ICYMI: PA Fake Summer Edition (10/11)

 Every Fall, in Western PA, we get a week or so of fake summer. This year it's particularly nice to get another pass at playing outside  in shorts and sweatshirt weather. The board of directors has suddenly taken an interest in gardening, and the timing is perfect since there's hardly anything going on that they could kill. 

Meanwhile, there's some stuff for you to read. Remember, sharing these readings helps amplify the message. Help out.

Bill Gates Quest for the Mythical Magic Bullet   

Ed in the Apple takes a look at the newest attempt by Gates to remake education; this time it's going to be Algebra I for everybody!

What does it mean when hardly anybody stands up for the basic needs of children and public schools.

Jan Resseger talks about how much it sucks that public education continues to be an orphan in these miserable times

Virtual Instruction: 5 pros and 5 cons  

Steven Singer takes a look at the pluses and minuses of trying to educate via computer connection

The Freedom to be That Change

Teacher Tom talks about the challenge of raising children to be moral, ethical beings.

NC can leave the dark ages on education    

Justen Parmenter offers an op-ed in the Charlotte Observer laying out in fairly short, stark terms, how leaders in North Carolina have lost the educational plot.

Governor accused of improperly using Covid relief money to fund vouchers  

Meanwhile, in South Carolina the governor decided he woud just go ahead and implement the DeVosian voucher plan on his own. From EdWeek.

Everybody needs to work less   

At Slate, Dan Kois notes that pandemic distance learning is stretching everybody, and the crazy radical has a solution to offer that doesn't involve dumping the problem on teachers or parents.

The lost year fallacy  

Nancy Flanagan takes a look back through history to see if it's legit to write off 20-21.

The corruption of charter schools in Alaska   

The Anchorage Daily News looks at how the  charter industry in Alaska is a money-grubbing mess

How online learning companies are using the pandemic to take over the classroom

Jef Bryant takes a look at the corporate opportunism going on right now.

Greatschools wanted to disrupt school ratings. Did they make segregation worse?  

Well, yeah, probably. And the hidden culprit is, once again, high stakes testing. A thorough look from Mother Jones.

John Lennon's Report Card   

From Valerie Strauss at The Answer Sheet, one more reminder that schools can sometimes miss the point

Dear Secretary DeVos: Either Help Or Hush

Dear Secretary Devos:

Teachers in the US are facing unprecedented challenges this fall, trying to make the best out of whatever bad solution their local districts have chosen. It's a tough time, the kind of time in which we look for help and leadership from folks at the top.

You have not been helpful.

Last Wednesday, you took a conference call with the Phyllis Schlafly Eagles, a collection of your very conservative friends (You and I are old enough to when she was a big name in politics, opposing the ERA, homosexuality, arms control agreements, and guys like Nelson Rockefeller). You told those folks that many public school districts "have not really taken their customers--you know, their students and their families--into consideration." You specifically criticized the Fairfax schools for changing at the last minute their previous plans for the fall into all remote learning. You accused them of "pretending" to offer options over the summer, as if they were up to some sort of sneaky trip and not, say, trying to figure out how to navigate an unprecedented health crisis. A crisis that people in leadership roles, like you, have offered no leadership or guidance on dealing with.

Thursday you were in Waukesha, WI, speaking to a select group of private school parents about how families have been unhappy with education during the pandemic, which is a remarkably obtuse comment because, well, duh. Everybody is unhappy with education during the pandemic. There are no good educational options during the pandemic, and nobody--whether they are worrying about exposure in face-to-face school or struggling to overcome the many limitations of distance learning--is all that happy. 

What's the smartest choice? Hard to say. Some of the early data suggests that schools might not be super-spreaders, but then, schools that are just regular old Covid spreaders are enough to worry--and kill--folks.

While you've been out slamming public schools at events like the two above, you've made it clear what your interest is--promoting school vouchers. You keep plugging your scholarship tax credit plan, and keep insisting that the pandemic underlines how badly families need choice, as if one of the available choices were a school that is completely immune from the covid spread. 

It's seems hard to believe that you could make people more angry at you than they already were (I understand that you don't care--I'm just saying). But here we are with the school house on fire, and the head of education is using it as an opportunity to sell her personal brand of asbestos gloves.

I suppose it should be clear after all these years that we can't expect any help from you for public education. And it's a sign of the times that it makes sense to type a sentence like "the United States secretary of education cannot be expected to support public education in the United States." So sure-- no guidance, no assistance, not even a sympathetic pat on the shoulder or a half-hearted attaboy. Certainly not a "These are really difficult times-- what can we on the federal level do to help you?"

But if you're not going to elp, can you at least hush? If you are not going to be part of any sort of movement to help public schools, can you at least not be out in the front lines of people trying to attack it? Is that really so much to ask? Just, you know, hush. Just let the people who are actually doing the work of public education in this country have one fewer voices bussing in their ear declaring that they stink and they're failing and we should be giving them less support and instead buying everyone a pair of these asbestos gloves. 

Either pitch in and help us get through this, or, if you can't bring yourself to so that, just sit down and hush. 

Sincerely,

Peter Greene

Democracy Is Not The Point

 Twitter is often a fine place to catch people saying the quiet parts out loud. For instance, this tweet from this morning:

Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prospefity are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.

— Mike Lee (@SenMikeLee) October 8, 2020

Mike Lee is a Senator from Utah who tilts all the way over into Libertarian rightness. He loves himself some school choice. He's also part of the crew that got Covid-19 as a parting gift at the White House Amy Barrett soiree. 

As a blogging master of multiple typos, I'm not going to dog him for clearly meaning "prosperity." But I am going to whoop and holler and point at the "democracy isn't the objective" part. That was a follow up to yesterday's tweet "We are not a democracy." (Don't bring any "but we're actually a republic" argument in here--that just signals you aren't ready to seriously discuss this).

It's the quiet part out loud, the part that we've been hearing in the assault on public education. It's in the arguments by guys like Reed Hastings (Netflix) that elected school boards are a hindrance and should be done away with. It's in the cities where mayoral control has been implemented. It's in the communities where charter operators come from outside and make education reform something they do to the community rather than with it. It is in the education disruption model that says what we really need is a powerful visionary in charge who isn't held down by regulations or unions and who doesn't have to be accountable to the community. This Wise and Powerful school leader will provide people with what he believes they need, and they should be grateful. 

One powerful part of the reformsters disruptive narrative has always been that "rank democracy" gets in the way of real reform. Just put that visionary CEO in charge, and let him be accountable to the invisible hand of market forces. Focus on how we're giving families a choice and direct attention from the fact that 1) they can only have the choices that we decide to give them and 2) citizens who don't have children get no say at all. 

We could dig deeper. Why is democracy so "rank"? Under the current administration, the working theory seems to be that the Wrong Sort of People have been allowed a say. People ask how this administration can even pretend not to be divisive; the answer is that they see themselves as uniters of Real Americans, and they're uniting them against all Those Others who are not Real Americans but have somehow been allowed to have votes and voices and some kind of control in the national conversation. America will be Great Again when the Right People are in charge.

That means schools, too. Or maybe even especially. 

I'll add the usual disclaimer--reformsters come in many flavors and types, and there's virtually nothing you can say that will be true of them all. 

But. This thread of anti-democracy, of just-sit-down-and-let-your-betters-run-the-show runs through much of the ed reform movement, and it's there not strictly because of the education world, but because it is part of a larger movement in this country to clamp down on democracy and put the Right People in charge, so that the Right People can enjoy their liberty and prosperity in peace, and so they can dole out whatever amounts of such things they believe all those Others deserve. 

"Democracy is not the objective." It would be a mistake to think that just because we're here in the United States of America, there couldn't possibly people--certainly not people in positions of power--who believe that. Lee says that he likes school choice because it involves the community, but always remember-- democracy is not the objective.

Has Miami-Dade Really Found The Secret Of Cheap Excellence?

From school choice to school finance, Florida is the state education disruptors love to point at, though they tend to point verrrrry carefully at very specific features of the Floridian education landscape. For instance, here's Michael Q. McShane at Education Next running a piece about how Miami-Dade schools have "bucked the staffing surge trend" while still maintaining "student achievement." His thesis is right up front:

The Miami-Dade County Public Schools spends less per student than the only three larger districts in the country and still manages to deliver top-tier student achievement results.

The implication, popular with the conservative wing of reformsters, is that educational excellence is available for bargain prices if we just worked the right levers. But there are three large holes in his Florida argument.

About that staffing surge...

McShane starts by pointing out that Miami educates around 350,000 students, and according to the census folks, they do it for less than $10K a year, far less than other huge districts, even when adjusted for cost of living. This has not a surprise; Florida schools have been trying to shake off the "latest" budget cuts for years (here they are in 2011, and here they are this year). Florida is run by politicians who are openly hostile to public education, and they've been trying to bleed the system dry for years. 

But Miami-Dade, says McShane, is doing it "partly" by providing low-cost education by pushing back against the "staffing surge."

Except here's the thing about the staffing surge. Bring it up on Twitter and Bruce Baker (School Finance 101), a Rutgers University professor specializing in school finance and education policy, may well bring up this chart:

The staff surge is not very surgey. Now, that is a national average, so some parts of the country could be feeling some surge, I suppose. McShane is using numbers from Ben Scafidi of Kennesaw State University, but he seems to have focused on how much student and staff populations grew or shrank by percentage. By his measure, Miami-Dade is unusual in showing a percentage of growth equal to the percentage growth of student population. 

Now, I'm not an education scholar, but I know this about percentages. If I have a thousand students in school, and next year I get 100 more, my student population has grown by 10%. But If I had two administrators and I hired two more, my administration staff has increased by 100%. Since student populations, particularly in a huge district like Miami-Dade, are way larger than teacher or administrator populations, comparing their growth or shrinkage by percentages is an apples-to-watermelons situation. I'm confident Baker's method of measuring is more useful, and that the "staff surge" issue is not that big a thing. 

About student achievement...

I'm a broken record on this point, but I am just going to stay in my groove until folks examining education start singing a different song. When McShane says "student achievement," he means "student test scores."

Test scores are not the same as student achievement.

Test scores are not the same as student achievement.

Test scores are not the same as student achievement.

Test scores are not the same as student achievement.

Just do me a favor and keep repeating that infinity times.

But even if we decide we care about test scores...

McShane wants to point at NAEP scores-- well, the Trial Urban District Assessment NAEP scores. But he only wants to point at very particular NAEP scores. Miami 4th grade reading and math scores outperformed  the large-city average for the test. The 8th grade scores were...meh. On par with other large cities. There is also such a thing as regular old NAEP scores and, in some years,12th grade NAEP scores, but McShane doesn't bring any of that up. Can you guess why?

Billy Townsend knows, and he lays out all the gory details in a blog post here. The short answer is that by the time Florida students are finishing their education and ready to go out into the world, all of that 4th grade test-based awesomeness has vanished. Not only vanished, but cratered as Florida's students fall behind the nation as a whole. 

Stanford did a study looking at growth, and Kevin Drum, a political writer for Mother Jones took a look at the results, mapping out districts based on how much students advanced in a year between 3rd and 8th grade. 

You know I'm not a fan of these kinds of test-based statistical shenanigans, but if that's the game these folks want to play, let's take a look. In the map above purple marks the districts with the very least growth between 3rd and 8th grade. As Drum concludes, based on these results, "Florida is an almost insane basket case."

Florida, I will remind you, may hate public education, but they absolutely worship at the altar of the Big Standardized Test. This is the state where sick and dying children have been harrassed with state demands that they take that test. This is the state where they test the littlest of the littles. This is the state where students who have top grades in reading are still held back a grade because they won't take the test. And with all that, they're still not very good at giving the actual test.

So if they've been drilling testing into students since the students were five years old, why don't they test well as eighth graders? That is a question that answers itself, although I might add, have you met an eighth grader? Florida wants to be a proof of concept state for many things, but one thing it is absolutely proof of concept for is that focusing your entire education system on test taking leads to lousy educating. 

So in the end, we have to conclude that along with the fountain of youth and land deals that can make you rich, cheap educational excellence is another thing that cannot be found in Florida.

CAP: It's the School System's Fault

The Center for American Progress (CAP) is nominally a left-tilted thinky tank, but they have always been solidly on the side of reformsterism, backing charter schools and relentlessly stumping for the Common Core.

They're also fans of the narrow reformster view of education as a mill for churning out meat widgets, and here they are at it again in a post from mid-September (you know, about ten years ago) entitled "Preparing American Students for the Workforce of the Future." It's a pervasive reform idea--that the point of school is as vocational prep (and college is just vocational prep for higher-paying jobs).

And yes-- if schools were cranking out graduates who were completely unemployable, that would be a disservice to those students. But the notion that the years 1 through 18 (or even 22) should be focused simply on making yourself useful to your future employer is such a cramped, meager, joyless, shrunken version of what a human life can be-- Well, I could go on and on, but let's settle for this--no parents with resources to provide their child with more would settle for thirteen (or fourteen or fifteen) years of meat widget training.

But CAP leaps right in with "The United States has failed to prepare all students for college and their careers" and follows up by citing TNTP's Opportunity Myth, one of those non-research "reports" that reformy groups crank out so that other groups can cite them as if they contain actual research. I've discussed it at length elsewhere, so I'm not getting into it here--short form: it's not a good sign.

CAP throws in some chicken littling about the pandemic's effects on the US healthcare, economy and workforce, noting that Black and brown people are worst hit, and they're not wrong. But their call to address "systemic gaps in education" (and again, they're not wrong) focuses on just three areas of gappage.

We'll get to those three areas in a moment, but first, CAP wants to talk about its "new research approach, which aims to be more responsive to community needs and desired solutions." See, CAP is going to "embark" on a "series of community conversations across the country in areas with a high proportion of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous populations." The conversations will be "a unique way to collect data about the needs and potential solutions" for these communities, except the list of specific questions would seem to indicate that CAP has already decided that what these communities need is more job training.

The conversations will focus on how community members define the future workforce; how they learn about new industries and occupations; how well their schools help students prepare for this future; and how their schools should be held accountable for preparing all students.

CAP goes on to explain that a cross-sectional collaborative approach is necessary because this stuff is too complicated for schools to handle alone, and they devote half a sentence to another benefit for society that they foresee--engaging more actively as citizens. But mostly it's jobs jobs jobs, including a description of what constitutes a "good" job based on a Gallup poll. The list of ten characteristics, but we are still stuck in the allegedly progressive view of supply-side jobs programming, the notion that if everyone gets more education, somehow the supply of jobs will expand to meet them, that the lousy jobs will be magically done by, well, someone, and most of all, we need not look for any levers that might impel businesses to provide better jobs. Somehow, in this formulation, when the manager of Walmart sees that he has twenty-five people with advanced marketing college degrees, he will immediately increase the pay and benefits for the job he's trying to fill. At any rate, all those people you know in lousy jobs? That's the result of them getting insufficient proper education, and is in no way the fault of economic forces or cheap-ass corporate employers.

Anyway.

Here are the three magic bullets that CAP suggests for fixing the meat widget problem.

Early Career Preparation

Schools aren't "exposing" students to careers and industries, and they're not doing it early enough. It's in this section that we find this jaw-dropper:

Most students enroll in high school course pathways that lead to a dead end and leave students ineligible for their desired postsecondary options.

This claim is based on "research" by the Center for American Progress and I'm not going to take a side trip into that mess. Short version: they compared high school course requirements to college admission requirements, and then also compared course requirements to a set of "college and career ready" requirements that they just kind of made up. They did not--as one might expect from research that reaches such a gobsmacking conclusion--come up with any actual numbers of all these students who are stranded out in Dead Endsville. Because you'd think that if "most students" are on that dead end pathway, we'd here about it. Lots of fun to se "progressive" CAP aligning with Betsy DeVos on their assessment of public education's dead endedness. 

They are correct in noting that students in low-income communities may have less opportunity to hear about certain careers, mostly because there isn't a varied pool of employers in the area. From there they jump to the notion of an "imperative" for local employers to "engage" with schools--except, wait--if the problem is that there aren't many varied local employers then who is doing this engaging? Dammit-- this is an actual problem, but that's no solution. Networking, research, using the internet, staying in contact with students who leave the area, or, and humor me here, going to college without any plan beyond majoring in a subject you like and finding out there what you'd like to do with it. 

Holistic preparation for college and careers in the future of work

This is three paragraphs of argle bargle that walks right up to the edge of that baloney stat about how many jobs of the future don't exist yet. But I think this boils down to "the future of work  in many jobs is a big varied changing field, but we want to be able to measure it with some concrete instrument anyway." Try this paragraph and see what you think:

Research and practice have led to consensus on the different dimensions of readiness all students need for college and future careers. These include academic mastery across a range of subjects, technical training either in a specific field or in cross-cutting skills such as computer literacy, and 21st-century skills such as critical thinking and collaboration. Most states include these in their definitions of college, career, and life readiness, and some elements of these definitions are included in states’ school accountability systems. However, what’s missing are specific systems to develop these skills equitably across all students and ways to measure students’ attainment.

This seems a bit more on point

Too many people will be left out of the future of work. They lack opportunity to develop the critical academic, technical, or cross-cutting skills that allow them to participate in this evolving workforce.

So, the future is big and broad and unclear, but we ought to have a solid set-in-concrete one size fits all measurable program to prepare students for this no size fits all immeasurably broad and varied world. Or maybe students are supposed to be prepared for everything, even though they may have their own ideas about what they want to be prepared for--although you'll notice that student dreams, goals, and preferences are ignored throughout this piece. Everybody should study everything, just in case. And "holistic" is a cool word.

Accountability for establishing and maintaining high-quality pathways to good jobs

You know what? Screw you, CAP. How is this the responsibility of schools and not employers? Yes, CAP calls for employers to get in there and consult and "identify what systemic changes" will be needed, but the main point here is that we need an accountability system to hold schools accountable for how well-employed their graduates are. They're supposed to develop a "seamless pathways from education to training and to good jobs of the future," which harkens back to the old cradle-to-career pipeline. But all the responsibility lands on schools

Accountability systems drive administrator and educator behaviors, so the next generation of accountability systems must provide an incentive to drive behaviors that better prepare students for tomorrow’s workforce.

This also comes with an endnote that takes us to another CAP "report." But God save us from a school system driven by this measure. It's true that when you pick your accountability measures you answer the question, "What is the purpose of this school?" There has to be a better educational answer than "To provide employees for businesses."

It's not just that this narrows the horizon for students. Imagine if we use this yardstick for measuring the offerings of public education. Art? Music? History? Any electives that don't teach job-related skills? In CAP's world, none of that stuff is justifiable.

It's the same old baloney. A narrow view of education that privileged parents would never acept for their own children. Accountability for schools, but not for the politicians who manage the economy or the businesses that set the stage for working conditions. 

After rattling off statistics about low and under-employment for Black and Latinx workers, CAP says "The US education and career training systems should produce better outcomes than they are currently producing." What outcomes? Underemployment? Low wages and few benefits? That--that!--is somehow the fault of schools?? If we get a Democratic administration some day, I hope to God that they ignore anything CAP has to say.

ICYMI: Another Week That Lasted Ten Years Edition (10/4)

Holy crap. Let's take a moment to wax nostalgic about last weekend, those happy times when a story like the First Lady talking about how we should [expletive] Christmas would have gotten at least fifteen minutes of attention instead of being completely wiped out by a raging news cycle. Those happy times when the national news seen was merely a dumpster fire and not a dumpster fire dragged across a wasted landscape by the four horsemen of the apocalypse. The best we can say is that there was a lot of worthwhile writing that appeared, and here's some of it--

How The School Choice Debate Is Failing Our Public Schools 

I am not always a Samantha Bee/Full Frontal fan; on a bad day she just feels like the Lefty version of Ann Coulter. But she does a really nice job of covering the school choice issue in less than seven and a half minutes. Worth watching and sharing with your non-education policy friends.



Epic Owes Oklahoma $8.9 Million

Tulsa World has the story of Epic schools, one more charter business that managed to rip off the state by making off with millions and millions of dollars.

Significant Lack of Equity in K-12 Education

Michigan Civil Rights Commission took a hard look at equity in Michigan schools, and it found many, many problems. Covered here by Michigan Live

New Jersey Spent 35 Years and $100 Billion Trying To Fix School Inequity 

Speaking of states that have failed to straighten equity issues out, here's Politico taking a look at New Jersey. And wonder of wonders, rather than talking to Mike Petrilli, they talked to Bruce Baker (School Finance 101) instead.

Public Schools and School Libraries: The Hubs of Democracy Face Crises

Nancy Bailey takes a look at how the current crisis is eroding some pretty important institutions

Battling for the Soul of Black Girls

Erica Green (along with Eliza Shapiro and Mark Walker) has put together a serious and moving look at the problems growing for what is ":arguably the most at-risk student group" in the country. This is a hell of a piece.

How the SAT Failed America 

And speaking of in-depth reporting, here's Susan Adams at Forbes covering both the broad swath and important details of the College Board's business woes under David Coleman (who, shockingly, does not come off looking good, once again).

The Wealth Gap 

Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat explains how measuring income rather than wealth leaves many families in financial straits unseen.

Student Absences and Juvenile Justice 

Yes, I know you may not read the reformy Bellwhether blog often, but this piece about how the involvement of juvenile justice system in student lives tends to make things worse--well, this is some research worth knowing about. One more piece of the school-to-prison pipeline

In Internet Dead Zones, Rural Schools Struggle With Distance Learning   \

True that. This is NPR reporting about an issue that some of us are far too familiar with.

The Rich and The Rest 

Nothing about this Have You Heard podcast will likely surprise you, but still listen/read as Jennifer and Jack explain just how the rich and the rest of us do not have the same priorities when it comes to public education.

My Way 

Grumpy Old Teacher gives a picture of a real teacher dealing with the real issues of this miserable pandemess in the classroom.

Weird Al Yankovic: We're All Doomed

Just in case you missed it-- Weird Al + Autotuned Candidates = verion of this week's debate that is actually tolerable.

DeVos Awards Another $131 Mill From Failed Federal Charter Fund

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos announced Friday that the department will pump yet another $131 million into the charter school industry (you may have missed the news; a few other things have happened in the last 48 hours).

The grants go to 19 different organizations, primarily charter school "developers." Amounts range from a tiny $299,988 to Acadia Academy in Maine up to $18 mill to Florida's department of education and $23 mill to the Texas ed department. There are a couple of state-level agencies, and a couple of charter-financing groups. Most intriguing [digression alert] is the $592K award to the ALL FOOTBALL CLUB LANCASTER LIONS CORPORATION. I don't know why they're in all caps, but then, I'm not sure why they're in the running for one of these grants. The AFC Lancaster Lions are an "American professional development soccer team" based in Lancaster PA. The corporation was formed in 2014. The organization was founded by Brian Ombiji, a pro "soccer player-turned-CEO" who came here from Kenya. He wants to start a "sports-infused charter school" for grades five through eight.

In addition to the typical core subjects, the school would offer courses related to print and broadcast journalism, fitness and nutrition, scouting, analytics and other sports-centered topics.

His founding board includes Faith Wangunyu, a Kenyan emigree who started the Princeton Preparatory charter schools in Georgia. Also on the board, Dean Kline, co-founder of Penn Ventures Fund, a venture capital outfit. As of August of 2020, the school didn't have a location nailed down. But now they apparently have a nice pile of money to go shopping with. 

It would not be a shock if AFCLL Academy Charter School crashed and burned or even experienced failure to lift off, because that is the not-uncommon historic pattern of such grants. DeVos is doling out tax dollars from the Charter Schools Program (CSP) fund. You may recall that this is the program that has, over its lifetime, lost over a billion dollars to waste and fraud. Like really a lot of waste and fraud and the charter school equivalent of vaporware--schools that never even open. 

But DeVos is kind of stuck in her covid talking point loop. 

“The coronavirus pandemic has made it clearer than ever before that students need the freedom to choose where, when and how they learn,” said Secretary DeVos. “All too many students, particularly the most vulnerable, have fallen further behind because the one-size-fits-all system couldn’t transition and adapt to meet their needs. A bright spot has been high-quality charter schools, many of which pivoted quickly and kept learning going. These grants will help to ensure these high-quality options are available to even more students in the future.”

Well, no. Charter schools haven't been any better at pivoting than anyone else. Heck, the shining sun that is Success Academy has announced it will be doing distance learning till at least January. But then, Succes Academy is more one-size-fits-all than any public school; like too many charters, it has its one size and it accepts only the students who fit. 

The DeVos covid argument highlights one of the fallacies of market-based education. Because it's true that many parents want a choice--they want to be able to choose a school that's open for regular face-to-face learning without any impediments like masking and PPE and weird social distancing rules, and they would also like that school to be completely free of the virus and their children and their family at no medical risk, and while that is a super-appealing choice, no matter how much families want it--the market is not going to provide it. 

The market provides what it wants to provide, not what the customers want it to provide. And the charter (and voucher) school market don't have to provide what everybody wants--they just have to please enough people to fill their schools, which means all you families with difficult or expensive students to educate can just go away. 

But hey-- let's dump another $131 million into charter school prop-ups and profiteers. It's not like public schools have any special pressing extra needs at the moment.