Do Rising Charter Tides Lift All Boats?

So lately we've been getting the charter-pushing return of the notion that the rising tide lifts all boats. Here's Fordham Institute's head honcho Mike Petrilli at The Hill, throwing in a side of "follow the science" because Petrilli is great (and I say this with all sincerity) at working the angles. 

The "science" that he's referring to is a 2019 study-ish thing that Fordham put out (with Walton financing), authored by David Griffith, entitled Rising Tide: Charter School Market Share and Student Achievement. The idea he sets out to prove is that when charters open up, the resulting competition causes all students in all schools--both public and charter--to do better. The rising tide lifts all boats.

Griffith's background is a BA in Politics and Philosophy; later on he went back to school for a Master's in Public Policy. He worked as a political aid for a couple of years, worked briefly as a "research assistant" at two different outfits, did some TA work after grad school, taught for one whole year at a DC charter prep school, then landed a job at Fordham as a Research and Policy Associate. Make of that what you will.

The "study" depends, as always, upon Big Standardized Test data. Its finding included a claim that "high charter market share is associated with" big gains for Black and Hispanic students, but no real gains for white or rural students.

I could pick apart this piece of charter marketing for you, but as it turns out, that job was already done at the time, by the folks at the National Education Policy Center. The NEPC review was conducted by Yongmei Ni; she's an actual professor, the department chair of education leadership and policy at the University of Utah, who has produced a whole bunch of actual peer-reviewed studies. 

Her review of Griffith's "study" can be found here. Here's the short form of her findings:

One should interpret the findings and conclusions with extreme caution because of major issues surrounding the data and methods, including the measure of charter market share, the sample selection criteria, and the overreliance on results based on a small number of districts, especially the ones with over 95th percentile of charter market share. Overall, the findings have little use to policymakers because of these issues with data and methods and because the report does not probe beneath the surface.

The problems with Griffith's work are many. 

The rationale for the conclusions are the result of treating correlation as causation. The positive results (all student achievement rising across the district) only appears in certain samples, and there is no evidence offered that the effect is caused by charter school presence. 

The research literature cited in the report is carefully cherry picked. The market share measurement is inaccurate. The data is inaccurate. And the selection of samples is arbitrary and "very puzzling." And there's some stuff about cubic spline regression that can be a little confusing for laypeople, but I can fully understand the point that ultimately, Griffith bases his findings on data from about six or seven districts.

So a tiny, hand-picked set of samples gets him the results he wants, if you squint and don't examine the data too thoroughly, and if you don't want to talk about how such a thing could happen.

Yongmei Ni finds that the study is not useful for guidance of policy and practice, but apparently we're going to do just that by trotting it out again to claim that the rising charter tide lifts all education boats. It may not matter, as GOP choice fans seem to have deserted charters in favor of voucher programs, but here's your reminder that following the science will not lead you to any boat-lifting charter school revelations.

ND: Kneecapping Public Education

North Dakota's governor just signed SB 2196 into law, allowing the state to quietly slip forward in 2021's race to dismantle public education. While other state legislatures have focused on vouchers, North Dakota took its leap forward by focusing on unbundling and competency basxed education.

SB 2196 is short and the changes it enacts even shorter. It amends the rules about instructional time requirements with this sentence:

Establish and certify a North Dakota competency framework to allow students who have demonstrated content mastery of units required under sections 15.1-21-01 and 15.1-21-02 to waive unit instructional time requirements under section 15.1-21-03.

In headline-ready English, that means the bill will "expand learning outside classroom." Or as state K-12 Superintendent Kirsten Baesler puts it, "A student’s ability to learn is not completely dependent upon how much time he or she spends sitting in a classroom." Baesler was a school librarian, a principal, and a school board member. In office since 2013, she was a proponent of Common Core (she also has two arrests--one for domestic violence and another for DUI).

The bill now allows students to accumulate school credit for "community volunteer projects, internships, and other educational options." Baesler has thrown some other language at it, touting "personalization" and "methods of learning." She asserts that it will do these things "while maintaining academic strength and accountability," although nothing in the bill calls for an oversight or accountability. Will Pat be able to earn math credits by working as a cashier at the Piggly Wiggly, or get phys ed credits for helping on Uncle Bob's farm? 

The bill is also promoted as giving districts "flexibility," which I suppose is true in the sense that they will have the flexibility to cut classes and fire the teachers who taught them. 

The unbundling of education usually comes attached to vouchers. That legislation is kicking around the North Dakota (HB 1369 would create education savings acounts--vouchers), supported by the usual suspects (including the Catholic church, because ka-ching), but North Dakota has been pretty resistant to school choice in the past, and this bill is not doing well, either.

The lack of voucher support for this new bill means that student "flexibility" will be tied to family resources. Can't afford to play private league soccer or go to summer camp? Well, then, you'll just have to take phys ed in public school. Can't afford a special private math tutor? Public school math for you. Of course, since there may not be anybody checking to see just how legit the "flexible" credit earning is, this may be less of a problem than I'm imagining. 

The bill passed with large support, and while North Dakota is largely run by the GOP, the news could still find a Democrat to say something uninformed about it:

"It creates great opportunity to continue to move further away from the industrialized 'I lecture, you learn' model of education," Sen. Erin Oban, D-Bismarck, said in support of the bill.

Industrial model. Hasn't changed in years. Yeah, that's definitely not public education, but it's important never to let facts stand in the way of dismantling public education.

Covid, Learning Loss, and Katrina 2.0

Well, here we go.

Here's Morgan Polikoff in the Los Angles Times, explaining that we are in a terrible mess, that educational attainment, or at least test scores (as measured by another testing manufacturer) are dropping, that the mental health of children in the nation is a mess. And hurray for the Biden relief plan, which throws a pile of money at all these education. But. But but but. Our educational structures can't handle this, Polikoff argues. Too many districts with boards and parent groups and teacher unions and famnilies and students and they just aren't up to "identifying what works and then providing it equitably to students and families." 

What does he think has to happen?

This is where state and national leaders simply must step in. They need to provide clear and specific guidance on the best ways to spend American Rescue Plan dollars to address the negative impacts of the pandemic on children and families. They must not leave decisions to local actors — burdening them with the task of figuring out what works and implementing it.

Local control is a bad thing, and it needs to be swept aside, as witnessed by the data we have so far.

Polikoff asserts that three things are needed going forward in this state-controlled education universe. And number one is measurement--academic tests, social and emotional well-being tests. And they should go on for years "so we can follow our progress well beyond the end of the pandemic." Oh, and the "measurement plans should be carefully constructed to ensure the results are directly useful for informing instructional and other decisions" which is a cool idea except that there are no such standardized tests currently in existence, especially if you also want them to simultaneously serve the entirely other purpose of providing government reports on how the system is going as a whole. Teachers can do this kind of assessment, and, in fact, do so every day, but not in a way that scales up for state-level progress reporting. 

Polikoff also wants high-quality interventions that are "supported or directly provided" by the state; his list includes the current reform darling, tutoring. And third, he wants to target those who need the interventions most, which he seems to already know means low-income communities and communities of color. And all of this state-run takeover "should be designed in collaboration with community leaders, not merely imposed." Sure. You know one reason this sort of thing is always targeted for low-income communities and communities of color? Because rich white folks in wealthy communities will tell the state to get stuffed and take a hike.

All of this leads us back to the old refrain:

Simply put, we can’t undo the negative effects of this national crisis on our children with 13,000 districts working independently. We must not allow our dysfunctional educational systems to block the serious response that our children need.

So here we are. The pandemic is, as Patty Levesque of Jebucation's Excel In Ed called it, an opportunity. It's ed reform's Katrina 2.0, another opportunity to cash in on a natural-born, human-exacerbated disaster. It "proves" that public education is in a shambles (though some reformsters believe it has always been a shambles) and that the old system of local control and locally-elected boards needs to be removed. 

It's not a simple situation to navigate. Katrina was a real hurricane that caused real devastation, and the pandemic has taken a real bite out of education in the US. The problems, the disaster--that's real. But when  folks shift away from "what are the actual problems, who's dealing with them, and how can we help" and start in with "this is awful and here's how the same policies that we've always pursued would be a good fit," that's the time to take a hard look at what's really going on.

Take the fabled Learning Loss. I have no doubt that learning loss, the missed opportunities to push a child's education further forward this year--that's a thing. But Learning Loss as in "these test scores prove that the pub lic education system is hopelessly broken and we must make the best of the opportunity to implement our favorite corporate ed reform"--that's some bullshit right there.

That's one other reason to fear the 2021 Big Standardized Test. I have no doubt there are some test-loving folks out there who sincerely believe that we need to take students' academic temperature to diagnose what medicine is needed. They're wrong, but they're sincere. But other folks are waiting to run the playbook that Polikoff reads from here. Look at these test scores! It's a disaster! Public education has failed! We must put the state in charge, and they must put these various private education-flavored businesses to work, and local control can't be allowed to flourish, though of course we'll work closely with community leaders, you betcha. 

We're already seeing the pandemic-fueled attack on public ed from the right--parents need vouchers so they can deal with all this. The neoliberals wave is coming--only entrepreneurial thought leaders can rescue the broken system. 

2021 is not going to be a fun year for public education. 

Jebucation Has New Five Year Plan

Long long ago, when Jeb! Bush still had White House dreams, he cooked up a Floridian reform group, which then scaled up to national status as the Foundation for Excellence in Education, which has now become ExcelInEd. Headed up by Patty Levesque, the organization  remains a clearinghouse for education disruption ideas pushed by well-heeled, well-connected education amateurs. It is hard to pretend any more that these are serious people who have goals other than breaking up public education so that the private market can profit from the pieces. 

Their website is still chock full of carefully twisted stats (Florida is first in AP test participation!) and same old baloney talking points (US students rank 38th internationally in math on the PISA scores--which is of course right where they've always ranked). The message remains as always that public schools are failing and we must open education to the privateers who want access to all those sweet, sweet tax dollars. (It also includes some celebrity bad quotes).

The group is busy-- they push policy ideas out into the states and have been busy filing briefs in support of ESAs (the newest flavor of education voucher) and just generally supporting the privatization agenda whenever they can. And they put on an annual gathering of privatizers and profiteers called, seriously, EdPalooza.

Recently Levesque was interviewed by Rick Hess. As with his recent exit interview with Betsy DeVos, this is Hess being uncharacteristically soft and fuzzy, allowing his subject to spin her tale without ever questioning or challenging her story. The end result is illuminating only because it gives us an unvarnished picture of the alternate reality that Levesque wants to promote.

Levesque's account of what EIE has done is standard reformy fare-- they're "developed policy solutions" that are "based on research, proven success, creative problem solving and learning from other states." Well, the "creative" part is right, anyway. And the usual claim that they want systems "centered around children and their needs" which sounds so much better than "we want to crack open an educational marketplace where entrepreneurs can make a bunch of money with education-flavored products."

Levesque is ostensibly talking to Hess in conjunction with a new EIE five year plan (though I can't find any such plan on their website), and as the plans are teased out, they turn out to be the same old baloney.

There's the usual empty language about equity-- "We believe that too many children—especially low-income students, students of color, and rural students—do not have access to a high-quality education, but we aren't proposing that we get them that education by fully funding schools in their communities." Instead, Levesque is one more edu-disruptor who thinks Covid smells like another Katrina, a "massive disruption" from which they should "seize the opportunities." So she'll use some of the newest marketing bullshit-- the McKinsey report on the Days of Learning that students have "lost." Here's an explainer of why that's bunk, but the short answer is that McKinsey's days of lost learning are really hypothetical lost points on the Big Standardized Test, computed using numbers that are all made up. But one of the rules of education reformstering is that you have to sell the big scary problem and thereby avoid providing evidence that what you propose is actually a solution.

And don 't miss this sentence at the end of that graph: "We have a responsibility to turn that around and to act quickly." Who is the "we" in this sentence? Is it EIE, because that's a group of educational amateurs who appointed themselves overseers of US education. There isn't a person in a leadership role with a shred of actual education background (okay--there's one who was actually in a classroom). This remains, for me, one of the astonishing features of the ed reform movement. If I walked into my local hospital and announced, "I have a responsibility to show you how to improve the way you perform brain surgery" or walked into a court and declared, "I have a responsibility to show you how to improve the conducting of trials," I'd be shown the door, not treated as if I were an expert that everyone needed to listen to. 

Anyway.

Levesque's next problem to fix is pandemic-lowered college admissions, so EIE has a goal to "strengthen college and career pathways." Fun phrase. Takes me right back to the days that Jeb! embraced Common Core as a pathway to the White House and the whole thing turned around and bit him in the ass. But she moves right on to a desire to "empower families with the opportunity to find the best fit for their child's educational needs" aka "we are all in on backing education vouchers," which further adds to my sense that the ed disruption crowd is leaving charter schools behind in pursuit of vouchery dreams. She has no argument that vouchers work well, but instead falls back on "because pandemic." Seize the opportunities. Ka-ching.

Other key goals? She's going to rattle some off.

"To close learning gaps" which actually means test score gaps, which nobody has successfully honestly done in the whole modern ed reform era. 

Third grade reading, an idea that highlights some folks inability to distinguish between correlation and causation, not to mention an inability to recognize bad policy when they see it.

High quality teachers in every classroom, which is an odd one to toss out there if you're backing current voucher theory, which requires no teachers or classrooms at all. At any rate, another idea that reformsters have been pushing for decades b ut have no idea how to execute (perhaps because they think "high-quality" means "whose students get high test scores").

Digital divide. Yeah, that is an actual problem, and most folks see it, but it's an infrastructure problem, like building an interstate highway system, and so nobody wants to talk about seriously because we all know that the one actual solution is a buttload of money.

"Reimagine learning." Curious phrase, since I seriously doubt that the nature of actual learning has changed, ever. What she really seems to mean is how we deliver credits, and so her examples are "flexible paths to mastery, credit for work experience, opportunities for teachers to change their role in education, and allowing students to learn anywhere." So, vouchers, unbundling, and putting teachers out of work. She will double down on this "learn anywhere" thing in the next paragraph. Another way to understand this vision of unbundled free-market anywhere education is this way-- the state hands each parent a stack of money and says, "Your kid's education is now your problem, not ours. Good luck. Enjoy your freedom." What could possibly go wrong? 

Asked about success stories, Levesque cites Mississippi, which is not where I would have gone in her shoes. But she brags that Mississippi got its Fourth Grade NAEP scores up. There is no trick to that- you hold back all the third graders who are going to do poorly on the test. It's like raising the average height of fourth graders by flunking all the short third graders. It is also a meaningless achievement--who cares that your fourth graders do better is all the gains have disappeared by graduation? But Levesque wants EIE to get some credit for all that. 

Levesque also owns Florida's Schools of Hope, a policy that allows charters to open up right across the street from struggling public schools, so that the attacks on the most vulnerable public schools can be more efficiently accelerated. Levesuqe says this policy is "working," which doesn't seem to mean that students are being educated so much as charter profiteers are getting to expand their market. EIE, she says, worked hard to get charter operators a "fast pass" to open, so that public education can be dismantled that much more quickly.

There's some quick stroking of Jeb! Bush, and then on to underlining what we are seeing to be true--that the emphasis on pushing education disruption has now shifted to the state level. Levesque notes that they work with partners across the political spectrum, so, everyone from Republicans who support privatizing to Democrats supporting privatization? Don't get me wrong--I think it is possible to have useful dialogue with some ed reformsters, even find areas of agreement about improving education in the US. But when I think of those kinds of conversations, I don't think of Levesque, Bush, or Excel In Ed. Their goals are pretty clear, and their vision of the future is one in which, if it exists at all, public education is a low-cost warehouse for Those Peoples' children. 

Why We Don't Need The Big Standardized Test In One Quote

This is taken from the reformy Jebucation ExcelInEd website:

If we don't have a strong accountability system, then students from low-income families and students of color will not receive the instruction and resources needed to be successful.

That's Pam Stewart, former education chief of Florida, the testocrat who famously demanded that a dying child take the Big Standardized Test. 

It's an illuminating quote. By "strong accountability system," she of course means high-stakes attached to the Big Standardized Test. Let me make a couple of observations.

1) If you already know that low-income families and students of color are the ones who need instruction and resources, what the heck do you need test results for? Seriously. Stewart is not saying, "Our legislators are poised with a big pile of resources, but they just have no idea where they're needed until we get those test results back!"

2) Florida's history tells us that BS Test results are not used to get instruction and resources to students who need them. BS Test scores are used to target public schools for takeover or to have a charter school open across the street or for resources to be drained so that privatizers can make a buck with an education-flavored product. Florida's history is filled with examples of fairly blatant segregation tolerated by powers that be (and which did not require test scores in order to be visible).

3) And, of course, "strong accountability system" in Florida has never meant accountability for legislators who failed to fully, equitably fund public education. 

2021 is an excellent year to opt out, in Florida and across the country.

ICYMI: Spring Is Here, Apparently Edition (3/21)

 It's nice enough, but I've lived in NW PA too long to be fooled. We'll just see where this leads us. In the meantime, here's your reading for the week. Also, your reminder that you can get a daily dose of edubloggery by checking out (or subscribing to) NPE's Blog of Blogs

Why Black Parents Aren't Joining the Push To Reopen Schools

The short answer is "trust," but you should go ahead and read the long answer from Melinda Anderson at Mother Jones.

Cyberattacks on Schools Soared During the Pandemic

From EdWeek, a report on one of the big pandemic side effects we haven't been talking about

Let me teach like a normal @$$ human

Active shooter drills, pandemics, and teaching like a superhero, from the blog Affective Lving

Top Chicago Charter School Admits Racist Past

Noble charters join  the ranks of "no excuses" charters that are finally admitting that maybe that whole thing was a bad, racist idea.

Questions about the AFT and NEA's "Learning after Covid"

Nancy Bailey has looked at what the unions are touting for post-pandemic programs, and she has some concerns.

Note to MATH advocate Andrew Yang-- 2+2=4

At NYC Educator, a look at Andrew Yang's recent pronouncements on education and teaching in NY which are, well, not good.

Education Reinventers

Gary Rubinstein looks at the history of reformy rebranding as ell as debunking the latest miracle school.

How the stimulus will affect schools, explained

Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat offers a clear explainer of where all that money is going to go (or not)

Outdated research and ideas about teacher quality render report useless

NPEC takes a look at the National Council on Teacher Quality's 2020 teacher prep review, and it is once again a document not to be taken seriously.

One of the fairest school funding models in the nation might be about to fail

We don't usually hear about Wyoming because their schools have been exceptionally well and fairly funded for decades. Now that may be about to end. From the Hechinger Report.

An encouraging consensus on character education

Conservative Andy Smarick at reformy Education Next has some interesting thoughts about c haracter education.

There has to be an accounting

Turns out that maybe AT&T has been bilking the E-rate progam that provides affordable internet for schools. Oopsies.

How children read differently from books vs. screens

From the New York Times, more research about how children really interact with screens.

Rules for Rural Philanthropy

Juliet Squire is a partner at Bellwether Education Partners, a reliably reformy part of the Fordham-AEI axis. She has traveled the Phillips Exeter-Yale-AEI career trajectory with a stop in the New Jersey Department of Education before landing at Bellwether, where she makes observations about education  that I pretty much always disagree with. 

But she also just released an article for AEI about philanthropy in rural communities, and speaking as someone who has lived his life in a rural community that periodically is afflicted by someone trying to do philanthropy to it, she's made some good observations here.

One of her three "key points" is really on the mark:

Place-based philanthropy is hard to do right. It requires philanthropies to shift their mindset from that of a benefactor to that of a partner committed to learning and working alongside local leaders.

This is fundamental. Do-gooders who sail into town with attitude of, "I'm here to bestow my wisdom and largesse on this bundle of hicks," are doomed to well-deserved failure. Squire goes on to offer five somewhat jargon-choked lessons on how to get it right, and they're worth discussing.

Place-based philanthropy requires local capacity and sometimes building that capacity from the ground up. 

Philanthropists like to "partner" with locals already doing good works (or at least they should), but rural communities don't necessarily have a lot of Good Deed Doers working regularly. Squire's picture is unnecessarily bleak ("In some rural places, significant declines in the population or the economy have hollowed out civil society"), and she suggests that philanthropists may have to "build capacity" from scratch, which requires the philanthropy to more directly engage (or at least it should). Squire suggests starting with concrete actions like building playground equipment, so that the locals can see you're for real.

Place-based philanthropy requires local leadership and philanthropies willing to embrace humility.

This point is dead on. Local leaders know the territory, the challenges, the history, the hopes, the dreams. Philanthropists coming from outside have to earn local leader trust and they have to actually trust local leaders to make the right choices. Trust local leaders and get out of the way. Modern fauxlanthropy too often resembles a business venture that hires people to help the Big Rich Guy implement his preferred programs (looking at you, Bill Gates).

There is something about rural communities that makes this worse. Perhaps the notion in some big city types that they need to step in and show the rubes how to get it done. In recent decades, this has been exacerbated by the rise of Tech Bros who have a tendency to believe they smartest people in the room, even on subjects about which they don't know jack. "I'm a young gazillionaire, so I must be an omni-expert." 

These deep-pocketed Dunning-Kruger exemplars inevitably screw it up. Let me tell you  story from my own town. A guy bought the hotel (yes, there's just one) and declared he would turn it into a local culture center, starting with a big high school arts festival. He approached all four of the local high school choirs about appearing, selling it by telling each director that the other three had already signed up. Only someone who didn't know how small towns worked would have used such a dumb lie with four people who knew each other personally and saw each other regularly.  The unfortunate thing is that when these wealthy dopes crash and burn, they can walk away easily, and the locals have to clean up the mess (again, looking at you, Mr. Gates). 

If you don't trust local expertise, you are going to screw it up. Period.

Place-based philanthropy requires acknowledging the interconnectedness of community challenges and a readiness to invest across multiple domains

Everything is tied to everything else. I would argue that this is not true only in rural communities, but that the size of urban "Gordian knots" allows folks to pretend that issues can be handled separately. Squire notes that in rural communities, you can't disentangle school quality from economic development, and I want to ask if there's any place that's not true. But her observation that rural communities can be more "nimble" essentially because it's easy to get all the major players at the table makes sense. 

Place-based philanthropy requires patience, a willingness to play the long game, and early planning for how to sustain initiatives as philanthropic dollars phase out

Drive-by do-gooding is not super-helpful anywhere. The idea is that the money guys swoop in, set something up, and that gives itv the momentum to keep going. The lazy way to do this is what my brother (who served on the school board for a while) calls "grant crack." That's when the Widget Foundation gives you a two year grant to set up a widgetry program, in the hopes that at the end of two years, you'll find widgetry so delightful that you'll start funding the program yourself. Except that in two years you'll be just as broke as you are now. 

If you want your widgetry program to take route, you (and your investment) are going to have to stick around for a while to make sure that the program really works and is being led by people who are invested, capable, and knowledgable about widgetry. It's not just that it's needed to help the program find its feet; it's that when you dump-and-run, we take that as a sign you weren't really interested in us and you can't really be trusted.

Place-based philanthropy requires setting aside preconceived notions of what it looks like to achieve impact and scale

Or, more simply, you can't insist on your own definition of success. In particular, don't show up with your own set of pre-developed metrics for how to measure what is accomplished, because you don't know the people or the community and your pre-created metrics are bunk. See the above point about trusting local leaders. 

Squire nods to another problem--the creation of turnkey programs. I've always been mystified about this-- people who play in the big leagues of policy and philanthropy would rarely claim, "Well, this is how it worked in New York City, so it should work exactly the same way in LA and Chicago." That would be dumb, because each city has its own history, values, pace, style and ways of getting things done. Yet somehow, many folks assume that small towns and rural communities are interchangeable, popped out of some cookie cutter community design. One size does not fit all.

My extra two cents

These are five not-too-bad points, and I can't let them pass without noting that A) mostly they are true for any community  and B) so many education reform programs have violated these lessons. Common Core, the charterization of NOLA, test-centered schools, etc etc etc--they have violated these lessons over and over again. 

I don't really know what the audience for Squire's piece will be; I can think of some people who should read and reflect on it, but I'm not holding my breath. 

As a side note, one other story. A tech bro has just bought several major buildings in the neighboring town in my county. He has had some meetings with the locals, where the themes of his rambling presentations have included things like he doesn't much like collaboration, that he hopes to make money out of this, and that he hopes to revitalize the city--but, the implication is, on his terms. We'll just see how this plays out.