MO: Longtime Charter Sponsor Leaves the Biz (And Parents)

 The University of Central Missouri has been sponsoring charter schools since 1999, serving as the major sponsor of charters in Kansas City (in Missouri, the rule used to be that only St. Louis and Kansas City could house charter schools).

St. Louis schools have been a mess, with both public and charter schools having their share of legislatively-inflicted woes. And some legislators have continued to try hard to expand charter reach in the state, right up through this year.

But one notable feature of Missouri charter school law is that it allows institutions of higher education to circumvent taxpayers and sponsor charter schools. That's the biz that UCM got into.

From UCM's point of view, that makes some sense. UCM was founded as a Normal School, aka 19th century teacher training college, and they continue to educate teachers. UCM has used its charter schools as part of the teacher training program, placing their student teachers in charter classrooms. 

But in Missouri, as in the rest of the country, the teacher pipeline is drying up, as fewer and fewer young folks find the conditions and compensation with which they would work particularly attractive. The state is trying to fix that, with clever ideas like PSAs, because when you don't want to address a problem for real, you can always treat it as a PR problem. 

Last week, the news broke that UCM is getting out of the charter sponsor business. It has done wo without a whole lot of actual explanation; the decision is described as "mission-driven," which doesn't really mean a damned thing, and as coming from the UCM Board of Governors, which puts it behind a nice, opaque screen. If you like the longer version of the non-explanation, there's this: 

Action by the university’s governing board allows UCM to more closely align its resources to pursue its mission, which is focused on providing a quality post-secondary education to students in Missouri and beyond.

There's more--we've had a great time, these charters are swell, history, mission, blah. blah, confident the transition will go well. 

It's bad news for seven Kansas City charter schools which now need to find a new sponsor by the end of next school year. The charters are putting on their brave faces, but there are only three other sponsors operating in Kansas City-- University of Missouri in Columbia, Kansas City Public Schools, and the state's Public [sic] Charter School Commission.

Meanwhile, parents of charter students have some thoughts:

We would love to if they offer any opportunity for parents and families to have a voice in sharing what matters with them. We would love to play a role in that.

Spoiler alert: they will not play a role in that. The University's board does not answer to the taxpayers. The charter company does not answer to the taxpayers. Parents are just "customers," and they have as much say as you have when you angrily email Mark Zuckerberg over a Facebook format change, or when you angrily email McDonalds about changing the fry oil formula.

Charter advocates often argue that market forces are sufficient for charter oversight, because parents can vote with their feet. But the bipedal plebiscite is not really a thing when the whole structure is collapsing and the various parties with power are scrambling to save a chunk. As we have seen over and over and over and over again, when a charter school starts to go south, parents learn very quickly that they have no power, no say, and often not even anyone to call. 

It would be super-interesting to learn why, exactly, UCM bailed, but of course they don't have to explain any of their decision to anybody. In the school choice and charter world, that level of non-transparency is considered a feature, not a bug, but sometimes even the charter folks themselves get stung.

PA: One District (Mostly) For Sale

Chester Upland is a district that has struggled with issues and money and racism for decades; they are the history of every problem facing public education in the last century, right up to and including the gutting of a public education system by privatizing charter operators. Poorer and Blacker than all surrounding districts, they have suffered through one damn thing after another.

Chester Upland School District has been under the state's thumb via a declaration of financial collapse for about a decade. The court has been in charge of the district, and has okayed the idea of letting the charters that have drained the districts of resources go ahead and buy up the last of the bits.

It's hard to track everything that has happened because so little of it has happened in public view, but three charter organizations have now submitted plans for partial charter takeover of the district's schools.

The three proposals were pitched at a meeting that was presented in person and on line, and critics of the plan were not impressed. 

Harris indicated Thursday’s presentation was designed to communicate Friendship’s philosophy rather than what could be read about the plan elsewhere, while GLA CEO and Principal of GLA Southwest Tamika Evans said this was essentially a first meeting with the community.

But Public Interest Law Center attorney Claudia De Palma, who represents four district parents and an advocacy organization, noted this was the only scheduled meeting where community members could probe the proposals being made.

“I think most people expected it to be a bit of a sales pitch, but I expected it to be a more specific sales pitch and it wasn’t even that,” she said. “If the good faith intention is to at least inform the community … then you need information, which is really the bare minimum. It just feels like it keeps getting kicked down the road.”

Charter operators are still pretending this is not a takeover (the CEO of the leading charter group (Chester Community Charter School--the outfit that made Vahan Gureghian rich) says students are free to attend public or charter schools, so it's not a takeover.

Perhaps it feels like a takeover because the public has been kept carefully boxed out of the process every step of the way. Judge Barry Dozer and district receiver  (and former superintendent) Juan Baughn have made a lot of noise about transparency, but that has rarely translated into action.

"The way that the order was ordered was that the proposals weren’t going to be coming out until after the recommendation was made, which was obviously after the presentation,” said [Public Interest Law Center lawyer Claudia] De Palma. “If the point was actually to allow the community to ask questions about the proposals, then that goal obviously was foreclosed by not providing the proposals beforehand, and if the goal was for the community to learn in the first place what the proposals contained, that was also not a goal that was met (in the meeting). Each step of the way just feels more and more like a keep-away game and not an actual effort to involve the actual community.”

Or, as one observer reportedly put it: "I sense that the orchestrators of this process may have ulterior motives for pushing charter schools that don’t include the students."

CUSD has had problems both internal and external. As a poor community, they've suffered under Pennsylvania's state funding inadequacies. Meanwhile, they have suffered internal mismanagement (right up to recently misplacing a bunch of money under as-yet-unexplained circumstances).  And CUSD is a poster child for Pennsylvania's damaging method of paying charters for handling special ed students, which not only pay charters more than the school of origin actually spends on the students, but actually compounds the difference annually.

Public school advocates in Chester Upland have long suspected that the takeover is a foregone conclusion. "Well," you may say. "That's all unfortunate, but perhaps this will finally solve CUSD'd financial problems."

That seems unlikely for two reasons.

First, the plan seems aimed toward delivering the elementary schools to three different charter operators, creating a three-way competition for market and funding. CCCS is the 800-pound gorilla in town, meaning the competition will be lopsided from Day One.

Second, the discussion of a takeover of the district really is, in an important sense, inaccurate. Because nobody wants to take over the high school. That means the charter-run elementary schools will be draining resources from the district and the district will, in turn, have to run high school education with whatever is left. That also presents some logistical and curricular issues--imagine a high school that gets all of its students from a different district entirely. Maintaining any sort of consistent, coherent K-12 program will be impossible.

It's a wretched mess, and it doesn't appear that anyone in a position of power is interested or stopping or even slowing the privatization train. And CUSD gets to demonstrate yet one more way that a pu blic school district can be run through the wringer.

PA: The Special Ed Funding Triple Whammy

Are you ready for the best explainer yet for the screwed-up state of Pennsylvania's charter funding when it comes to special ed students?  

Here at the Institute, we're fans of the work of Research for Action. The Philly based research group is meticulously independent and well-conceived and executed. We're previously looked at their work on test-based (poverty-punishing) assessment, the failure of cyber-charters, and the astonishing PA gap between students and teachers of color.

Now they've produced a video outlining the troubles with Pennsylvania's formula for funding special ed in charter schools. 

This matters because right now Governor Tom Wolf is trying to fix this, and charter school advocates are screaming that the governor is trying to cut their funding. That's technically a true, but in spirit, it's a lie. PA's charter schools continue to be overpaid--in some cases, hugely overpaid--for providing special ed services. If your folks give you a hundred dollar bill each day with which to buy lunch at Burger King, and they suddenly decide that maybe they should just give you the actual cost of a meal, you have no honest basis for complaining that they are trying to starve you by slashing your lunch allowance.

I've written before about how PA's charter special ed funding is out of whack, but even I had missed one aspect pointed out here--it's not just that charters can get more, maybe even way more, to educate a student than the sending school spent, but because of the quirks in the system, that overpayment actually compounds and gets worse year after year. If you've wondered how charter schools in Chester Upland could be getting more than $40K per special ed student, well, this explains it. Take a look.

UPDATE: For folks who stumble upon this post and want some further text-based insight into PA's special ed funding woes, let me recommend this piece by edufunding expert Bruce Baker, the source of many insights about school funding.

Covid and the Good Guys

If @rweingarten, the unions, & every leader/expert who kept schools closed this year want any hope of re-gaining the support of angry parents, it's best to acknowledge their mistakes and apologize for the damage done rather than pretend they've been the good guys all along.

— Elisabeth Weinberg (@misselisabeths) May 15, 2021

You can set this Twitter comment next to a quote from Rep. Virginia Foxx, who said that Weingarten "is attempting to rewrite history by framing her union as part of the 'solution.'"

Both are a fine example of how far off the rails the re-opening school debate has gone (if we can characterize a bunch of people hollering at each other a debate). Notice that the outpouring about Weingarten's call to re-open school buildings in the fall is not talking about whether that's a good idea or not. No, what we're now arguing about is who should get to call themselves a good guy. 

One of the narratives pushed and pushed hard for the last fifteen months has been the Narrative of the Evil Unions, who have somehow been behind the whole school closing thing even though many many parents have balked at sending students back and many private schools have stayed closed and it's not even particularly clear exactly how and where this union pressure has been exerted. Nor have I ever, ever understood what the villains' motivation was supposed to be in this story--if teachers are intent on shutting down schools, why is that, exactly? But anyway-- the Narrative of the Evil Unions has never flagged, and people who are invested in it will be damned if they're going to see the unions wiggle their way out of wearing their Evil Villain hats at the last minute. 

This is not a useful conversation to have now, and it never was. The last fourteen months have been hellaciously difficult and confusing. Schools kicked off this pandemic with absolutely no leadership from DC or, in some cases, the state, and with a lot of the science being worked out in real time, before our eyes, which, it turns out, is really hard for some folks to deal with--scientists are supposed to step out from the lab in carefully pressed lab coats and declare "These are the facts, immutable and set in cement under a blazing banner that says It's Science!!" And when that didn't happen, many folks simply blew a gasket.

It didn't help that Trump performed his usual feat of turning even the most non-political issue into a referendum on loyalty to Dear Leader. It didn't help that science and politics repeatedly got in each others' ways. It hasn't helped that we live in an era of bone-headed conspiracy theories. It has not helped that every loose seam and corroded weakness in our political and journalistic systems have blown apart under the stress.

And all of that ugly dumb mess is thrown on top of the actual problems of actual humans trying to lead their actual lives. Pandemic shutdowns have put families under huge stress-- financial, personal, and "oh my God what if this messes up my kid's whole life" type. Businesses have been sweating the uncertainty and strain and possible hollowing out of uncertain times. And teachers and administrators, have been trying to figure out how they can do their job without doing serious, even lethal, damage. 

These are all real, serious issues, and they have happened in the context of communities in which people who are near-paralyzed with fear over the disease live side by side with people who think it's all stupid and masks are a threat to liberty. 

And as this has dragged on, other issues have bubbled to the surface. Once the treadmill stopped, I think, a lot of folks looked around and thought, "Why, I'll be damned. All this stuff in my life and my job are actually bullshit!" Just now we seem to be having a mini-reckoning about an economic system that requires a large supply of desperately poor people to keep business churning along ("If they don't like the wages and benefits, they can always just quit" wasn't supposed to be advice that anyone actually took). Under pressure, some folks have said the quiet part out loud-- like teachers are servants and should start acting like it. 

We have no single trusted source of information, not in government or journalism or even scientific outfits like the CDC, which seems to have to walk back and/or clarify every damn thing it says. 

People are scared, angry, tired, and they have a legitimate right to all of the feelings. Unfortunately, some people are living by the rule that one should never let a crisis go unexploited, whether for political power ("Let's get those evil unions to pay for their behavior during the pandemic") or for economic gain ("Buy our hot new program for fixing learning loss"). 

But looking for simple answers is a fool's game. This is a mess, and it's complicated, and it does not lend itself to a simple narrative of good guys and bad guys. 

This part of it is easy enough to understand. Teachers and administrators have been trying to do the right thing, the thing that will allow them to educate their students and keep them safe, while also looking out for the lives of themselves and their family members. What that right thing might be has not been simply clear, and in fact an not-inconsiderable number of union locals include members who cover the same range of beliefs and fear and skepticism as the general public. 

The right thing has also been hugely local, depending on what resources and conditions prevail. This has been one of the dumber criticisms leveled against schools-- "East Egg High School is open and doing fine, so our school should open right now." But if East Egg High has a spacious building with great ventilation in a low-spread community and smart, engaged leaders, and your school is a crumbling cramped sealed box run by dismissive tools in a high-spread community, East Egg's experience means nothing. I can drive 75 mph down I-80; that doesn't mean that everyone should drive 75 mph down all roads at all times. 

I am tired to death of the attempts to turn this into a political horse race, as if this very real problem only matters insofar as it can be exploited for leverage. I am tired to death of people who want to suggest that the best explanation for what happened in schools is that teachers are involved in a vast, dark conspiracy to bring to a grinding halt the system that they devoted their professional lives to because the Truth is that they all entered teaching in hopes that it would give them a chance to hurt children. That's your explanation for what has happened? How about, instead, the idea that teachers and administrators have been struggling like everyone else to find a path through difficult times while still working to achieve the mission they dedicated themselves to before COVID ever showed its ugly head. 

Some people reach their convoluted explanation by starting with the premise that the solution is simple and obvious and not a shred of evidence contradicts or complicates. It's hard to tell if they hold onto that because of willful ignorance or because it's just a tool to achieve their goals, but I am quite certain that it displays a stunning lack of empathy and understanding for their fellow humans.

It's that last part that's going to haunt me long after the pandemic fades--that when things got hard and complicated, some folks revealed just how little heart and care they have for their fellow travelers on this earth. Rather than arguing over who gets to be the "good guy," maybe recognize mostly what we've got is a bunch of people trying to do what seems best to them, where they are, in a difficult leadership-thirty time. 

ICYMI: Grandchild Edition (5/16)

No, I don't have a new one. But my newest grandchild is in town, so I get to see him for the first time in a year. A photo of his extreme cuteness to follow, but you'll have to scroll past this list of reading material from the week.

How College Became a Ruthless Competition Divorced From Learning

In the Atlantic, Daniel Markowits has written a piece that will repeatedly having you yell "Yeah!" and trying hard to decide which quote to pull. Marriage, Jane Austen, educational hierarchies, elite schools, meritocracy, rankings and ratings. This is your "if you only read one selection" selection for the week.

4 Ideas about AI that even Experts Get Wrong

Yes, I know I share lots of AI articles, but you have to remember that this is the stuff that certain people want to take teachers' jobs, and we should be paying attention.

Is Critical Race Theory Dividing the Country?

Nancy Flanagan as usual provides a thoughtful look at the hot topic of the day.

The GOP's 'Critical Race Theory' Obsession

While we're at the Atlantic, look at this Adam Harris piece explaining how a fifty year old academic theory has become central to the GOP's latest round of fearmongering.

We found the textbooks of senators who oppose the 1619 project and suddenly everything makes sense

Michael Harriot at The Root did exactly this, and it's a pretty stark, clear reminder of how much the 1619 project diverges from traditional school history texts.

Restructuring Plan "Disastrous" for PA Universities

The state of PA is looking to downsize its (very expensive) system of higher education. Economists predict that results will not be pretty.

This is a map of America's broadband problem

Not actually an education article, except that it is, because broadband problems are education problems.

I spent a year and a half at a no excuses charter school. Here is what I saw.

Joanne Golan writing at the Conversation. Blunt and to the point. 

After a high point in the Obama administration, philanthropies no longer drive education policy

Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat offers a view of how the philanthropic landscape has changed in educationland. Interesting viewpoint.

What Black Men Need From Schools to Stay in the Teaching Profession

A useful and insightful interview with three Black teachers over at EdWeek

The invisible tax on Black teachers

Rann Miller talks about the extra weight that Black teachers are asked to carry, and how that is tied to keeping them in the classroom. At the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Now, as promised. Yes, he's adorable.

NV: Should Charter Schools Hire Licensed Teachers?

Nevada is one of the country's leading states for privatizers; in 2015, they went all in on education savings accounts aka super-vouchers. Well, not so super--they were not large enough to benefit the poor families that were the excuse for passing the bill. But they've got tax credit scholarships so that donors can get out of paying school taxes and support private schools at the same time. And, of course, they have charter schools.

Charter schools in Nevada enjoy a couple of advantages. One is that charters are authorized by a state board (the Nevada State Public [sic] Charter School Authority), meaning they can bypass any local boards that are elected by local taxpayers who might not want to foot the bill for additional schools in their area. 

Nevada charter schools are also excused from having to hire licensed teachers. Up to 30% of teaching staff can be unlicensed, as long as they aren't teaching certain subjects (eg English, math, special ed). The rest of the staff must be either licensed or "demonstrate subject matter expertise," whatever the heck that means.

Reportedly the state does not actually know how broadly that waiver is being used. Charter School Authority Executive Director Rebecca Feiden reportedly told lawmakers that only 36 out of 2,287 charter teachers lack "an active license," but she also acknowledged that a substitute teaching license counts as an active license. And they have no idea how many of those are involved. In Nevada, you can score a substitute license with 60 college credits. (Hat tip to April Corbin Girnus at Nevada Current for providing some concise thorough coverage of this issue).

Nevada's Senate Education Committee decided to level the playing field and put forward a bill--AB109-- requiring charter schools to have a fully licensed teaching staff. Makes sense. Nevada charters like to call themselves public schools, so why not operate under the same rules as actual public schools? Given the numbers Feiden shared, it doesn't seem like a huge ask, and in fact, since the bill quietly appeared in February, there's been no public squawking to speak of. 

There must have been some squawking somewhere, though, because the Assembly Education Committee amended the bill so that charters are only required to have 80% licensed staff. It's worth noting that both houses of the Nevada legislature are controlled by Democrats, and the Assembly Education Committee has a hefty 8-5 democrat majority. 

Not that there aren't some unhappy Dems in this. Girnus offers this quote:

“I want this on the record: that we have licenses for a reason,” said state Sen. Marilyn Dondero Loop. “We don’t hire firemen who aren’t certified. We don’t hire electricians and plumbers without a license. I think it’s important to keep that in mind.”

Pushing from the other side is GOP State Senator Carrie Buck, a charter school leader who says that Nevada charters (who get the same per-pupil funding as public schools) are poor because of facility costs. Also, national teacher shortage, which, well--no. Offer better jobs.

And, while we're here--why doesn't anyone know who is teaching in charter schools? Why shouldn't charter schools have full transparency about the qualifications of their staff? Isn't that basic information to which parents should have easy access?

So once again, charter schools are public schools, except when being a public school includes inconvenient rules, and folks who expect Democrats to support education are often disappointed. We'll see what happens next.

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