ME: Charter Pushers Quietly Switch To New Product

Maine has suffered through its own brands of education disruption. Most notably, they became the target for a bunch folks who wanted to use Maine as a proof of concept state for proficiency based learning grafted onto standards based grading. At best they showed that a poorly implemented and underfunded disruption of this sort is disastrous; at worst, they showed that re-organizing education around the needs of data miners is a terrible idea. However you slice it, Maine's little experiment failed hard.

But what education in Maine hasn't had to deal with much is the rise of charter schools. The charter industry hasn't infected Maine as badly as, say, Ohio or Indiana. There are ten charters, with fewer than a total of 3,000 students enrolled. There are plenty of possible explanations, not the least of which is that once you get away from Theme Park Maine on the coast, Maine is pretty rural (I have an old friend who used to describe his central Maine high school as fifteen miles and an hour and a half away from the nearest rival). But that limited role for charteristas may be about to change.

Like every state where charters are legal, Maine has a group that promotes, advocates, lobbies and generally cheerleads for the charter industry-- the Maine Association for Charter Schools, whose stated purpose is to promote "high-quality options for all children within Maine's public education system." But last year the legislature indefinitely extended a charter school cap. 10 is all the charters they may ever have.

So what's a chartery education disruption group to do? 

How about renaming yourself? And rebranding yourself with a whole new mission by declaring yourself the leaders of the state's education community?

So let's meet a fun new group launched just a few months ago. It's the Education Action Forum of Maine and it is, well-- from their About Us page:

The Education Action Forum of Maine operated for twenty years as the Maine Association for Charter Schools. On June 17, 2020, the MACS board voted to change the name and expand its mission to adapt to the realities influencing the education landscape in Maine.

Think of them as the Pandemic Down East Opportunist Society. Also from their About Us...

The time is ripe for an organization, such as ours, to provide leadership to assist the education system to move forward safely, and to develop strategies to restructure the system in ways unimaginable before the pandemic struck.

It takes its "inspiration" from "analogous" groups like the Mind Trust of Indianapolis and Education Evolving in Minnesota. I've written about the Mind Trust before (you can read about them here and here), and they are the same old disruptor model. Declare the public schools a mess, and then declare yourself "leaders" in the education space by virtue of the fact that 1) you say so and 2) you have collected some money and political connections. Mind Trust was, in fact, saying a couple of years ago that they wanted to scale up their model to other states. 

So when EAFoM says that they are "designed to amplify the voices of families, students and teachers," you can take that with a few tons of salt. When they talk about "restructuring the education system," assume they mean dismantling and privatizing the public system. And when they say they are looking to develop some "critical partnerships," pay attention to the people they partner with.

The organization is still led by Judith Jones, the chair of the board. She's been at this for a while, incuding a stint in DC during their chartery formative years. The new hire at EAFoM is John Mullaney (not the funny one), who previously spent twenty years at the Nord Family Foundation, a less well known philanthropic outfit with a charter-heavy ed portfolio that he helped manage.

EAFoM has already made some friends and is getting ready to get back in the game. Jones just sent out an e-mail announcing their "Educator Innovators Series, an online forum where regional and national thought leaders share their views on the future of education." And who doesn't love a good thought leader. They're partnering with the Thomas College Center for Innovation in Education and Educate Maine. 

The Thomas College center is fresh and new itself, launched with a grant just a few years ago. They have a program that can crank out a new teacher in just three years, and their facility is open concept. One write up of the program is argle bargle heavy, saying this is more than a "quixotic pursuit" and laying on lots of pretty detail-free descriptions. They have a program for recruiting high schoolers as future teachers, and a "residency" program that places "pre-service teachers" in a rural community and school for a whole week. Founded in 1894, Thomas College is a private business college that focuses mostly on business, technology and education. I don't know whether they know what the heck they're doing or not.

Educate Maine, on the other hand, is cut from familiar cloth. It's another one of those business-centric reformy organizations, and its mission should ring a bell--To champion college and career readiness and strive to increase the educational attainment of the Maine workforce. In other words, to make sure that schools keep them supplied with meat widgets, specifically those that have been trained in the Common Core. They're rich with corporate sponsors. And at some point they folded in the Maine Coalition for Excellence in Education, a group that was involved in the PBL adventure.

So what does EAFoM want to do with its new friends? Well, the email offers some more hints:

This partnership presents a new opening for Maine educators, business leaders and families to participate in conversations that envision new and more personalized approaches to education in our public system.

And there's this

Our inaugural speaker is Jason Snowdon of Knowledgeworks. His research into potential models for education sets the foundation for our efforts to imagine a restructured and vibrant network of public schools in Maine.

The name Knowledgeworks should ring a bell--these guys are another Gates-backed outfit pushing hard on the computer-based algorithm-driven teacher-free data-collecting system marketed as Personalized Education. Really-- they've written a whole prospectus of what education could look like with more computers and fewer--as in none--teachers.

So it looks as if the folks who previously thought that Maine really needed charter schools have now decided that what Maine really needs is more personalized [sic] education. It's an unsurprising choice--Maine's rural nature makes it a bad fit for charter schools, but advocates of computer-driven personalized [sic] education love to tell the story of Chugach, Alaska and how competency based personalized [sic] education worked so well for that isolated tiny community (spoiler alert: what Chugach did is not what they're selling). 

So, wolf in sheep's clothing? Wolf in a different kind of wolf's clothing? Whatever metaphor you choose, it appears that Maine gets yet another round of privatizing, data-mining education disruption. Bummer.

Orphaned Education, Forgotten Children

These are depressing times. Let me tell you why I'm bummed, but first, let me tell you a story.

Almost a decade ago, I was the local union president during a contentious contract negotiation that became a strike. That was probably the lowest part of my teaching career. If you've taught for more than a year or two, you know, somewhere back in the back of your mind, that a lot of people are not really pulling for you, don't really respect the work you do, don't think you should get all uppity about wanting good wages, good working conditions, some sort of say in how the work is done. 

You know all that, but you put your head down, focus on the work, the students, the people out there who respect and value the work you're doing. There are plenty of them, sure enough. But those others. You know they're out there, in many cases in positions of power, but like I said--you keep your head down. But during the strike, I couldn't ignore them. They stopped me on the street, called me at home. I had to look right into that dark maw, and it was deeply disheartening. 

I feel like we're back there again. Seven months of this pandemess, and I think we've become numb, used to just how much education and children is NOT part of the ongoing concerns before us at the moment. On the one hand, it's not news--public education has been a political orphan for at least thirty or forty years. Go ahead--name a prominent political figure who's known for being a champion of public education. Name a Secretary of Education who did their utmost to stand up for public education. I'd punctuate this by saying "I'll wait," but I don't have that kind of waiting time. 

Education had its fifteen minutes in the Democratic primary, with candidates falling all over themselves announcing how many times over they'd multiply Title I, and some even showing a rudimentary grasp of the problems of privatizing public education, of handing it over to "market forces" to get the job done. Sanders had a good bit of platforming, and it even made it into the "unity committee" aka "will progressives please hush and play nice" document, but Candidate Biden's education "plan" is the same old weak sauce. So once again, the closest we get to an education candidate is "the one who isn't openly hostile to the very idea of public education." 

The coronavirus spread and the national conversation started including the question, "What about the kids?" And for a half a second you might have thought, "Great! This is the perfect opportunity to start talking about how we can remake public education in a better, stronger, more equitable form." But no. The next part was not "How will we insure their education" so much "How can we get them out of the way so that the economy can start reviving."

Jan Resseger gets to the point right here-

I do not remember a time when the wellbeing of children has been so totally forgotten by the leaders of the political party in power in the White House and the Congress. This fall, school district leaders have been left on their own as they try to serve and educate children while the COVID-19 pandemic continues raging across the states. School leaders are trying to hold it all together this fall at the same time their state budgets in some places have already been cut.

Teachers are being ground down by the new and stressful demands, but it's not like anyone is truly shocked or surprised that it has come to this. There are a million nuts and bolts that need to be put in place, and each one of them costs, and yet nobody in power is seriously trying to deal with any of it (unless you include Betsy DeVos calling public education names and trying yet again to get tax dollars to her beloved voucher schools).

Even when people try to address some of those nuts and bolts, it's, well, a bummer. A great Canadian article about the need for decent ventilation in schools ends like this:

There is overwhelming evidence that addressing ventilation in schools improves academic performance, decreases absenteeism and reduces asthma. When you total up all the economic benefits, it’s an economic no-brainer.

In other words, never mind the moral and ethical considerations of taking care of young human beings--let's look at the return on investment for providing schools with adequate air to breathe. I don't blame the author--you make the argument that you think will get the job done. But it's a bummer that this is the argument he figures will get the job done.

From our lousy parental leave laws to our tepid support of public education, the US has always talked a bigger game for caring for young humans than we actually walk. The pandemic has just underlined that and put it in caps. 

Not Politics In The Classroom

 Distance learning seems to have pumped new life into the debate about politics in the classroom. From parents freaking out over a Black Lives Matter poster, to simple declarations that teachers should never, ever talk politics, to the Pesident's adoption of the call for more patriotic education, we're back to arguing about how much political content should make it into a classroom.

I actually agree that a teacher's politics don't belong in the classroom. But there' a reason that maintaining the wall has become more difficult, and I'm pretty sure I don't mean the same thing that some critics mean.  But I have another way to sort this out--I'll get there eventually. 

The problem is bigger because of the politization of everything

One of the extremes represented by the current administration is the extension of a personal political brand. This kind of bundling is not new--if you were a Prohibitionist, there was a whole batch of political positions having nothing to do with alcohol that you were expected to support. But Trump has taken this over the top, from the very beginning of his term when he established that counting people in a photograph was a political statement. 

That has simply accelerated. If you say that climate science is real, that Black lives matter, that California is a lovely state, that Mexicans are not all racists, that racism is part of US history, that mocking disabled people is wrong, that Nazis are always bad, and any number of other comments, you have taken a partisan political stand. Trump has staked his claim to so many positions that it's hard to have a position on anything at all and not be taking a side for or against the President. Again, this is not new--once upon a time, it was partisan politics to say that ketchup is not a vegetable. But it's as bad now as it has ever been, and needlessly extended to a number of piddly issues.

For some subjects, this is an extension of an old minefield. I taught US literature for decades, which meant that I had to discuss race, religion and gender issues every week. All of those are more politically fraught now than they were thirty years ago. My position was always, explicitly, "I am not here to tell you whether these folks were right or wrong, but to show you as clearly as I can how they saw the world and their place in it." But the very notion that somebody can hold a particular point of view for reasons other than being stupid and/or evil--well, that's also politicized now. You can't just disagree with the President--you must, apparently, hate him.

How to build student understanding of the world without showing students different ways to see that world? That is increasingly the challenge.

It helps to draw a line between what is politics and what is not

YMMV, but this is where I draw lines in my own head.

Values are one thing, and politics are something else. What you think matters, what your map of the world looks like--that's not politics. The solutions to issues created by governments and laws, the lines that you draw to create boundaries on your map--that's politics. (I like, also, P. J. O'Rourke's definition--Politics is the business of getting power and privilege without possessing merit.)

Moral and ethical questions are just that--moral and ethical questions. They deal with how we humans are supposed to conduct ourselves in the world, how we are supposed to interact with other humans. Politics covers all the rules we think governments should make about how humans behave. Morals and ethics may inform our politics--but they aren't politics. 

That applies in both present and past tense. Whether Columbus was a wretched disaster vector or a noble-ish explorer is not a political question; it only becomes a politics-flavored question when you try to attach it to the question of what the government ought to be doing right now. 

But we often try to "reduce" things to politics as a way of diminishing them, of saying this is not about facts or honesty or a better understanding of the world--it's just about politics.

Hence the bitching and moaning about Black Lives Matter and the 1619 Project. Look, there is nothing remotely political about saying that Black human beings have a right to life. It is not a political statement. Some folks have tried to engage with good faith arguments with people who dismiss BLM by way of many fine metaphors (Imagine you've been sitting at the dining room table and getting nothing to eat. Imagine that your mother just announced she has cancer) but for some BLM opponents, that's not the point. They believe, essentially, that Black people used to have it rough, but at some point (maybe the Civil War, maybe the 1960s) we fixed all that and right now, Black people don't have it any worse than anyone else. This BLM stuff, they are pretty sure, is just a ploy, a piece of political theater intended to leverage the government into favoring a particular group. The 1619 Project is not a legitimate attempt to put forward another perspective on history, but simply an attempt to create pressure on the government, a political project.

It does not help that the past many decades have seen an increasing belief that government should make people behave the One Right Way. It does not help that we live in a time of heightened cynicism, where our elected politicians make whatever argument gets them political advantage, even if it directly contradicts the argument they made yesterday. It does not help that we have a guy in the White House who will say anything in order to gain political advantage. 

But talking about facts, values, and honesty--that's not politics. Saying that you believe human beings have an intrinsic worth is not a political statement. Saying "Vote for that guy" or "call your congressperson to oppose that bill" is a political statement. We have a sign in the front yard that says things like "science is real" and "love is love," and despite the fact that some folks have tried to politicize those issues, it is not a political sign.

"All of this clarifies nothing," I hear you saying. So let me try to boil it down to specific classroom practices.

No points for agreement

My class involved lots of writing about controversial subjects, and discussions to help flesh out the ideas. My job was to argue any and all sides to add fuel to the fire. Invariably my students would ask me what I really thought, and I always refused to tell them, because for a writing and discussion class, it was critical that they knew that all viewpoints were fair game. I learned in my first year or two that if you tell students what you think about the topic, you'll get a stack of essays that agree with you. 

It's impossible to pretend that we are some sort of blank slate of belief. Classroom rules ("everyone in this classroom will be treated with respect") are infused with our beliefs. 

As the year progressed and we built a level of trust, I would become more transparent about my beliefs. Teachers are among the few adults that students encounter in life, so it is important to model adult human behavior, including How To Believe Something Without Being a Giant Asshat About It. That includes giving students the safety to express opinions that you think are wildly wrong (and boy was I tested on that in some moments). That includes demonstrating disagreement on an issue without sending the message, "You are a jerk and a fool and Less Than because you believe that" (again, lots of testing). That doesn't mean pretending that you could conceivably agree with that damn fool thing that just came out of their mouth or pen, but once you've built trust, you can push back. "Find me some evidence" is your friend here. 

Two things I held onto here. One is that it's hard to make a good argument and write a good essay in support of terrible ideas. The other is that humans, particularly young humans, learn and grow, and they do it best when they have the ability to examine their own thoughts and ideas rather than building a fortress around them to protect them from perceived attack. 

There is a difference between "this is what I believe" and "this is what I think you should do about it." That to me is the difference between beliefs and politics in the classroom.

But how do you decide what becomes explicit in your teaching. I have that poster at home--would I have put it up in my classroom?

Where I draw the line   

For me, it goes back to a safe and accepting classroom environment. 

If I put up a KKK poster or a Confederate flag or legalized abortion is murder poster or argue against some legislation that has been labeled part of the gay agenda (whatever the hell that is) in my classroom, I'm going to send a message to some students that they are not welcome there. That's bad practice. It guarantees that some students will feel threatened, that they will know they should never write an honest essay for me. It will mean that they get the message from an official representative of the Adult World that they are unwelcome, Less Than. That is not okay.

Likewise, a poster for a political candidate signals that the classroom has been claimed by one particular team, and members of other teams are not welcome.

Does a Black Lives Matter sign, or a Love Is Love banner, have a similar exclusionary effect? I suppose a student who doesn't like gay or Black folks could argue that it is, but there's a big difference between "You aren't welcome here" and "I don't want to be around Those People." In one you are being excluded, even threatened, against your will, while in the other case you've made choice about who not to accept. Deciding you don't want to be included is different from being told you won't be included. 

The line for me is anything that makes the classroom feel unsafe or unwelcoming for a student. We can handle disagreement and controversy. But it is never okay to send the message, "Because of who you are, you are not welcome here. You are not okay." Not from student to student and certainly not from teacher to student. And if you believe that an inclusive message interferes with your need to treat other people as Less Than, well, you may want to search out a private alternative to public school (just don't ask the people that you want to treat that way to help pay your tuition). 

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.