.

Poster boy for endlessly failing upwards

You can get a good sense of where this business is coming from just by looking at the priors of the folks running it. The spokesguy that EdSurge talked to was Chris Cerf, a lawyer who became part of the Joel Klein edu-team in NYC, then became Chris Christie's education chief for New Jersey. He left that job to work with Klein at the fiasco that was Amplify (it was totally going to change the face of education). Oh, and Edison Schools, too. After that, he became Cami Anderson's replacement as head of Newark schools. Now he's part of the leadership team at Cadence.

Also on the team are Kevin Anderle, from Achievement First and Teach for America; Savita Bharadwa, former chief of staff at Newark schools, as well as a consultant. Her degrees in electrical engineering, but she got a fake degree from the Broad Academy. so there's that. Then there's Rochelle Dalton, senior fellow at Bellwether, also formerly KIPP Foundation, and Teach for America. Aquan Grant, PrepNet--but she has a real education degree and spent two whole years in the classroom before her career as a charter school principal. Monnikue Marie McCall founded a business solutions service. Doug McCurry is co-CEO of Achievement First. Katie Rouse is from Bellwether, and has a fake degree from Broad. Ian Rowe is CEO of Public Prep, and previously at the Gates Foundation and before that, MTV. Betsey Schmidt, Mesh Ed Collective CEO, after doing R&D for Whittle Schools and Studios, and a stint at Ascend Learning. Saya Taniguchi is an "independent education consultant" who started out in TFA. Mary K. Wells, Bellwether, formerly Bain. Steven Wilson, CRPE, Ascend Learning, special assistant under Mass Gov William Weld. Lakisha Young, cofounder of Oakland REACH, a parent advocacy group.

There are also an "award-winning" team of mentor teachers. There are 21 of them. 7 are "enrichment" teachers. Of the remaining 17, at least 8 are TFA products; the rest are charter school teachers.

So, in this big ole company, this company that is designed all around the idea of helping deliver classroom teaching, there is nobody in sight with any meaningful experience in classroom teaching (or, for that matter, distance learning--unless you want to count Cerf's time wit the disastrous failure of Amplify, and why would you).

The model is simple enough. The "mentor" teacher starts the virtual class, along with a couple of "showcase" students, and then kicks it over to the "partner" teacher. Let me point out that odds are good that the "mentor" teacher will actually have far less teaching experience than the "partner" teacher. Cadence also offers lesson plans and a daily schedule, just in case your student needs to spend (checks chart) almost six hours in front of a screen.

Right now the program is free to smaller schools, fueled with big time grants. Cerf says the point here is to put a focus on quality cyber-schooling, but it's not clear what this slick well-funded band of edu-amateurs has to bring to the table. But it is one more handy way to A) get public schools to hand over the driver's seat to a private company and B) prop up charter schools that are struggling. It's one more variation on the Rocketship/Summit model, wit the twist of a live synchronous body involved in sort of teaching the class, kind of.

These are difficult times, and the last thing schools need is more amateur hour shenanigans from people who come from the world of "if it's really important, you should be able to make a buck at it." If you see your district considering these guys, speak up loudly.